Culturally Responsive Teaching

By now, everyone on the planet has seen the various videos of majority teachers teaching in underprivilged schools to underprivlidged students, rapping, dancing or otherwise engaging in some form “Culturally Responsible” Teaching.

As I write this, I think of the movie “Lean on Me”. I understand that an unorthodox method sometimes is necessary to with the untenable and unfortunate circumstances of underprivildeged children in the educational system. At one point, I thought rapping and dancing white teachers in underprivilged schools was good thing. But that was before I started to think about this critically.

Why is it that these majority teachers think the only way to connect with students of color, more specifically black and latino students, is to dance and sing? The kids I work with in my community center have all kinds of varied interestes. Most of them are not interested in rapping.

Amany wants to be a Marine. He can rap, but that is not what he wants to do. Instead of trying to figure out which Bad Bunny song to rap the Quadratic formula to, why not show a kid like Amany how algebra is used in modeling and control systems?

With that being said, I understand that logisitcal issues of a teacher getting to know thirty students. Which brings me to the next point. We need more teachers and smaller classrooms.

I mean, think about it. If your a parent with one child, that is difficult. Imagine having two or three kids all close in age with different needs. For me, the answer to the problems seem so simple. But I also understand it is a system within a system. Side note, this book has guided my approach to thinking about the solutions to this problem. This book inspired me to persist with my mothers work because I understand that housing and employment are other systems that are embedded within education.

I digress. But I wonder, how much of this culturally responsive teaching is intentional? How much is just misguided? How much is self-serving.

I ask this question because during one of my classes, my professors played a video of an all black math class. The students and the teachers had southern accents. One of the individuals at my table blurted out, “I know this is going to sound condescending, but I am trying to figure out where they are from?” So if you know something you are about to say has the potential to be offensive, why would you say it?