Culturally Responsive Teaching

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is the concept widely connected to educationist Geneva Gay. In her book Culturally Responsive Teaching (2000), she provides an exploration of the principles of CRT, as well as a synthesis and comparison of similar ideas from various scholars. The concept of “cultural blindness” in education is discussed, the four critical aspects of culturally responsive teaching are described, and three major categories of responsibility of CRT teachers are examined.

According to Gay, the foundational belief of Culturally Responsive Teaching is that it “validates, facilitates, liberates, and empowers ethnically diverse students by simultaneously cultivating their cultural integrity, individual abilities, and academic success” (2000, p. 44). She offers a direct challenge to an educational system that she maintains to have largely ignored the skills and strengths of ethnically diverse students. As a central tenet of her argument for CRT, she presents five points of cultural blindness upon which systems of schooling are built:

1. The belief that education has no connection to heritage.
2. The reality that the majority of teachers do not possess an adequate understanding of how their practice is rooted in middle-class white values.
3. The assumption that treating students differently based on their racial, ethnic, and cultural identities is fundamentally racial discrimination.
4. The idea that good teaching is immutable and somehow transcends all cultural differences, world views, and epistemologies.
5. The understanding that the goal of education is to provide an effective pathway to assimilation for all students. (2000, p. 21)

To overcome the harmful impact an unquestioned adherence to beliefs in cultural blindness can have on ethnically diverse students, Gay posits that teachers implementing curriculum rooted in CRT must consider the four fundamental aspects of caring, communication, curriculum, instruction. “Caring” in CRT refers to the authentic relationships that teachers develop with their students in ways that “honor their humanity, hold them in high esteem, expect high performance from them, and use strategies to fulfill their expectations” (p. 46).

To demonstrate caring, teachers must exhibit certain behaviors (i.e., academic, social, personal, moral) toward their students in ways that clearly convey a deep respect for them as complete and complex beings, as well as an investment in their academic success. The hope is that students will eventually begin to emulate these behaviors as they navigate educational spaces. This ultimately allows for the achievement of culturally congruent success in schools.

Communication refers to the deep relationship between culture and communication in educational spaces, such that “languages and communication styles are systems of cultural notations and the means through which thoughts and ideas are expressively embodied” (p. 81). In essence, all learning experiences of students are inevitably bound by language and thus are subjected to the cultural expectations with which the language used in educational settings is imbued.

Moreover, the languages and communication styles that each student brings to the classroom maintain their own set of cultural expectations that is either congruent or in conflict with the dominant mode of discourse in the classroom. Gay argues that it is precisely this relationship that teachers need to be made aware of in order to understand the profound implications for student engagement in the classroom.

The third aspect of CRT refers to curriculum and the way that it promotes and honors racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse perspectives. The main goal of CRT is to empower ethnically diverse students and that “knowledge in the form of curriculum content is central to this empowerment” (p. 111). Fundamentally, curriculum constructed in a culturally responsive manner must focus on representing the histories, cultures, and contributions of ethnically diverse groups as a means to engage all students with meaningful learning moments regardless of their membership in a minoritized group. Moreover, a curriculum grounded in culturally responsive precepts connects with the lived experiences of all students, in intercultural exchange and through equalizing the long-held asymmetrical power dynamics that occur through these between- group interactions. Gay suggests that by diversifying the perspectives shared in curricular sources (e.g., textbooks, literature, news samples) and increasing community connections (i.e., using community spaces and members as valid sources of knowledge production), student learnings will be grounded in positive representations of different cultural groups.

The final aspect of CRT, instruction, encompasses the “interactional processes” between teachers and students in learning environments that lead to the students’ acquisition of knowledge. Gay suggests that viewing instruction through the lens of CRT provides for the understanding that modes of knowledge transmission is culturally influenced. Moreover, students who enter mainstream education (typically at five years of age) have already “internalized rules and procedures for acquiring knowledge and demonstrating their skills” (p. 148). Instruction in this context is often referred to as the praxis of CRT in that it “combines all other components into coherent configurations and puts them into practice to expedite learning” (p. 148).

As such, the central focus of instruction is to develop an understanding of the learning styles of ethnically diverse students. While the learning styles of various groups should not be viewed as monolithic (as they are influenced by ethnic identification and affiliation, socioeconomic status, orientation toward traditionalism), they should be seen as patterns and thus tools to provide “more cultural congruity in teaching/learning processes” (p. 148). Certainly, instruction grounded in CRT is a complex and dynamic endeavor that is context- dependent, and yet there are methods that exemplify the principles: providing space for cooperative learning, incorporating multimodal learning experience (i.e., using music and movement), and creating learning environments that are centered on ethnic worldviews.

Funds of Knowledge. Another asset pedagogy, the concept of Funds of Knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) refers to the cultural artifacts and strategies that students acquire as members of their complex cultural and community assemblages and use to negotiate learning environments they encounter in life. However, Funds of Knowledge also refers to an inquiry-based approach that requires teachers to conduct interviews grounded in participatory ethnography of parents, relatives, and other community stakeholders. These interviews, observations, and insights are essential to growing robust understandings of the knowledge and other adaptational strategies that have been developed and passed on to students. Another important aspect of the Funds of Knowledge approach is the collaboration between cohorts of teachers and facilitators who are actively engaged in examining their students and local communities. Through the sharing of data, observations, and insights, these teachers can collectively produce broad understandings that more effectively allow them to theorize their practice as well as develop more effective pedagogical strategies.

Funds of Knowledge is largely based on the Vygotskian concept of mediation, which posits that our interactions in the world are influenced and, in many ways, bound by culture (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). As we negotiate these spaces, we use cultural artifacts as “tools for thinking through which we interact with our social worlds” (p. 18). Essentially, this means that all human actions are mediated through these cultural artifacts. The cultural artifacts, or funds of knowledge, that students possess are important for teachers to understand, because these are the tools that students use to negotiate both formal and informal learning spaces. In line with this thinking, teachers do well to develop community relationships that provide for authentic, compassionate, and indepth exploration of the cultural artifacts that students have acquired from their home environments. In turn, these understandings then become cultural artifacts for teachers to develop learning environments that allow for student success to be demonstrated in ways that are congruent with their own strategies for exploration.