Culturally Responsive Teaching Essay

To begin to understand and create a culturally responsive classroom, educators must first know their students’ cultural backgrounds thoroughly and then promote an inclusive learning environment by implementing culturally responsive teaching.

Educators must be familiar with the characteristics of culturally responsive teaching practices to create an effective learning environment where all students become part of the learning process.

A key purpose of culturally responsive teaching is to provide all students with learning opportunities, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, or first language. (Ladson-Billings, 1994). A primary goal of culturally responsive teaching is to ensure that students from diverse backgrounds have meaningful opportunities

I think teachers need to experience personal identification of culture first rather than focus heavily on activities. In addition, teachers must focus on one’s own culture and how it influences perceptions of diverse cultures and what implications that has on instruction. Educators must self-reflect and identify their own culture and then look at other cultures without any biases. This must start by examining and reflecting on their own beliefs and ideologies and how they affect their teaching and their views about other cultures. I am still working on this process of accepting how my beliefs affect the teaching of other cultures to diverse students. This is a very challenging task as many different cultures have different sensitive issues that are not found in my own culture. How we deal with teaching these issues will determine how effective is our cultural pedagogy. Controversial issues like LGBTQ and religious beliefs need a very careful approach before teaching them. Educators must reflect on their beliefs about these topics and be aware of potential biases and inequitable teaching practices that may arise when teaching them to cultures that have different beliefs about them. We must teach cultural pedagogy from a social justice perspective (Moje, 2007). Culturally responsive teaching with social justice brings the cultural and linguistic strengths of students into the classroom. This approach requires being deliberate about getting to know and understand the knowledge and experiences students have acquired outside of school, along with respecting, valuing, and using these “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) when