Understanding Culturally Responsive Teaching

While the term culturally responsive teaching is gaining popularity, what this approach actually means often depends on who you ask. Researchers have raised concerns that, without the proper guidance, education leaders and individual educators can adopt simplistic views of what it means to teach in culturally responsive ways.¹ Moving forward therefore requires that educators and those who support their efforts have a coherent understanding of what culturally responsive teaching does and does not entail.

Several frameworks exist for culturally responsive approaches (e.g., culturally responsive education, culturally relevant teaching, and culturally congruent teaching), each outlining various components. Capturing the history and broad base of scholarship on CRT is not possible here as there are decades of research and analysis. However, outlining the seminal work of key scholars and teacher educators Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, and Django Paris is a necessary starting point.²

Over two decades ago, Gloria Ladson-Billings introduced the term culturally relevant pedagogy to describe a form of teaching that calls for engaging learners whose experiences and cultures are traditionally excluded from mainstream settings. Based on her research of effective teachers of African American students, Ladson-Billings proposed three goals on which these teachers’ practices were grounded. First, teaching must yield academic success. Second, teaching must help students develop positive ethnic and cultural identities while simultaneously helping them achieve academically. Third, teaching must support students’ ability “to recognize, understand, and critique current and social inequalities.”³ By centering these goals in their practice, culturally relevant practitioners can empower students not only intellectually but also socially, emotionally, and politically.

Building on the work of Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay developed a framework with a stronger focus on teachers’ strategies and practices—that is, the doing of teaching. Gay coined the term culturally responsive teaching to define an approach that emphasizes “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.”⁴ Gay calls on culturally responsive practitioners to make positive changes on multiple levels, including instructional techniques, instructional materials, student-teacher relationships, classroom climate, and self-awareness to improve learning for students. Gay argues that an asset-based view of students is fundamental to ensuring a higher degree of success from students of various cultural groups. Like Ladson-Billings, Gay also places a strong emphasis on providing opportunities for students to think critically about inequities in their own or their peers’ experience.

These scholars promote asset-based approaches as alternatives to popular deficit-oriented teaching methods, which position the languages, cultures, and identities of students as barriers to learning.

More recently, Django Paris expanded on the work of culturally relevant pedagogy to develop a vision for culturally sustaining pedagogy, an approach that takes into account the many ways learners' identity and culture evolve. In a 2014 article, Paris and co-author H. Samy Alim posit that culturally sustaining educators not only draw on but also sustain students’ culture—both static culture (e.g., heritage ways, and home language) and evolving culture.⁵ In other words, culturally sustaining educators help students develop a positive cultural identity while teaching math, reading, problem-solving, and civics. Paris also offers a “loving critique” of CRT, arguing that relevance in the curriculum cannot, alone, ensure students will be prepared to live in an increasingly diverse, global world.⁶ Paris and Alim maintain that culturally sustaining practice “has as its explicit goal supporting multilingualism and multiculturalism in practice and perspective for students and teachers.”⁷ This is an important goal at time when schools are increasingly racially segregated and students are grappling with racially motivated bullying.⁸

Collectively, these scholars promote asset-based approaches as alternatives to popular deficit-oriented teaching methods, which position the languages, cultures, and identities of students as barriers to learning. While these pedagogies are not identical, they share a common goal: defy the deficit model and ensure students see themselves and their communities reflected and valued in the content taught in school.

Compelling research highlights the benefits of culturally responsive teaching. For instance, studies in brain science and education find that drawing on learners’ background knowledge shapes comprehension; indeed, all learners process new information best when it is linked to what they already know.⁹ Research also illustrates that instructional materials, assignments, and texts that reflect students’ backgrounds and experiences are critical to engagement and deep, meaningful learning.¹⁰ A smaller, yet promising group of studies evaluating the effectiveness of CRT interventions link this approach to a wide range of positive outcomes such as academic achievement and persistence, improved attendance, greater interest in school, among other outcomes.¹¹

Culturally responsive teaching also has critical synergies with other reform efforts in education, such as initiatives to improve school climate and implement social-emotional learning.¹² For instance, research shows that students who develop a positive sense of racial and ethnic identity are more interested in befriending people of different backgrounds.¹³ Other studies have found that a strong racial-ethnic identity is linked to higher self-esteem, academic attitudes, well-being, and the ability to navigate discrimination.¹⁴ Though more rigorous, large-scale studies are needed,¹⁵ existing studies already support taking action to boost teachers' cultural responsive practice.

In a culturally responsive classroom, learners’ varied identities and experiences are identified, honored, and used to bridge rigorous new learning. This type of individualized instruction benefits all students, which is why Gloria Ladson-Billings titled her seminal text on culturally relevant pedagogy: “But That’s Just Good Teaching!”¹⁶ However, culturally responsive teaching begs the question: Which students do not receive this type of culturally relevant instruction? For Ladson-Billings, the answer is African American students. It remains true that far too many black students have their cultural ways of knowing treated as barriers in the learning process, they have their ability and potential questioned, and they encounter educators who proclaim: “I don’t see color!”¹⁷

Several scholars have expanded on Ladson-Billings’ framework to address learners with other varying and intersecting identities (including based on social class, English proficiency, disability status, LGBTQ status) whose identities and experiences are likewise excluded from mainstream settings.¹⁸ It is clear that these students can also benefit from “mirrors" that allow them to see themselves, their experiences, and their communities in school. For these and other students culturally responsive teaching also provides critical “windows” into the cultural heritage and experiences of others. In an increasingly diverse society, all students benefit from learning to honor their own, and one another’s cultural heritage and lived realities.