Chapter 7: Culturally Responsive Education for Indigenous Communities

This chapter argues that Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) is a basic human right most recently expressed in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that historically has been frequently denied to Indigenous peoples by colonial and settler regimes. They summarize extensive research from around the world supporting Indigenous CRE and put it forward as complementary to constructivist learning theory and an antidote to the myriad social and educational challenges faced by Indigenous youth. They agree with Sioux author Luther Standing Bear (1933/1978) declaration that young Indians needed to be “doubly educated” so that they learned “to appreciate both their traditional life and modern life” (p. 252). Reyhner and Singh discuss “cultural difference theory” (Demmert & Towner, 2003; Phuntsong, 1999) that posits one source of learning difficulties for minority students emanates from a cultural mismatch between students’ home and school cultures and stress the importance of teachers learning about the out of school lives of their students to minimize misunderstandings that can create tensions between teachers and students. They propose that all teachers need to be culturally sensitive in order to increase the chance for student success.