Summary Of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy By Gloria Ladson-Billing
If you were to ask a teacher why they chose their profession, you should not be surprised to hear them say they felt called to educate the next generation. As honorable as this calling may be, it comes with great responsibility. Teachers can become overwhelmed, feeling like the weight of the world and its future rests on their shoulders. They cannot be like parents who can choose to limit their focus on investing in their own children. A teacher’s influence can be limited to their school, their classroom, and their students. However, their profession has a lasting impression when considering how much maturing and human development occurs during those early years of most American’s life. Another bit of common knowledge is that teachers usually
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Gloria Ladson-Billings’s monumental work on culturally relevant pedagogy has inspired many educators to strive to appeal to the diversity of their students. Culturally relevant pedagogy is “a theoretical model that [...] helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 469). However, if culture is taught, it tends to be taught like an ancient history class, where the culture has been long displaced from our modern perceptions. Only the best history teachers will link the history to the present in truly profound and meaningful ways. Django Paris accurately criticizes the view that teaching a culture belonging to poverty should not be taught in a “progressive” America (2012, p. 93). Teaching about the interests of a student is beneficial for them and using other cultures can spike their curiosity so that white students will want to investigate the topic. Paris furthers Ladson-Billings’s point about culture in classroom, in that it cannot simply be relevant to a specific moment in time, but it must be sustained over time. He suggests culturally responsive instruction: “Teaching and learning that seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralisms as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a necessary response to demographic and social change” (Ferlazzo & Paris, 2017). In practice, culturally responsive instruction has students return the favor to the teacher when the lesson values they
Gloria Ladson-Billings’s monumental work on culturally relevant pedagogy has inspired many educators to strive to appeal to the diversity of their students. Culturally relevant pedagogy is “a theoretical model that [...] helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 469). However, if culture is taught, it tends to be taught like an ancient history class, where the culture has been long displaced from our modern perceptions. Only the best history teachers will link the history to the present in truly profound and meaningful ways. Django Paris accurately criticizes the view that teaching a culture belonging to poverty should not be taught in a “progressive” America (2012, p. 93). Teaching about the interests of a student is beneficial for them and using other cultures can spike their curiosity so that white students will want to investigate the topic. Paris furthers Ladson-Billings’s point about culture in classroom, in that it cannot simply be relevant to a specific moment in time, but it must be sustained over time. He suggests culturally responsive instruction: “Teaching and learning that seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralisms as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a necessary response to demographic and social change” (Ferlazzo & Paris, 2017). In practice, culturally responsive instruction has students return the favor to the teacher when the lesson values they