The Case For Culturally Relevant Pedagogy By Ladson-Billing

Your image of the teacher

Teaching has been a passion of mine since I was a child. I have always loved school and learning as much as I can (honestly if I could afford it I would stay in school forever and earn degrees in everything because there is not a subject that I do not like or have an interest in). I remember my first interest in becoming a teacher was in the 1st grade. Another student and I began to create homework sheets and give them to our teacher as homework. It was very basic and simple and the teacher did them and we graded them. She would make mistakes and we would correct the work with a red pen. Looking back now I realize that she was teaching us without teaching us, but we just thought we were smarter than the teacher. Mrs.

The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Ladson-Billings. She mentions how Native American children “experience difficulty in schools is that educators traditionally have attempted to insert culture into the education, instead of inserting education into the culture (Ladson-Billings, 1995)” and that is a possible reason why many nonwhites do poorly in school and have stigmas associated with them. She makes the argument for education to be culturally relevant for all students and that to do that students must experience academic success, develop or maintain cultural competence, and develop critical consciousness that challenges the status quo of the current social order (Ladson-Billings, 1995). This article was a great read and something that I found very interesting. Teaching in Atlanta for 4 years changed my perspectives on education, history, and what we as a nation are doing to continue to fail our minority populations in education. While I did not know about this article before, I feel that I was trying to do all 3 of Ladson-Billing's core principles. I taught juniors and most of my students who were in grade level in my US History class had no success in school. I did not make the assignments easier, but I made it more relatable to the students. I still taught the standards but I incorporated technology, memes, music, and movies and allowed the students the space to be themselves and answer rather challenging questions however

My teaching experience in Atlanta has changed me. I was teaching during COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans due to police brutality, which affected me and my students. Her quote “Tell them, first, that we will protect them (Darling-Hammond, 2017)” is profound. I found myself saying that to my students even when we returned from Covid-19. While I always told them that I would protect them, I wanted to make sure that I was being explicit and let them know that any racism would not be tolerated and that I had their backs no matter what. Now that I am in a largely white area (95%+) I still maintain and believe that to my core. When I am in ELA or Math class and questions or statements arise either from the students or the subject material, I always interject and correct or enlighten as much as I can on the topic of race. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of diversity in my area and my students grow up in a community that is not diverse or always accepts diversity. I had a student last year that would make horrible racist statements, draw the nazi symbol, and use inappropriate language toward female students. Any time this happened I would correct and let him know how it was wrong, why it was wrong, and what we needed to do to correct the situation. Other times I told him that I would not associate