Creating a Culturally Responsive Classroom
•Multicultural education is not an add-on to the regular curriculum. It is a perspective that is integrated into the daily activities of the classroom.
•The environment is both responsive and demanding, an environment in which children's multiple intelligences are recognized and nourished.
•Effective teachers acknowledge and build on cultural differences, while at the same time preparing children to live successfully in both worlds - their home culture and the larger society.
•Teachers engage in reflective self-analysis to examine their own attitudes toward different ethnic, racial, gender, and social class groups.
•Teachers strive to understand how children have learned to think, behave, and feel. Teachers can start with finding out as much as possible about the families' backgrounds and experiences of all children in the classroom, by:
•Surveying parents
•Reading multiple books on the represented cultures
•Careful observation of children to see what experiences seem to connect with them
A wide variety of multicultural learning activities ensures that all children see themselves and their families reflected in the classroom environment. Classrooms should include:
•Pictures, puppets, dolls, foods, and other objects for dramatic play that represent diverse cultures and people who are differently-abled
•Songs and literature from a variety of cultures, lifestyles, and income groups - especially those represented in the classroom
•A take-home library of children's books and tapes in diverse languages, to encourage parents to reinforce the heritage language, as well as to read to their children
Developing strong family/school/community partnerships is essential to providing cultural continuity for children. A number of strategies can be used to enhance continuity and help children feel valued and secure. It is important to respect a family's beliefs about sharing their culture and language - some families may feel that this practice is intrusive. If families are comfortable with these activities:
•Children can bring pictures of their families and share favorite stories or songs from home
•Parents and other family and community members may be encouraged to visit the school to share aspects of their culture - reading, telling stories, sharing oral traditions, beliefs, and values, and knowledge of traditional celebrations, art, music, poetry, and dance
•Families are encouraged to use their home language in the home--talking, reading, telling stories, and singing with children
The most successful bilingual programs appear to be those that emphasize and use children's primary (home) language, while at the same time helping children to learn English. Research on both first and second language acquisition shows that language is best learned through actual use in a nonthreatening social context. Learning a new language is encouraged by:
•Focusing on meaning rather than correctness of form, regarding errors as part of the learning process
•Learning as many words as possible in a linguistically diverse child's language
•Providing bilingual signs around the classroom
•Encouraging children to teach the class a few words in their language
•Helping children connect new words with meaning by using contextual cues, such as gestures, actions, pictures, and real objects
•When posing a question, increasing the "wait time" from the usual one second or less to three or more seconds
•Using lots of songs, chants, and poetry with rhyme and repetition
Culturally Responsive Teaching
The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life (Octavio Paz, 1967).A major goal of effective teaching is to make learning meaningful for individual children. In order to make sense of their experience, children must see the connections between what they already know and what they experience in school and other settings. For example, a child who has had little experience with storybooks but who loves to tell stories and engage in dramatic play can be encouraged to act out a story that is read aloud. Increasing the continuity and congruence between children's home experiences and the school environment is particularly critical to the success of children from diverse cultures and social classes.
From the early part of the twentieth century, theories of cultural discontinuity have been proposed in an attempt to explain the difficulty encountered by students in adapting to a school environment foreign to the societal norms of their ethnic community. Proponents of the cultural difference approach, such as Cummins, argue that differences between Anglo and minority cultures in values and interaction, linguistic, and cognitive styles lead to cultural conflicts that in turn can lead to school failure (Cummins, 1986).
Sociostructural theorists, such as Ogbu, argue that social and economic stratification lead to rejection of schooling by some groups when they see that schooling does not necessarily translate into social and economic gains. Unlike many immigrant groups who come voluntarily to this country to "begin a new life," minority groups such as American Indians and African Americans were incorporated into U.S. society against their will. Their "caste-like" status may result in a rejection and distrust of schooling (Ogbu, 1982). Both of these theories provide a framework for understanding the school experiences of culturally diverse children.
Although schools are often designed to "use educational technology to 'stamp' a uniform education on all students" (Bowman, 1994), the absence of continuity and congruence between the child's home culture and the school, an absence of shared meaning, may interfere with children's competent functioning in the new setting. Researchers have found that by the age of eight, disparities between the home and school culture may undermine children's enthusiasm for learning and their belief in their capacity to learn (Entwisle, 1995).
Acknowledging and nurturing the cultural knowledge of culturally and linguistically diverse children can help bridge the gap between home and school. Based on a number of studies (Campos & Keatinge, 1984; Cummins, 1983; Rosier & Holm, 1980), Cummins maintains that "widespread school failure does not occur in minority groups that are positively oriented towards both their own and the dominant culture, that do not perceive themselves as inferior to the dominant group, and that are not alienated from their own cultural values" (p. 22).
But creating a culturally responsive and relevant learning environment can only be achieved through indepth work. Bowman (1994) suggests that in order for schools to release the educational potential of poor and minority students, they must first understand how these children have learned to think, behave, and feel.
Reflective Self-Analysis
One of the first steps teachers can take is to engage in reflective self-analysis to examine their own attitudes toward different ethnic, racial, gender, and social class groups (Banks & Banks, 1995; Delpit, 1995; Phillips, 1988). Because our own cultural patterns and language are seldom part of our conscious awareness and seem quite natural, "just the way things are," we often forget that our taken-for-granted beliefs and values are interpretations which are culturally and historically specific. As Native American author Jameke Highwater says, "We do not all see the same things" (1981, p. 59) (see Handout 5 (pdf format)).
As our schools are becoming increasingly culturally diverse, our teachers are becoming increasingly white and middle class (Delpit,1995). When members of the dominant culture have little opportunity to experience other ways of seeing and knowing, other world views are dismissed as illusions or as deficient, in need of remediation (Highwater, 1981). We all bring our own "private collection of biases and limitations to the classroom," reminds Vivian Paley. In To Become a Teacher, Nancy Balaban (1995) writes:
Critical to truly seeing and understanding the children we teach is the courage to reflect about ourselves. Facing our biases openly, recognizing the limits imposed by our embeddedness in our own culture and experience, acknowledging the values and beliefs we cherish, and accepting the influence of emotions on our actions are extraordinary challenges (p. 49).A number of strategies (e.g., reflecting on one's own life story or videotaping classroom interactions and examining them for bias) can help all concerned gain the self-awareness needed to begin a classroom conversation on the deeply-held, often taken-for-granted beliefs and biases that make up the ecology of the classroom and society. Using multicultural literature dealing with issues pertaining to race, class, gender, or disability can teach children to think critically and, at the same time, build a democratic classroom and school (Braxton, 1999).
In Beverly Braxton's third/fourth-grade classroom, the children read Crow Boy by Yaro Yashima, a story about Chibi, a boy who for five years is made to feel alienated and isolated at school. Children respond to questions that identify different ways that people reinforce discrimination, consider the power of non-verbal messages, and encourage understanding of what it feels like to be excluded based on differences. To help her students empathize with Chibi, Braxton asks them how they might feel if they were him. She asks: "How was Chibi made to feel? How might you feel if you were Chibi? Why might you feel that way?" (Braxton, 1999, p. 25).
The multicultural curriculum advocated by many early childhood educators, then, is not merely a "tacos on Tuesday" or "tourist" approach to diversity, one that emphasizes the "exotic" differences between cultures by focusing on holidays, foods, and customs. Derman-Sparks (1992) points out that such an approach tends to ignore the real-life, everyday experiences and problems of other cultures and can lead to stereotyping. Instead, the suggested approach is to view multicultural education as a perspective that is integrated into the daily activities of the classroom. If it begins with teachers' self-reflection, it also includes an examination of the racism and biased attitudes and behaviors that are structured into our society and our schools, and an exploration and validation of the many cultures that make up the classroom, our nation and our world.
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This document's URL is: © 2001 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
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