Identifying and Choosing Culturally Relevant Texts
What is culturally responsive teaching?
Gay (2010) defines culturally responsive pedagogy as the way teachers teach:
to and through their [student’s] personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments. Culturally responsive teaching is this kind of paradigm… It is routine because it does for Native American, Latino, Asian American, African American, and low-income students what traditional instructional ideologies and actions do for middle-class European Americans. That is, they filter curriculum content and teaching strategies through their cultural frames of reference [making them] more personally meaningful and easier to master” (p. 26, emphasis not in original).
When contemplating making our curriculum culturally responsive, it’s also important to think broadly about what culture means. Gay (2013) notes sometimes she shifts between saying culture, values, attitudes, beliefs, customs, traditions, heritages, contributions, experiences, and perspectives. This is an important shift in language and in thinking because it encompasses a broad range of traits that can help us more deeply understand our students. Gay’s definition of culture helps educators see culture as an asset that all our students can bring to our classroom and discussion.