Teaching To and Through Cultural Diversity

TLDR

Culturally responsive teaching addresses key issues and attributes related to cultural diversity in education. The paper aims to explain the author’s perspective on culturally responsive teaching and demonstrate how to embed it in writing to educate readers. The author outlines conceptual frameworks and specific actions—reshaping teacher attitudes, confronting resistance, centering culture, linking to core curricula, and illustrating with scholarly excerpts—to implement culturally responsive teaching.

Abstract

This discussion examines some of the major issues and attributes of culturally responsive teaching. It begins with explaining my views of culturally responsive teaching and how I incorporate cultural responsiveness in my writing to teach readers what it means. These general conceptual frameworks are followed by a discussion of some specific actions essential to its implementation. They are restructuring teacher attitudes and beliefs about cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity; resisting resistance to cultural diversity in teacher education and classroom instruction; centering culture and difference in the teaching process; and establishing pedagogical connections between culturally responsive teaching and subjects and skills routinely taught in schools. Excerpts from samples of my own and others’ scholarship are woven throughout to exemplify general patterns, themes, and principles of culturally responsive teaching.