Culturally Responsive Teaching

 

The term Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), first coined in the USA in the 1990s, refers to teaching which is sensitive to different cultures both within and outside the classroom. “It is an approach that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (Ladson-Billings, 1994).  Issues to do with diversity and racism have come to the fore again in recent years and attracted growing interest in language teaching and education circles in general. It was not a subject on my agenda, I have to confess, no doubt owing in part to the setting I taught in (rural, generally mono-ethnic at that time and mono-cultural). But I think language teachers would do well to be aware of some of the issues at stake, if they are not already knowledgeable about these issues.

First, what is culture? One definition has it as the norms, beliefs, and behaviours passed down from one generation to the next. These partly explain why a student might answer a question in the way they do, stand a certain distance away, or why another might not feel comfortable looking you in the eye when you are speaking to them. These aspects of culture can affect pupil-teacher relationships. Culturally Responsive Teaching attempts to bridge the gap between teacher and student by helping the teacher understand the cultural nuances that may cause a relationship to break down and which ultimately causes student achievement to break down as well.

A cornerstone of CRT is having some cultural knowledge of the students. Through conversations or ‘getting to know you’ questionnaires, you can find out what name they would like used, their interests, family background, languages they know, activities they enjoy and even what they would like to get out of your subject. In ethnically and culturally diverse classrooms, this may be especially useful. In less diverse classrooms, it's then a question of opening up minds to other cultures. 

Activities can be planned which value diversity, for example students can present about their linguistic or cultural background; traditions and festivals can be celebrated through texts, projects, culinary lessons; some words or phrases can be learned in a student’s heritage language, or any other new language. Artwork from different cultures can be used as a basis of a speaking and listening lesson. A ‘cultural bulletin board’ could be set up in your classroom to highlight a different country or region of the world each month. 

With intermediate and advanced classes texts could be chosen to highlight aspects of history or culture which make students reflect on cultural dominance. Talking of cultural dominance, the term decolonising the curriculum will be familiar to you, but not necessarily clear. It refers to identifying, acknowledging and challenging the ways in which colonialism has impacted upon knowledge and learning. This means including in the curriculum a range of voices which go beyond the dominant Western perspective. In practice, in advanced lessons, this might mean choosing texts which allude to subjects such as slavery, racism, the displacement of peoples (refugees and asylum-seeking), economic and linguistic dominance, child labour and language use in developing countries.

A recent article by teacher Nki Osamo-Wright highlighted what she thinks of as the issues surrounding decolonising the curriculum. Nki writes; "The current Eurocentric MFL curriculum does not reflect my students, or me, in any manner, and is unrelatable for many of us." It is thought-provoking, but maybe does not take account of a number of factors affecting why we teach the languages of the former colonial powers (French, Spanish and German). We have to take into account teacher supply, parental demand, business demand - German and French are still most sought after according to surveys - and difficulty. The case for opening up the curriculum to other languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Russian is not that easy to make, in my view.

Some language teachers may feel that issues around cultural diversity and decolonisation are peripheral to their main goals. This is understandable when the immediate priorities are preparing students for the next exam, but it only requires some awareness and intentionality to be a culturally responsive teacher.