Culturally Responsive Pedagogy/Culturally Relevant Teaching

An enduring problem confronting the American educational system is how to ensure that all students, particularly racial/ethnic minority students, achieve academic success. Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) is an approach whereby teachers acknowledge the home, community, and culture of each student and integrate those values and experiences into curricular content and school environment. CRP recognizes that the “lived experiences” of marginalized groups are significant and are what allows them to make meaning of the world. The approach also acknowledges deficiencies in many traditional curricula that primarily convey the ideology of the dominant culture. CRP's goals are for every student to achieve academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness, and for every student to become empowered to create and construct meaning in order to succeed in the larger community.

Although the 2010 census documents that 74.8 percent of adults are white, racial/ethnic minority children from birth to age 17 comprise nearly 45 percent of the population. In the 20 largest U.S. school districts, students of color range between 53 percent and 97 percent of the public school population. Given that more than 80 percent of today's K-12 educators are white, adopting culturally responsive pedagogy is a vital praxis toward bridging cultural differences.

Culturally responsive pedagogy includes a curriculum organized around sharing ideas, active student involvement, high expectations, community collaboration, and questioning “truth” in society and in long-established methodologies. This academically rigorous student-centered curriculum has its roots in established educational methods termed equity pedagogy, sociocultural teaching and multicultural or social justice education. This model of nonjudgmental, inclusive teaching, borrows from many multicultural, antiracist education scholars of the past 30 years. James A. Banks has traditionally advocated transformative teaching that includes a movement away from a Eurocentric curriculum, with a goal of equity pedagogy.

In Geneva Gay's Culturally Responsive Teaching, she passionately calls for teachers to recognize, honor, and incorporate students’ personal experiences into lessons and teaching strategies. Gay, through her instructive style of storytelling, explains culturally responsive teaching as a dynamic and interactive process. Through narratives, educators learn to become more engaged with their students’ cultural connections as they model ways to incorporate what is significant in students’ lives into academic achievement.

Educator Sonia Nieto defines education in a sociopolitical context with multicultural social justice principles infused throughout the curriculum. Pedagogical theorist and teacher Gloria Ladson-Billings, however, coined the terms culturally relevant teaching in 1987 and culturally relevant pedagogy in 1994 to delineate when the three interrelated tenets of student success, cultural competence, and critical sociopolitical consciousness are achieved through teaching that honors connections between home, community, and school cultures that are committed to collective as well as individual empowerment.

Culturally relevant teaching ensures that ethnically diverse students’ learning is relevant to them. Gay, however, acknowledges a preference for the term culturally responsive pedagogy because it represents a compilation of ideas from a larger variety of scholars. The term is often used to describe the collective philosophy practiced in culturally relevant teaching. It is aligned with the goal of reversing the achievement trends of students of color through an intentional pedagogy of power-sharing through teaching modes that cultivate both academic success and cultural identity through student empowerment. Students’ experiences are a core element of the curriculum within a shared teacher/student practice. Culturally relevant teaching describes the praxis, or the doing and living of the lessons of culturally responsive pedagogy.

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