The term culturally responsive teaching (CRT) originates from the US and addresses mainly teachers in K12 school situations. Here the aim is to increase motivation by making sure that every child feels valued and included. A great deal of the US focus is on closing the divide between black and white and increasingly on Latino immigrants. Here in Europe the focus is on a very diverse range of immigrants both from within the EU and further afield. In the adult education field we need to cover the full panoply of diversity, not just immigrants, but there is also a great deal of work to be done helping refugees to integrate and obtain the qualifications they need to participate actively in the community through work and other means. The Teaching Culture course applies CRT to European contexts in adult and vocational education.
You can find a detailed exploration of what culturally responsive teaching is here but for now I will take the first element of the description:
Gay (2000) defines culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students.
It may seem quite a burden in the first instance to take a critical look at your current teaching practice and explore how to conciously change it to take into account the diverse cultures in your group. I will explore why this is in a later blog post. But one of the most significant parts of the above description for me is ‘it teaches to and through the strengths of these students’.
My recent experience with Appreciative Inquiry has shown me how powerful and transformative working with strengths is. It completely changes the tenor of your interactions with your colleagues and students if you are continually looking for and building on strengths rather than faults or errors. Therefore, you can look on culturally responsive teaching as an enriching multiplier rather than a time-consuming drag on (your) resources.
Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurgenappelo/10867415006/