Becoming culturally responsive educators: Rethinking teacher eduction pedagogy

Kea, Cathy, Campbell-Whatley, Gloria. & Richards, Heraldo.:

“Becoming Culturally Responsive Educators: Rethinking Teacher Education Pedagogy”.

NCCRESt publications. (NationalCenter for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems) 2006. Practitioner Brief.

Article focused on defining key challenges related to diversity in teacher education programmes and defines guidelines for culturally responsive curriculum. Findings were based on previous studies of number of researchers. Writers also reviewed the characteristics of culturally responsive teachers. The goal of the article was to demonstrate the need of rethinking current approaches to teacher education pedagogy and to provide guidelines for further development activities.

Cochran-Smith, M. (2004) found out that some schools have acknowledged the urgency for hiring culturally competent teachers while others found it challenging to fit appropriate programs into their curriculum. She saw that main reason for this was teacher educators´ resistance which was caused by their own discomfort feelings for dealing with culture sensitive areas such as children’s ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Teachers need to know how to adapt the content of instruction and teaching styles. In order to meet these targets, Kea & Utley (1998) determined that curriculum, methodology and instructional materials should be responsive to student’s cultural norms and values. Teachers should know who they are teaching, what they are teaching and methodologies to teach them. This means that teachers should be able to use researched-based pedagogy which is responsive to the learning, emotional and social needs of ethnically and linguistically diverse students.

Villegas and Lucas (2002) encouraged teacher educators to examine critically their programmes through different characteristics via their learning experiences and coursework. They defined six characteristics which prepare culturally responsive teachers to work successfully in diverse classrooms. Those characteristics are: sociocultural consciousness, an affirming attitude toward students from culturally diverse backgrounds, commitment and skills to act as agents of change, constructivist views of learning, learning about students, and culturally responsive teaching strategies.

Sociocultural consciousness is understood so that one’s way of thinking, behaving and being is influenced by ethnicity, social class and language. An affirming attitude to culturally diverse backgrounds impacts on student’s learning, belief in self and overall academic performance. Commitment and skills to act as agents of change enables developing skills for collaboration and dealing with chaos. Constructivist views of learning see that all students are capable of learning and constructivist teaching promotes critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration and it recognises multiple perspectives. Learning about students utilises student’s past experiences, their home and community culture and it sees that both world in and outside of schools helps learning. Culturally responsive teaching strategies support the constructivist view of knowledge, teaching and learning.

Schmitz (1999) set guidelines for culturally responsive curriculum as a list of five ‘do’s:

1. Defining learning goals
(what students need to know about? e.g. the history of diverse groups, the social dynamics, stereotyping, societal change, etc.)

2. Questioning traditional concepts
(if ‘re-organising the content of the course how will the course change?)

3. Understanding student diversity
(what diverse experiences students bring to the class?)

4. Selecting materials and activities
(how to integrate new approach, new teaching strategies and new material so it won’t be just an ‘add-on’?)

5. Evaluating effectiveness (how to assess learning, what are strengths to new content ad teaching techniques?)

At the end of the article the writers summarised that the course description and objectives should be reflecting how the course will contribute to the development of one’s awareness and skills which are related to diversity and relevant to the focus of course. They also stated that is important to provide varied activities by which students can gain knowledge or skills and demonstrate competence. Variable curriculum encourages new way of thinking and designing that kind of curriculum is also developmental process. As most important they considered providing varied activities through which students could gain knowledge or skills and also demonstrate competence.

I found this article interesting because it was reflecting the same issues what we are studying in our teacher studies. The more you read it the more challenging it felt to start thinking how to plan and implement culturally responsive teaching if you had to do it yourself. There are number of things to consider and it made me think how important role the curriculum has. But also the way how things are taught has a great impact. There is much to take into consideration, so the whole ‘package’ really has to be planned professionally. Some of those things we were also discussing at first contact lessons, so I guess we will return many times to those same thoughts.

I think that the writers managed to present culturally responsive curriculum guidelines in an understandable way and also those things which are affecting them as well as those issues which need to be developed.