Module 3: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Over the past twenty-five years, scholarship on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) has served to spark new questions in teacher education and teacher practice about the nature of pedagogy, foremost, and primarily how might teacher practices change learning experiences for children of color and African American children, specifically. Since the 1990s, CRP continues to shape and challenge discussions of teaching and learning including school learning environments, planning, and assessment (Harding-DeKam, 2014; Aguirre & Zavala, 2013). However, the application of CRP has not always included all of its components (Ladson-Billings, 2017; Gay, 2013; Sleeter, 2012) and in some cases, erasure of the sociocultural and sociopolitical dimensionality of what it means to respond to the hegemony of education for children of color. There are discourses related to CRP that are a part of the community of language related to centering the identities, needs, and power of students who have been systematically failed by educational institutions. These discourses include terms like cultural competence, culturally responsiveness, culturally congruent, and recently, culturally sustaining pedagogies (hereafter CSP), which comprehensively challenge us to think about how we situate culture in schools as understanding how students live and think.