Culturally Responsive Teaching

In practicing inclusive practices and being a culturally responsive educator, it is important to recognize that appreciating various languages, dialects, and accents is the first step in being a culturally responsive teacher. This is especially true for anyone who plans to teach in the Appalachian region. The Appalachian Mountain range is home to some of the greatest diversity. People in this region are agricultural as they are also found working in business suits and ties. People in this region live in high elevations, while others live in deep valleys. Appalachian people, particularly West Virginians, live in diverse environments. Some regions survive amongst a wide, rushing river, while others live nestled in the side of a steep slope. All of these various aspects of ways to live in West Virginia bring rise to classrooms filled with children who live differently, work differently, and think different. Most important is that the students who enter a classroom filled with diverse life experience speak differently.

At this point, it is easy for a teacher who is not culturally responsive to view certain students with a cultural deficit. Teachers who view a student’s way of speaking, which in West Virginia’s case is primarily influenced by Social Economic Status (SES), as a deficit are those who cause students with low family incomes to miss out on the opportunity to become literate. This is a tragic mistake as literacy is the ability to understand meaning regardless of the mechanism to send or receive a message. A student who has less literacy skills is one who can be overpowered by factors that are generally uncontrollable. An example of this situation arises from Purcell- Gates in The skin that we speak: An anthology of essays on language, culture, and power. The example is of a young boy named Johnny who entered grade school without the knowledge that words contained meaning. The SES of Johnny’s family and their lack of experience with Standard English became what seemed to be a legitimate excuse to write off Johnny’s lack of literacy and inability to speak the language of Standard English. The truth here is that Johnny’s teacher was not culturally responsive, which caused for her to ignore the literacy progress that Johnny potentially could have received in her classroom.

                “This was the second key insight I came to as a result of my two-year ethnography of Donny’s family. While documenting the effect of growing up in a nonliterate family on Donny’s conceptual knowledge of written language and the problems this posed for this learning to read and write in school, I had to ask what the school was doing about this. How were they dealing with this experiential difference so that his learning could proceed? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not only were they failing to address Phil’s inexperience with cars- they were also seemingly unconcerned about this failure to learn.”(Purcell- Gates, 2002).

This example demonstrates the need for teachers to overcome the cultural deficit perspective of students. In order to do this, educators need to gain the recognition that all students can learn regardless of their background knowledge. They need to recognize that all previous knowledge acquired by their students can be valuable and useful in building new connections to new experiences in school. In Johnny’s case, his teacher would have used his knowledge to help him become a user of Standard English while accepting his dialect and appreciating the diversity he brought to the classroom. Another example of overcoming cultural deficit thinking is provided by Luis Moll in A look at Luis Moll’s Research into Hidden Family Resources. Moll uses an example of a teaching method by Hilda Anguilo that called on that cultural background of the community to strengthen the skills of her students reading ability even when the content was extremely out of her comfort zone. Lacking the cultural deficit perspective, Hilda’s students benefited in addition to language arts in the following way:

                “Various families with rural backgrounds knew a great deal about the cultivation of plants, animals, ranch management, mechanics, carpentry, masonry, electrical wiring, and medical folk remedies. They also had some entrepreneurial skills and were familiar with archeology, biology, and mathematics.”(Moll).

This example of the cultural difference perspective used the strengths of the students along with their interests to teach them more about a subject matter that was weak. Not only were the students motivated to learn content desired to be covered by the instructor, but they also grew in multiple areas that they may choose to encounter outside of the classroom. This approach was definitely successful in the purpose of education in America and on the opposite end of the spectrum as Johnny’s case. Johnny’s case, which demonstrates a teacher in the perspective of cultural deficit, contributed to poor literacy instruction because it “justified the belief that certain groups were intelligently inferior to others, particularly to the group in charge.” (Bolima).

The literacy instruction at Johnny’s school could have improved if his teacher would have done a simple task. All that his teacher needed to do was to honor Johnny’s dialect. By accepting the use of his dialect, Johnny’s teacher would have provided Johnny with the confidence to enhance his usage and understanding of the widely accepted Standard English. By viewing the fact that Johnny had the ability to speak words, the teacher may have instilled Johnny with cultural capital to use in his future reading classes. Instead, the option of ignoring Johnny’s funds of knowledge prevented Johnny from conveying meaning through spoken and written words throughout his entire public school experience. In fact, a teacher by the name Liz Phillips combated this teaching style with the Wheeler and Swords’ approach, which is explained by Epstein and Herring-Harris as acknowledging students’ informal speech in the classroom. Phillips views her students as having a cultural difference which is evidenced by her stating, "I know my kids as individuals, and this is who they are. It's my responsibility to teach the learning standards, but not to change them or take away their dialect."

Phillips was successful at being a culturally responsive teacher just as the Where I Am From project developed by Denise Lindstrom at Fairmont State University in West Viriginia.  The project asked students to create a brief autobiography by making a Digital Story with PhotoStory. The project used a variety of strategies that are connected to different learning styles by having the students write a poem about their life experiences and ending the project with a video presentation of the items in their poem. As students were able to exercise their ability to operate technology in order to communicate, they also were encouraged to get to know and listen to each other by reviewing the digital story and collaborating for twenty minutes in a group setting prior to writing a reflection on the project. The teacher candidates started acquiring the cultural difference perspective as they witnessed their own diversity in the classroom as expressed with the class’s videos.

Acquiring the cultural difference perspective in Denise’s classroom, I also thought of how to implement a culturally responsive teaching practice in my future classrooms. One activity called “Train Wreck” is a fun way for students to find similarities among each other as they get the opportunity to get to know and listen to their classmates. In addition to practicing the Wheeler and Swords’ approach, I plan to encourage students to express chemistry with the words they see fit to describe occurrences of physical situations of everyday life. By acknowledging my students’ informal language in required laboratory notebooks, which will be used as a learning tool during laboratory activities, and providing an optional Formal Lab Report for extra credit and comments, I can begin to provide students with instruction on the best ways to use Standard English when communicating to an audience of scientists. The full effect of the hands- on laboratory procedures performed by the West Virginia students comes from the wise selection of meaningful activities in which students can use their interests and life experiences to relate to the material. All of this is effort on my part to provide students in West Virginia with the ability to convey meaning to scientists while also improving the understanding of events that occur every day in their life such as the formation of clouds.

               

References

Bolima, D. (n.d.). Contexts for understanding:educational learning theories. Retrieved from http://staff.washington.edu/saki/strategies/101/new_page_5.htm 

Epstein, P., & Herring- Harris, L. (2011). Honoring dialect and increasing student performance in standard english. Retrieved from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3655

Purcell Gates, V. (2002). As soon as she opened her mouth. In L. Delpit & J.K Dowdy (Eds.), In The skin that we speak: An anthology of essays on language culture and power.