I’ve been reading and researching culturally responsive teaching. The main thrust is that if you are going to effectively teach kids, you should understand their culture. This can be big “C” culture or little “c” culture. I think of little “c” culture as understanding the daily relevance of what you are teaching to them now, which might include pop culture, current events, etc., whereas big “C” as more traditional ideas of culture. Both are important, though I think we tend to focus more on little “c” culture in this country.

The human brain won’t engage in higher function and learn if it doesn’t feel safe. Being known and understood is crucial to feeling safe. Also, in terms of learning theory, to own what you learn, the human brain uses prior experience, knowledge, and emotions to connect the new experience to prior experience in order to makes sense of it, creating a permanent “file.” This also creates an easy way to access that new experience/knowledge/emotion later—sorta like placing a shortcut to a file on your computer desktop.

To do this skillfully as a teacher, you should know your student’s story. The teacher must understand their culture. Not understanding this, you can still dispense information. However, it will be difficult to get students to “criticality,” as first being able to think deeply and analytically about what they are learning, but then as defined by Gholdy Muhammad, as “the ability to read, write, think, and speak in ways to understand power and equity in order to promote anti-oppression.”

Getting to any level of criticality requires the learner to make sense of what they are learning as it relates to their story and their identity. This is why simply dispensing information isn’t enough. Of course, some students do (and always have) been able to get to criticality even if their teacher was merely dispensing information and then do more than simply memorize to take a test. But, I dare say that the majority of students do not.

You can then see the importance of the teacher and curriculum either being aligned to the students’ culture—their story and identity, or the importance of the curriculum being open-ended and inclusive enough to allow a multicultural class of students to own it and align it to their story and identity. This isn’t a license to teach selective history, alternative facts, or a different curriculum to each student, etc., but it is a mandate to provide multiple points of entry, modes of exploration, and means of making sense of  the communally agreed upon relevant facts and information, as well as broaden the historical stories we teach kids.

Do you see now the structural racism in the education system? The bulk of the teachers are white Americans teaching a curriculum written primarily by white scholars, driving towards tests written by those same scholars. That includes me.

This is a problem, and one maybe unique to the United States, which is by design multicultural (at least in theory). It inadequate to say that “we’re all Americans now, so that is the culture we share and align to.” To do so requires assimilation by those who do not come form the dominant Eurocentric, white culture and thus ignores, denies, or worse yet, seeks to erase their story and identity that might be rooted in thousands of years of cultural, biological, and ecological evolution. Plus, it’s icky, and just mean.

There’s another problem here. Many in the U.S. are largely acultural, not really knowing their story as it connects to deep family roots, the land, and ecosystems from which their people came and how and where their culture evolved. This is largely a unique problem to the dominant white population of the U.S. Consequently, many of us don’t really know our story and identity except as recently written in U.S. history of manifest destiny and as largely expressed and communicated in pop culture. That’s probably my story largely.

As I’m learning about culturally responsive teaching, I’m finding that the place for a teacher to start is to know their story and identity. Then they must provide space for their students to explore their own story and identity and make sense of what you are trying to teach them in the context of their unfolding story.

This is the importance of teachers understanding culturally responsive teaching even though it can be abstract and difficult. A great teacher doesn’t just know their subject and teach science or math, etc. They know themselves and their students and they teach, no they lead, students’ discovery of the world they live in, come from, and want to make.

Lacking that, then education for so many is perfunctory time served until they can do something meaningful. That is the reality for so many children and might be why we see such growing derision toward formal education in the country.