Closing the Culture Gap: Q&A With Steffen Saifer
One of the most powerful—but least used—ways to strengthen family and community partnerships is to make instructional and curricular practices more culturally responsive. This classroom-level approach sends a strong message to students and their families that the school values who they are. Families respond in turn, although not always by volunteering more at school or by other traditional means of “parent involvement.” Instead, they are often more inclined to support their children’s engagement with school: helping more with homework, promoting good attendance, and having higher expectations for their children’s school success.
In 2002, the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) set out to describe how educators can incorporate the knowledge and culture students bring to school into a standards-based curriculum. The three-year study, called Classroom to Community and Back, involved practitioners in almost two dozen schools. It resulted in a set of practices called culturally responsive, standards-based (CRSB) teaching. Unlike multicultural education—which is an important way to include all the world’s cultural and ethnic diversity in lessons—CRSB teaching draws on the experiences, understandings, views, concepts, and ways of knowing of the students who comprise a particular class or school.
Steffen Saifer, program director for NWREL’s Child & Family program, talked with Northwest Education about CRSB school-family-community partnerships.
NW Education: How were the CRSB teaching practices developed?
Saifer: CRSB was developed from the ground up, in the course of completing the Classroom to Community and Back study. We saw what creative, caring teachers and schools—and some entire districts—were doing to address the cultural gap, then we looked at these practices to see what they had in common. Those components formed the basis of Classroom to Community and Back. CRSB teaching is one part of that. It makes a direct link between standards-based teaching and how to incorporate the individual cultural backgrounds of the students into daily classroom practice. Of course, behind that is the idea that closing the cultural gap will be very helpful in closing the achievement gap. On its own, it’s not sufficient, but it’s a critical element.
In Classroom to Community and Back you talk about family partnerships rather than the more traditional forms of parent involvement. Why is that?
Classroom to Community and Back is about the bigger picture, the things that schools and teachers do to create long-term partnerships with families. That’s what we’re always looking for—the kind of practices that move from the outdated, ineffective parent involvement model to a partnership model. We found that the most profound ways to do that were primarily at the classroom level—what teachers do. When you think about it, it makes sense. Most parent involvement activities are outside the classroom—at the PTO meetings, auctions, bake sales, or high school–level sports. But teachers have the most direct access to the families through the students. If you skip them, you’re skipping the most critical piece.
By doing these culturally responsive curricular practices teachers can communicate strongly but indirectly—through what kids say about the classroom, the work they bring home—that they value the parents, the family, and the culture the students bring with them. If it’s consistent and done well it sends a strong, positive message and helps build the kind of partnerships that can strongly affect student achievement.
Is it difficult to implement CRSB when you have multiple—not just one or two—kinds of cultural differences represented in a classroom?
General self-awareness and the attitude that you’re going to embrace those differences and draw on them in the classroom goes a long way to being able to see points of difference among the variety of cultures. There’s a set of skills involved in being culturally competent and those skills cross whatever culture you’re interacting with. It’s about having an open attitude and a value system that views cultural differences as interesting and empowering rather than problematical.
Besides that kind of attitudinal shift there are some direct skills involved that people in schools need to learn to be effective in dealing with various cultures. It’s a difficult but necessary task. We’ve seen how it can transform families as well as schools in amazing and moving ways. It has a much more profound impact than what we typically think of as parent involvement. 
