Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

As I engaged in each week's readings and other content, I try and make it relevant to my own practice. A lot of my posts have been relating the themes or lessons I learned to my life as a teacher. And this week, as I was relating the readings and videos to my life, I experienced a somewhat "meta" moment in that this is the feeling (or something similar to it) is what our students should be feeling in school. They should not only be actively searching for personal or life significance in things that they are doing, but we as teachers have to also ensure that they can pull meaning from what they are learning.

As a middle school math teacher, I get a lot of questions about the importance of what we are learning. A lot of "Miss, how will this actually help me in life." As a lifelong math enthusiast, it's really easy for me to just assume that people understand that math in general is just important. And I try to convey to my students that problem solving and critical thinking and perseverance, not just content, are skills that they are building for later in life. But again, they are middle schoolers and need more concrete, tangible, satisfying answers than that. That, to me, is where I need to be a more consistent culturally responsive teacher.

In the Ladson-Billings reading, the three criteria for successful culturally responsive pedagogy were academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. This really stuck with me for several reasons. I feel like I have reached the cultural competence level by doing my best to integrate more superficial aspects of my students' lives into our curriculum. Doing things like including their names, their interests, and general aspects of their culture into problems, warm-ups, and tests. I change problems that were about gardens to be about shoes or or basketball, and just doing small things like that will spark my students' interests.

However, my goal is to push myself to reach that critical consciousness level. A lot of times, I use the "math teacher" excuse as a reason for not being a more cultural responsive teacher; math is math, right? But math and numbers are powerful tools to question and critique cultural and societal norms and can be something that I can start to instill in many different math units while still meeting standards, and is something I am actually trying to accomplish in my current unit!