I think people, when they use the term culturally responsive or culturally relevant pedagogy, forget that the base of the word is culture. So culture has to do with worldviews, beliefs, language. It has to do with values.
Culture to me, at its essence, are the things that, those filters that help us as human beings make sense out of the most ordinary things. Culture can be grouped into two different kind of categories. You can talk about visible culture and invisible culture, or tangible and intangible. The tangible, I would translate that to say the crafts, the music, the art, the technology. And those are important, but I think the more important are the intangible.
And these are values, beliefs, feelings, opinions, perspectives, assumptions. So culturally relevant pedagogy, one of the primary premises is that teachers take students'everyday lived cultural experiences and make the appropriate linkages between what the students... know and do and understand and come up with examples, comparisons and contrasts.
They make the connections. They are cultural translators. They are cultural bridge builders. I think when we talk about culturally responsive pedagogy. We have to remember that students approach learning not as cultural blank slates.
So they bring into the classroom all of those cultural experiences. And so it is very compatible with what we know about good teaching. Culturally responsive pedagogy builds on students prior knowledge and in this case we're talking about prior cultural knowledge.
Making connections between what what is known and what is to be taught and understood. So part of the argument of culturally responsive teaching is the dilemma has been an incompatibility between the cultural filters that have been used to send instructional messages to students. that's coming from the school frame of reference. And when kids from different ethnic backgrounds are trying to learn that, they are trying to receive what we send from school through another set of cultural filters. And if they don't match, then nothing's happening.
So culturally responsive teaching then says is that rather than always insisting that the students adapt to the culture of the school, the school needs to adapt and modify some of its sending messages, its sending mechanism. When we think about what matters most about culture, I think the first thing to remember is that students are not mere representatives of a cultural or ethnic group. And first and foremost, they are individual students.
who have individual needs and interests, etc. Students who belong to an ethnic group, their attachment and bonds to the group vary, for example, in terms of how long they've been in this country. social class and their own experiences in the community and neighborhood. Because if we think about students culture, we make culture a trait of that individual based on his or her membership in a particular community. Conflating race and ethnicity with culture.
We don't take race off the table at all, but we're really pulling apart what culture is and making sure we don't conflate it because if we do then we make cultural practices a trait of that person's membership in that particular community. And that leads us, of course, to make very easily slip into one size fits all, that my Latino children learn this way, or my African American children need X, right? And so it's making culture a trait of the individual. It's been very problematic in the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy.