17 Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Gloria Ladson-Billings^[1]

• Coined the phrase Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
• Proposed the theory of education debt
• Advocates for critical race theory

How do you define culturally relevant teaching in 2022?

There are three components.

1. Student learning you have to have a focus on student learning, that’s the reason people send their kids to school, that’s our reason for being.
2. Cultural Competence. The ability of students to draw on their own backgrounds, languages, histories, customs, and experiences as they gain fluency and facility in at least one other culture. If you think in terms of Black and brown kids, that one other culture is usually going to be the mainstream culture, but we don’t want their home language denigrated, we don’t want their home customs denigrated. We often use those home customs and traditions as analogies or metaphors for understanding this new culture. Also, I want to be clear that when I say cultural competence, it doesn’t leave white middle class kids off the hook. Even though schools are pretty much organized around their culture, they are going to have to be able to communicate with people in a lot of different places, in a lot of different circumstances.
3. Critical consciousness. People think, “Oh, I don’t want to get involved in that. I shouldn’t have anything to do with politics.” Well, you shouldn’t have anything to do with partisanship. But the truth of the matter is, we live in a political context. The critical consciousness is what I call the? so what” piece. We teach kids all kinds of things, and kids will say, “OK, so we learned this, so what? Were not going to have to use this, what is this any good for?” And we tend to give them very weak answers. We tell them things like, Oh, you’re going to need this one day.? Well, somewhere around 4th grade, they figure out, “I’m not ever going to need this.” So we’ve got to be able to show our students that what they are learning can have applications to the problems that they are confronting in their daily lives.

Watch the video Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Learning for Justice