Culturally Responsive Teaching Reflection

While doing my Where I am From, I remembered how culturally diverse the area I grew up in was. Living in Southern California you are exposed, most especially to the Latin/Hispanic culture. It is everywhere you go, from the language to the music and especially the food. In these areas language can be a real barrier to the learning process when most of the parents are immigrants with no or almost no English skills and Spanish is their first language. In this sense being able to bring that language into the classroom allows the ability to break that barrier and bring a connection to the two languages. The same can be said about Appalachian English and "Standard" English. They need to be taught that their speech is not wrong but show them the connection between the two and how to code switch when needed.

     "The researchers in Moll's study urged participating teachers to abandon the standard, drill-based approach so often used with working-class and poor students. In its place, Moll urged them to help students find meaning rather than learn isolated facts and rules. He also advised them to use activities that "involve students as thoughtful learners in socially meaningful tasks" (Gonzalez, Greenberg & Velex, 1994).

  Many time teachers do use a cultural deficit view when it comes to teaching in areas they are not from or unfamiliar with. Upon moving to West Virginia I was at a disadvantage having never experience the Appalachian culture and knew little to almost nothing about it. For some people coming into a new culture especially one with the stigma of poverty and backwoods they would look automatically at the language as ignorant and wrong and bring that into the classroom and try to teach them "right". Instead they need to look at the situation as a cultural difference view; not that how they speak is wrong but showing them another way to speak they may have not been exposed to.

"Most teachers believe students need to learn SAE so that they will have the communication skills which will enable them more opportunities in the future, and there are numerous studies that support this position... who found that speakers with a heavy, non-standard English were less likely to be hired. It is from this belief that many teachers have developed a negative attitude toward minority dialects as forms of incorrect English. According to Wheeler and Swords, “[i]t is clearly the case that when an urban teacher tells minority-language students that their language is wrong and error-filled, she creates a seriously deleterious effect in the classroom"(Rowland & Marrow, 2010).

Teachers can overcome this Cultural Deficit View by becoming familiar with the student, their culture  community and families. Knowledge is the best key to any situation and fixing said situation in a proper manner.

"In response to the research discoveries about her students, Hilda developed an instructional unit around a topic of interest to them: building and construction. She took a big risk, since construction was a topic she knew almost nothing about. Hilda did know, however, that her students, their families, and many other people in the community knew quite a bit about construction. (Gonzalez, Greenberg & Velex, 1994).

Some strategies to teach non-standard English speakers in a "Funds of Knowledge" approach would be to take what they do not understand and put it in a context they would understand. This type of strategy can be seen in some Language Arts classes where Old English Shakespeare is translated into a modern form of a language to be better understood and comparable. Another strategy would be using a Cultural Capital approach and putting in a culturally familiar aspect they can identify with. For many in the Appalachian culture bringing a subject to hunting, fishing, or camping may help put a subject into a familiar aspect of their life they can relate to and make a connection to a topic they may be unfamiliar with.

"Even as they move towards more widely-used English, it is not necessary to or desirable to wipe out the ways their families or neighborhood of origin use words. The teaching of excellence in writing means adding language to what already exists, not subtracting. The goal is to make more relationships available not fewer" (NCTE, 2008).

The Where I Am From project allowed our fellow students a glimpse at who we are and why we are that way. It shows us how much we have in common and can connect us together in ways we never knew before, as well as showing us a way to know and listen to each other. It allowed us to see a culture we may not be familiar with and create another teaching tool to what is already taught in schools and bring it to a personal level; a level students may not have been on otherwise. It brings a face of a friend or fellow student to a culture they may be learning about or will be learning about, and allow them to ask questions or have questions answered.

The teaching of non-traditional English speakers needs to be taken upon a teacher like teaching any child. Make the material relateable and a student will take more of an interest and comprehend better. You have a first grader read Dr Seuss to help show the relationship of rhyming, not Shakespearean prose. I have been in situations were bilingual or ESL children have been the majority of the students in the classroom and during those situations I was familiar with the culture and the language and was able to bring those aspects in to the classroom. By bringing their language and culture into their lessons in the form of books, words used to help explain something, students took more of an interest in that lesson and were able to make a connection. While in my 30 hour clinical I had to teach vocabulary to 8th grade students in West Virginia History, by using examples of local flora and fauna the student was able to understand the difference between the two words. Explaining a deer is fauna (baby deer-faun) and ramps as flora (it grows in the floor of the woods) he was able to distinct the difference between the two.
Works Cited


Committee, t. W., & 2004, N. (n.d.). NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing. National Council of Teachers of English - Homepage. Retrieved February 12, 2013, from http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/writingbeliefs

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132-141.

Rowland, J., & Marrow, D. (2010). Dialect Awareness Education: The Importance for Watching Our Words. UCS Undergrad Research Journal , 3, .