Culturally Responsive Teaching IS THE STANDARD!

“If students feel valued in the classroom and their ways of being and living are incorporated into the everyday curriculum, then they are more likely to be successful” (Walker, Hutchison 2020). 

Every student from a diverse background with a seat in your classroom needs an environment that consistently acknowledges, affirms, and validates who they are today and who they are becoming tomorrow. 

Every student with a diverse background deserves to use their cultural cues and funds of knowledge to connect their learning to the curriculum. 

Every student with a diverse background deserves an encouraging environment that encompasses a community of collective responsibility and collective reward that creates a sense of belonging through their cultural realities. 

Culturally responsive teaching is the standard. 

We know that the current education system was not designed for students of color, specifically Black and Brown students, to achieve at the same level or beyond their White peers. Subsequently, they are held at lower academic expectations throughout their educational careers. As a result, our students are more likely to have higher dropout rates, higher suspension rates, and ultimately lower educational attainment. Educators, school administrators, and leaders who lack the cultural awareness, knowledge of equity pedagogy, multicultural education, and fail to check their own bias contribute to the vast educational disparities that we continue to see today. 

CRT benefits all students. It encourages them to seek a deeper understanding of themselves, others, and the world around them while engaging in contextual learning experiences (CRT Report, 2020). Experts such as Ladson-Billings (1994), Gay (2000), Hollie (2012), Paris (2014), and more agree that CRT is key to student liberation and student empowerment. 

In the coming weeks, Education PowerED will be releasing our CRT report that includes teaching standards developed from extensive research that could be used in educational institutions across the country driven by the seven power elements. These standards will serve as a start of how we look into the practice and implementation of CRT that could lead to curriculum development, classroom and culture evaluation, and support for school and district leaders on what to look for within a sound, culturally responsive classroom. 

Through our work, educators will now have a criterion that could be used as a consistent guideline to increase the reliability and effectiveness of what it means to be a culturally responsive educator in today’s classroom. Suppose we truly desire an erasure of the opportunity gap. In that case, our students deserve a position in education where the attributes that make them unique are considered the center of their learning and not societal markers used against them.