Multicultural Education for Leadership – Culturally Relevant Pedagogies
Abstract
Dialogues pertaining to improving diversity, learning, teaching, and equality have rarely centered on culturally relevant pedagogy. The analysis divulges existing problems with deficit-based teaching practices and proposes asset-based approaches as a superior alternative. The research analyzes the works of distinguished scholars such as Ladson-Billings regarding the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy. The existing segregation in America, primarily on racial lines, has affected learning experiences adversely for the students of color. Monocultural and monolingual policies in many states underline this exclusion. The analysis offers a culturally relevant pedagogy framework as a solution to the enduring and complex societal and social problems of segregation.
Keywords: inequality, learning, culturally relevant, pedagogy
Multicultural Education for Leadership – Culturally Relevant Pedagogies
Introduction
The promise of equality in education remains an obscure dream despite the students of color today constituting the majority of students enrolled in American public schools (Chen, 2014). Many students of color endure suffering in under-resourced learning institutions, where they cannot access adequate facilities, quality materials, enrichment opportunities, and high-level academic courses. In addition to resource inequalities, many students of color are subjected to lower educational standards, harsh discipline methods, as well as taught in techniques that disregard or discount their linguistic and cultural assets. These barriers bring about massive inequities in academic performance, which limit life opportunities for these students.
Forming a diverse group of teachers who are ready to exhibit culturally relevant or responsive teaching is vital to reversing subpar performances as well as assisting students of color and other underserved learners in realizing their full potential. Culturally relevant pedagogy is a framework that challenges teachers to discern that, instead of deficiencies, students have strong points in learning, which must be leveraged to make learning activities and practices practical and relevant for all. Educators who practice culturally relevant pedagogy set demanding learning goals for all students. They repeatedly build bridges between what learners must learn and their lived realities, heritage, and the issues they value.
Background and Context
In the United States, racial discrimination in public schooling has been unlawful for 65 years. Nevertheless, inequality and exclusion remain rampant in American public schools with substantial consequences for learners, particularly students of color and persons with disabilities (“Disability Justice,” 2018). Presently, most students, as well as teachers, know the Supreme Court pronounced racial segregation as unconstitutional in learning institutions in the momentous 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education. However, less of them understand the extent of discrimination still lingering in American schools. According to Noguera (2017), over half of the country’s students reside in racially concentrated regions, where more than three quarters of students are either non-white or white. Moreover, school areas are frequently separated by earnings. The connection between economic and racial discrimination has strengthened educational disparities between poor and affluent students, and between students of color and white students. Even though most schools teach students about the past struggles to integrate learning institutions throughout the civil rights age, exclusion as a present-day reality is fundamentally omitted from the curriculum. A current problem to illustrate this issue is the prejudice seen in mass incarceration between non-whites and whites.
Mass Incarceration causes the parental imprisonment of children, illustrates the symbiotic connection between the American ghetto and the prison system, and reveals a geographic concentration of detention in urban districts (Tucker, 2015). Additionally, mass imprisonment extends beyond prison walls and affects other social controls, such as education. According to research, drug abuse is correlated to mass detention among African Americans, but further studies expose an underlying problem of prejudice. Statistics reveal that 2.6 million African Americans and roughly 14 million Whites use illicit drugs. Nonetheless, African Americans are imprisoned for drug-related crimes at ten times the rate of Whites (Tucker, 2015). This methodical injustice leaves many African American students at a significant disadvantage compared to their white peers. Culturally relevant pedagogy helps in alleviating such drawbacks (Tucker, 2015). Culturally relevant pedagogy or CRP is an inclusive framework focused on teaching diverse students effectively. It uses reference settings, previous experiences, performance styles, and cultural knowledge of culturally diverse students to make education practical and relevant to them.
Theories on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Several models exist for culturally responsive methodologies, for instance, culturally relevant teaching, culturally congruent teaching, and culturally responsive education, which capture different components. Critical educators and scholars, for instance, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, and Geneva Gay have studied the concept of culturally relevant education, and all have come up with asset-based approaches to hypothesize this concept. In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings presented culturally relevant pedagogy as a term to define an engaging teaching method for learners whose cultures and experiences are traditionally left out from conventional settings [17]. Ladson-Billings recommended three objectives to guide teaching practices in her study on teaching African American students. These objectives are: teaching has to result in academic success; assist learners in developing positive cultural and ethnic identities; and support students’ capability to identify, understand, and evaluate existing inequalities. Culturally relevant practitioners socially, intellectually, politically, and emotionally empower students by focusing on these objectives in their practice.
Adding to Ladson-Billings’ work, Geneva Gay advanced a model with a stronger emphasis on teachers’ practices and strategies. Gay (2018) devised the term ‘culturally responsive teaching’ to describe a method centered on the application of the cultural knowledge, structures of reference, performance styles, and prior experiences of culturally diverse learners to create education, which is effective and more applicable to them. Gay (2018) urges culturally responsive educators to change positively many levels, comprising instructional materials, relationships between students and teachers, instructional methods, classroom climate, as well as self-awareness to enhance learning for students. According to Gay (2018), an asset-based perspective of students is vital to guaranteeing a higher level of success from learners of different cultural groups. Similar to Ladson-Billings, Gay stresses on creating opportunities for students to reflect critically concerning inequities they experience.
Django Paris, in recent years, has built on the research effort on culturally relevant pedagogy to advance a vision for culturally sustaining pedagogy. Paris and Alim’s (2017) methodology considers the different evolution patterns of learners’ culture and identity. Paris and Alim (2017) suggest that culturally sustaining teachers should tolerate and utilize students’ culture – both evolving and static- such as home language and heritage ways. Alternatively, culturally sustaining educators support students to develop an affirmative cultural identity while teaching problem-solving, civics, math, and reading (Paris & Alim, 2017). Paris evaluates CRT elucidating that relevance in the curriculum by itself cannot guarantee students will be equipped to live in a progressively diverse world. Paris and Alim (2017) hold that culturally sustaining practice must support multiculturalism and multilingualism in practice and viewpoint for teachers and students, particularly during times of increased racial segregation in schools and racially inspired bullying. Culturally relevant pedagogies sustain cultures connected to the lives of individuals who practice and treasure them; thus, the two are constantly linked. Additionally, cultural activities and practices are often invoked in methods, which marginalize people of color. As a result, focusing on these individuals brings to the fore overlapping oppressions and presents an opening to formulate strategies to eradicate this exclusion.
Collectively, these researchers support asset-based strategies as substitutes to mainstream deficit-oriented teaching approaches, which position the identities, languages, and cultures of students as obstructions to learning. These pedagogies share a common objective, which is to challenge the deficit model as well as ensure learners view themselves and their communities valued and reproduced in the content taught in learning institutions.
Implications of Culturally Relevant Pedagogies on Policy
Culturally relevant pedagogies can continuously question and create avenues of comprehensive policy evaluation and development pertaining to educational reform and teaching practice. Deficit-oriented pedagogy harms multiculturalism and multilingualism in teaching practices supporting methods that encourage students to vacate poorly-performing schools. Consequently, asset-based approaches should be employed to amend education policies. Following the thinking of Ladson-Billings, Gay and Paris, well-performing students, being assets, should stay at their local schools and enhance the culture and teachings motivating them and their families to vacate the institutions. This perspective could bring new concepts and developments to their present schools and communities.
According to Cicero, our capacity to reason makes us equals. Consequently, culturally responsive stances need policymakers, teachers, and parents to reflect on the consequences and causes of school failure (Rothman, Kolbert, & Lepore, 2020). Additionally, stakeholders should study the effect of students’ transfer of schools by considering what is lost if one school is allowed to underachieve and the effect of poor performance on the local community. Similarly, reforms directed towards school assimilation challenge cultural responsiveness. Studies on culturally relevant pedagogies address the education at learning institutions through specific categories, including fundamental, linguistic, and racially homogeneous populations. Thus, the inclusion of traditional aspects in the syllabus can be fulfilled by transforming the curriculum and introducing cultural identities.
Paris and Alim (2017) posit that policies, which support culturally sustainable pedagogies, should not be assimilationist monocultural or monolingual. For instance, English only laws that are present in different states lead to high imprisonment rates, poor discipline, and monolingual literacy curricula for students of color. Educators should assist students in identifying, understanding, and analyzing existing inequalities while correspondingly achieving higher performances. This supposition is supported by the findings of Paris and Alim (2017) that reveal that when presented with the opportunity to join ethnic study courses, students of color perform better across other subjects in schools.
Conclusion
The long march to integrate multiple languages, cultures, persons with disabilities, and other underserved minorities has been meticulous, yielding slip-ups, and stimulating developments in education and research. The scholarly works of Ladson-Billings, Paris, and Gay provide a strong foundation for challenging mainstream deficit-based ideologies, which systematically disadvantage students of color. The scholars’ asset-based approaches to establishing a culturally sustainable pedagogy framework offer refreshing yet fundamental solutions to bridging long-enduring gaps between Caucasian learners and students of color.
References
Chen, G. (2014, October 31). White Students are now the minority in U.S. public schools. https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/white-students-are-now-the-minority-in-u-s-public-schools
“Disability Justice” is Simply Another Term for Love. (2018, November 5). Retrieved from https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/disability-justice-is-simply-another-term-for-love/
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.
Noguera, P. A. (2017). Introduction to “Racial inequality and education: patterns and prospects for the future.” The Educational Forum, 81(2), 129–135.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.
Rothman, J., Kolbert, E., & Lepore, J. (2020, January 6). The Equality Conundrum. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-equality-conundrum
Tucker, R. B. (2015). The Color of Mass Incarceration. Ethnic Studies Review, 37-38, 135–149.