Being a Culturally Relevant Teacher




“Just because you are a white teacher and do not experience life through the same lens as your students of color, it doesn’t mean you can’t build an environment where realness, rigor, and relationships abound in your classroom.”

In the article Dear White Teacher, by Chrysanthius Lathan, this was the sentence that stuck out to me, this was the part of the article that I kept thinking about long after I finished reading. I think that this resonates with me so much because I am white, and I do have privileges that many do not have. I cannot pretend to relate to students that may not know where their next meal is coming from, or that experience fear of racism whenever they get in their car to drive home. While I cannot pretend to relate to these students, that doesn’t mean that I cannot be a successful teacher and create an environment where all students, regardless of who they are or where they come from, feel valued and appreciated.
The chapter that we read by Winn and Johnson gave me a lot of insight into what it means to have a culturally relevant pedagogy. I loved that this article mentioned that this pedagogy does not require students to have a shared identity with their students, but that it does require that teachers become culturally immersed in their students' lives and that teachers are aware of the differences between them and their students.
For me, being a culturally relevant teacher is more than just buying copies of multicultural books and placing them on the shelves of my classroom, it is more than using inclusive grouping and making sure that I treat all students equally. Being a culturally relevant teacher comes down to truly listening to my students, and understanding what they bring to the classroom each day. I can listen to stories about student’s home life, what they like to do in their free time, and what they are passionate about. I can share stories and articles that show that I care about their experiences, regardless of their identity. Being a culturally relevant teacher is about acknowledging differences, building bridges between my classroom and the students outside environment, using varied instructional strategies to meet different learning needs, creating a classroom environment that allows students to know and express their own culture, and using multicultural resources in all subjects.
It is important for me to be able to recognize what I bring into the classroom, where my own cultural identity lies. When I am aware of the privileges that I have, the beliefs that I have grown up with, and the cultural traditions that I have, I am able to reflect and respond to differences between myself and my students. Like Lathan wrote, I can work to build an environment where “realness, rigor, and relationships abound in the classroom. By truly looking at each student as an individual, I can work to uphold high expectations for all students, treat them with the realness and respect that they deserve, and learn about who they are as a person.



Comments

  1. Heather K 445 BlogFebruary 11, 2019 at 1:27 PM

    I liked how you related the article "Dear White Teachers" to chapter by Winn and Johnson. I also enjoyed how you acknowledge that you may not be able to personally relate to students in the future, but you still want to ensure that you will listen to their stories and experiences and try to create a relevant curriculum for them. I think that creating a relevant curriculum for your students is extremely important in order to keep them engaged in the classroom. Your post provided a lot of important insight that not all teachers are willing tp consider based on some of the pieces we've read both in this class and other education classes.

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  2. What's Up With Welsh?February 11, 2019 at 5:13 PM

    This quote also resonated with me because I know as a white male I automatically have certain privileges over others of varying ethnicity, gender, and sex. But to me (and with hope, everyone), the rhetoric of racism is grossly outdated, illogical, and detrimental to our survival as a human species. We all come from different backgrounds, but with compassion, sympathy, empathy, and enthusiasm, we can reach and support all students in the pursuit of one goal: education; for through education, knowledge,, and discourse, we can be set free from the chains that shackle us to ideals of exclusion, otherization, and hatred. We are all people, and through that collective understanding we can be one race, one human species experiencing reality together.

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