What is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Teaching)?

Culturally Relevant Teaching is an approach to teaching that makes culture the central construct for understanding inequality. Culturally Relevant Teachers argue that all knowledge, "truth," and behavior is culturally contingent and, as such, all school curriculum, standards of excellence, disciplinary measures, policies, and procedures must be grounded in each student's cultural identity (race, ethnicity, sex, "gender," class, etc.). Furthermore, Culturally Relevant Teaching is the practice of brainwashing children into Critical Consciousness. 

Gloria Ladson-Billings, the Marxist educator who popularized Culturally Relevant Teaching (the other “CRT”), is one of Paulo Freire’s direct theoretical descendants. Several generations removed from Freire’s canonical texts, many of today’s teachers and administrators have no idea that Freire’s Critical Theory of education underpins one of their most prized educational concepts.

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The Culturally Relevant Teacher’s job is explicitly given as to develop a Critical Consciousness in students, teaching them how to use a Marxist sociopolitical analysis to understand how their cultural identity (race, sex, “gender,” etc.) and “lived experiences” are excluded from classrooms and society. In practice, this means telling children that a ruling class (dominant culture) oppresses them because they are poor, black, Hispanic, Native American, a girl, gay, lesbian, “trans,” fat, or disabled. After learning that they are oppressed, children are meant to begin practicing critical reflection--reflecting on their culture, identity, and experiences from a Marxist standpoint. This critical reflection is designed to motivate students to take up political activism, just as Freire prescribed.

Gloria Ladson-Billings was explicit about her program's goals when she published Toward A Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in 1995. “Culturally relevant teaching must,” she says, “[lead to the] development of a sociopolitical or critical consciousness.” Furthermore, she writes:
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​Beyond individual characteristics of academic achievement and cultural competence, students must develop a broader sociopolitical consciousness that allows them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequalities. (Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.)

​School administrators and teachers today have been trained to believe that Culturally Relevant Teaching is the only way to ensure their instructional methods are “diverse, equitable, and inclusive.” Ladson-Billings, in fact, described her Freirean approach in 1995 with the tagline, “But that’s just good teaching.” Culturally Relevant Teaching is now considered an essential practice for eliminating achievement gaps between student groups, reducing classroom conflict, and maximizing every student’s “equal shot at the same outcome (read: equity),” as it is so often phrased. Today, teachers everywhere are trained to think they must make their materials and methods “culturally relevant” for children to be successful in school. Most of these teachers have been duped, but many know what they are doing.
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At its core, Culturally Relevant Teaching forwards the idea that many children fail in school because there is a cultural mismatch between their school and their home/community. Culturally relevant teachers assume that “academic knowledge and skills” must be situated “within students' lived experiences and frames of reference” to be learned (2). Therefore, students who can learn, read, write, talk, and behave at school like they do at home or in their community—a cultural match between school and student—are more likely to succeed. Students who are removed from their cultural reference points and “lived experiences” at school face a cultural mismatch, making them less likely to succeed. Put simply, culturally relevant teachers believe that schools privilege some cultures while “silencing” and excluding others.

Culturally Relevant Teachers argue that schools hide the harmful effects of cultural mismatch in a “myth of meritocracy” that blinds teachers and students to the pernicious dynamic at play. As Gloria Ladson-Billings notes in Toward A Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, “the goal of education becomes how to “fit” students…into [a] hierarchical structure that is defined as meritocracy.” Culturally relevant teachers think that schools are not and have never been meritocratic. They think that “success” in school has always reflected how well a student assimilates into the dominant culture(s).

Culturally Relevant Teaching rests on the idea that schools stabilize the oppressive social and economic order by only accepting “normal” ways of reading, writing, thinking, and behaving. That is, Culturally Relevant Teaching rests on the idea that schools only accept certain forms of knowledge and certain people as knowers. In this view, the dominant culture in society has defined what counts as the normal way to read, write, and behave, and it measures all students’ success against those unjust benchmarks. Like Paulo Freire, Culturally Relevant Teachers argue that a dominant culture uses schools to stratify society, creating a hierarchy where the most “educated” (normal) reign supreme.
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In Summary

In summary, Culturally Relevant Teaching claims that the dominant culture uses schools to sustain and reproduce itself. The goal of the Culturally Relevant Teacher is to tailor her methods and practices to identify and deconstruct this dominant culture. She must determine how the dominant culture(s) marginalizes other cultures—other ways of reading, writing, doing math, practicing science, behaving, and “knowing the truth”—in her classroom. Likewise, the goal of the Culturally Relevant Teacher is to help students deconstruct their own culture(s) and determine how they specifically are oppressed by the dominant culture(s), or how their culture(s) oppress the marginalized culture(s). After modeling this deconstruction, the Culturally Relevant Teacher’s mission is to empower and inspire her students to change the dominant culture through social justice activism. The Culturally Relevant Teacher’s job is to push her students to develop Critical Consciousness.

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REFERENCES:
1. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.
2. Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106-116.
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