The conceptual foundation of culturally responsive teaching is the belief that culture plays a critical role in how students receive and interpret knowledge and instruction. The pedagogical principles of this approach use cultural knowledge and students' frames of reference to facilitate learning and achievement. Concerns with how to effectively educate diverse student populations leads to conceptualizations of culturally responsive practices that situate teaching and learning within students' values, languages, and cultural orientations. This entry describes how the system works and what research contributes.

Knowledge, Roles, and Practices

The theory of culturally responsive teaching holds that incongruence between students' ethnic culture and school culture leads to dissonance, disengagement, and underachievement. Advocates argue that teachers should develop and use knowledge of diverse cultures to create classroom environments ...

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