Thank you. Hi, I'm Dr. Nicole West-Burns and I'm here today to talk about culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy, affectionately known as CRRP. So in the Ontario context, really what that means is that we're attempting to engage in a pedagogical approach that actually recognizes that the schooling system is not fair and equitable for all students. And what CRRP is based on are two bodies of work from the states, culturally responsive teaching and culturally relevant teaching and pedagogy, which come from a place of saying that we recognize that the schooling system is not for all students. This work was actually predicated upon the experiences of black students in schools in the United States, knowing that the educational system was failing them in many ways. And what this what these two bodies of work do is they help us to understand possibilities for us as educators to think differently. Right. A lot of the literature. At the time that these two bodies of work came forward was really tied to deficits tied to black kids and their ability to even learn. And the creators of this work knew that these were nothing but racist ideologies that really fed that kind of thinking. And so what they said is we're going to look at ways to make the educational environment more successful. But the onus is on us. Right. This is about a system that actually is a part of systems of oppression that operate in society. And so what can we do as educators to push back to that? So I always want to be clear that. CRRP is not a multicultural approach. Although there are components of honoring identity and diversity within, it is an approach that actually recognizes it's more closely tied to critical social justice, that there are oppressions that exist in society, that in order for us to To really move students forward, that we need to recognize that and we need to address that within our actions. CRRP is an active pedagogical approach that is pushing back to dominant ideologies and pushing back to dominant narratives, while at the same time helping us to move students forward in classroom spaces. In the Canadian context, in the Center for Urban Schooling in 2008, we pulled culturally responsive and culturally relevant together. We amalgamated them because we thought that they fit nicely together in terms of helping to build success. We also broadened it for us to think about culture, not in really monolithic ways, but culture as complex and tied to the intersectionality of identities that students have. And I think that's a mistake that we make sometimes. We want to relegate certain groups of students to being one way. But identity is very complex and we need to understand that as we engage in this work. Additionally, what we did is we said if we want to think about CRRP, we need to think about it not just an individual teacher operating in their own classroom space, but how do we really think about stretching this, expanding this into all areas of equity that are important in schools for us to think about. And so we developed seven tenets, myself and my co-writer, we were the lead writers on the text, Karen Murray from Toronto District School Board. We created the text, the equity continuum, and within it we have seven tenets of things we need to think about as we apply this lens of CRRP. So we want to think about our classroom climate and instruction. We want to think about the student voice and space. We want to think about school climate. We want to think about community connections. We want to think about the ways that we're engaging and valuing parents and caregivers. And we want to think about school leadership. Furthermore, which ties really a lot into the critical consciousness component of culturally relevant teaching, we want to think about how are we building our knowledge as professionals doing this work. So the area of professional development. So the three components of culturally relevant teaching, high expectations, cultural competence, and critical consciousness, they come from Gloria Ladson Billings'work where she found that this is what teachers did. Teachers who were having success in the schools for students who were racialized. Students who may have not faced success in other environments, she looked at what these teachers were engaging in and said, how can I understand this? And she coded that data and came up with those three areas. High academic expectations is really about believing that these students can succeed and seeing it as our job. It doesn't mean every student will end the year at the same place, but what it means is success will happen, and in large part because the educator says, I may not know everything that I need to know. We have to have a certain humility to say, what haven't I tried? What haven't I done? How haven't I differentiated? How can there be things about the student that maybe I can learn that can help me to put in a different strategy, to scaffold more? So that's really what that high academic expectations is about. The cultural competence piece is about honoring and valuing. You know, one of the things I always say is that Dick Gregory, an activist from the 60s in the States, said, students should never feel shame when they walk into school. And that's what he said. He felt that he never knew shame until he walked into school. So how do we create classroom spaces around the diversities of identities that walk in our schooling spaces so that no student ever feels like they don't belong here, that learning isn't for them, that nothing here is meaningful? And then the last piece, critical consciousness, is the piece that I think is really the critical piece and the piece most teachers don't do. And what critical consciousness is about is about pushing back to dominant narratives. It's about helping students to understand that oppression is a part of the society that we live in. And then it's about our thinking as educators, how we kind of don't hope to replicate the status quo, but how we engage in thinking about what we think we know. How we engage in building new, more inclusive curriculum that's going to address some of the issues of injustice, that's going to engage students, that's going to connect to something important beyond the dominant Western narrative that we've always gotten in this educational system. So as an educator, thinking about how do we make this real in schools, a couple of things that I think are important. One, how do we actually plan for and organize time, concentrated and intentional, tied to this work? Right? Are there 15 minutes in staff meetings where we can agree to read a small something that will help us to build our knowledge and help us to think about ways that teachers might practice this? Teachingtolerance.org has a lot of blogs from teachers where they talk about, I want to talk about this issue in my classroom. A lot of the issues tied to social justice, how do I do it? And there are lots of great suggestions there. I also think that it's important to think about allowing people to enter it into a place that they're interested, right? So as an educator in a classroom, I might be hearing a lot of comments that really tie to gender binary stereotypes that my students have. Boys do this or girls do this. So maybe I start to bring in picture books. Right? Maybe that would be most meaningful. Maybe I don't take up another conversation right now because it's not what I'm hearing from my students. So we need to be listening to students, observing, hearing what their interactions are, thinking about how can I address this pedagogically. And I think bringing in picture books, bringing in videos, resources that might help us to do that can be a really important place to start those conversations. But I think if we try to mandate always that everyone start with the same conversation, we're going to lose people. So how do we create inquiry where people can enter it from a space where they see a need in their classroom? They have a curiosity. Their students have a curiosity. I think that's really important to keep people invested in the work. And while thirdly, I'll say a part of the investment in the work, I think the more we learn about these things that we're not taught about in schools, that most of us don't ever talk about in schools. The more that we learn, the more then that we can share with our students. And the two feed each other. So as the students get excited, students are begging for relevant curriculum. Curriculum that connects into who they are in their real lives. We know engagement increases with this type of curriculum. So the more that we can connect into that, the more that we're learning about it, the two go together. And I think we continue to learn as the educators while also allowing the students to continue to be involved in meaningful work toward a more democratic society.