Breaking From Tradition: Notes From a Non-Traditional Teacher on Building Cultural Competence

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

Albert Einstein

Despite our best intentions, our American education system remains highly traditional.  Access to a high-quality education is still reserved for students with high amounts of privilege, standardization continues to coerce diverse students into conformity, and educators, who are also products of this system, are perpetually confused as to how to address the changing needs in our classrooms with ever-dwindling budgets and stressful working conditions.

Popular rhetoric regarding our public system leads us to believe that it is failing.  Our students are failing, our teachers are failing, and the politicians who construct the budgets and create the legislation that dictates our service delivery are failing.

But we are not failing.  Within our school system I have discovered many relentless, visionary educators who continue to adjust their practices, develop their professional knowledge, and who change students' lives in positive, meaningful ways forever.  These people make it possible for students to succeed. 

What is it about these people that makes them so effective?  How do they do it?  

In short:  they learned to develop their talents in cultural-responsiveness and they are courageous in their endeavors to break from traditional teaching, paving new pathways for a new generation of learners.

So what does it take to be a culturally-responsive educator?  

The following list of qualities I have observed in culturally-responsive educators is by no means exhaustive, but for those who are interested in learning more about how to develop your own talents in cultural-responsiveness, it may be a good start.

Education/Background

Culturally-responsive educators often have unique educational or life experiences that have helped them develop a global awareness of the education system, how education works in our own nation and other places, and why there is diversity in the expectations their students' families bring to the classroom regarding education.

To learn more:  

Don't be afraid to take that Art History or Chican@ Studies minor in addition to your traditional teacher preparation courses.  Take advantage of that study abroad opportunity or teacher summer professional development experience in another place.  Learn another language or spend some time in the Peace Corps. Volunteer at the local homeless shelter or food pantry.  If none of these experiences are possible for you, read books or watch documentaries about people and places all over the world.  The goal is for you to learn everything you can and develop an appreciation for the experiences of people who come from backgrounds different from your own.

Life Experience

Culturally-responsive educators often spend significant amounts of time traveling and developing friendships with people from diverse backgrounds.  This helps them see the world, and their students, through the complex realities of our society, making adjustments to their approach to situations where necessary.

To learn more:

Travel, travel, travel!  And when you travel, don't just do the "touristy" thing.  Find out where the locals go, what they like to do for fun, and go do it.  Visit local museums, afterward checking out their websites for any possible free curricular materials they offer for you to bring back to your classroom.  Check out local music venues, social gathering sites, and local shops and restaurants.  The goal is for you to meet new people and hear about their experiences.

Professional Knowledge and Skills

Culturally-responsive educators often stay up-to-date with the latest news about education.  They are critically aware of the politics, pedagogy, and practices of school systems.  This helps them understand the bigger picture of the system within which they work, providing them the tools they need to diversify their practices and advocate for their students.

To learn more:

Attend professional development seminars and engage in professional conversations routinely about education.  Find out what other people are doing in their classrooms, what kinds of opportunities they are accessing outside of their classrooms, and how they are updating their instructional practices or curricular units. Develop a collaborative culture in your building and extend it to the wider community.  The goal is for you to network with colleagues so that you can continue enhancing your curriculum and learning new strategies for meeting the needs of diverse learners.

Conscience/Awareness

The most effective skill I have observed in culturally-responsive educators is their keen awareness that they will never know all there is to know about education or about learners...or about anything at all for that matter!  Effective culturally-responsive educators are always learning, trying new things, reflecting on the outcomes, and redesigning in response to said outcomes.  Culturally-responsive educators essentially see life as one giant learning experience. Because of this, they are open to new ideas and are willing to take professional risks based on their experience.  They are brave, open, and honest, but most of all they are humble.  They know that, as educators, they have a great responsibility to encourage all students to become the best they can be.  

Educators are in a precarious situation.  Our positions allow us the ability to build students' confidence or crush the students' dreams. We can guide students toward a love of learning or we can discourage them from walking through our doors.  We can teach students to become culturally-competent, themselves, or we can drive wedges between them.  

Ultimately, we owe it to our students to develop our cultural-responsiveness.  We need to learn how to meet the needs of our diverse learners.  And we need to learn how to be innovative while the system around us continues to be traditional.  If we are going to change the traditional outcome for our students, we must be courageous and non-traditional.  We must develop new forms of mind and collaborate to break from tradition to fix the lingering problems in our school system and to help all of our students achieve greatness in their lives and for future generations.  The change begins with us.

  

Portraits of Latino Achievement: Latino Contributions to American History and Society

What historic challenges have Latinos in the United States faced, and how have they responded to those challenges?

This question guides our biographical writing unit in 7^th grade Spanish Language Arts.  Building on concepts learned in our previous narrative writing unit, about the history of Latino immigrants to the United States and their influences on popular culture, students investigate the lives of Latino-American leaders and their historic contributions to American society.  They also reflect on their own contributions and future career goals, as Latino youth in America, who are often faced with unique challenges through which they have to persevere.  Modeled after the Smithsonian exhibit OJOS:  Our Journeys, Our Stories, Portraits of Latino Achievement, this unit is as much about building students’ understanding of how Latinos have persevered to shape American social and political history as it is about building students’ visions for how they, too, can have a positive impact in our society.

The literacy portion of the unit is anchored on biographical writing in its multiple forms.  Students gather biographical information about a wide variety of famous Latinos in the U.S. as presented in several different formats.  The traditional biographies are found on the OJOS site, the American Sabor site, and on a site called biografiasyvidas.com.  They are also presented in children’s literature, videos, interviews, poetry, and told through the music of corridos.  Students practice writing their own biographies about an influential Latino.   They also review the many ways in which information can be presented, which will later serve to help them decide how to present a subsequent social issues campaign.

The unit also relies heavily on social studies topics in the form of analyzing the Latinos’ historic struggles for civil rights in the United States and their accomplishments. 

Students investigate the struggle for workers’ rights, learning about influential Latinos such as César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Luis Valdez, Juan Barco, and Francisco Jiménez, all of whom have roots in migrant farm work. 

They also investigate the struggle for students’ rights, learning about the challenges faced by Latino students—lowered expectations, tracking, racism, and English-only policies—and how the students organized to advocate for their learning.  These stories are told through investigations of the lives of Latinos such as Sal Castro, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, Reyes Lopez Tijerina, and Paula Crisostomo, all of whom have connections to bilingual education activism or politics. 

Finally, students learn about the history of Latino immigration to the United States, comparing and contrasting the experiences of their family (sometimes two and three generations back) with those of other immigrant groups.  We analyze the poem “The New Colossus” (in both English and Spanish), learn about Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and discuss how the country from which a Latino immigrant comes influences his/her experience in the U.S.  For example, how does being a Latino immigrant from Cuba, who is considered a political exile, compare with a Latino immigrant from México, who came here as a result of a guest worker program?  How does being a Latino from Puerto Rico, which is a commonwealth of the United States, compare with a Latino immigrant from the Dominican Republic?

Ultimately, the students will use this historical understanding of the diversity of the Latino experience in the United States to identify an area of research for their next quarter’s argumentative writing unit.  They will take a position related to a topic (workers’ rights, education, or immigration), research it, write an argumentative essay, and use it to create an action campaign.  This historical/biographical unit provides the perfect background knowledge for this type of analysis.

American Sabor: Latino Contributions to American Popular Culture

Finding high quality bilingual teaching materials is a challenging task.  Thanks to a partnership between the Smithsonian Museum, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and the University of Washington, this was made a little easier for my teaching team and me as we used some of their materials to design a robust first quarter unit about Latino contributions to the American cultural landscape.  Although we delivered the instruction completely in Spanish, as part of our Spanish Language Arts program, the materials are also available in English, and, therefore, could work in any classroom.

American Sabor is an online and traveling exhibit that highlights Latino contributions to American culture through music.  It is organized into five distinct regions:  San Antonio, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and New York City, each with its own cultural influences, history, and music style.  The history of migration and Latino settlement, as well as political developments in the United States, has served to give each community its own unique flavor.  Much of the exhibit resources are found online at americansabor.org, including a running jukebox, musical clips, interactive maps of the cities, background readings, artist interviews, and various classroom activities that teach students about the diversity of Latinos in the United States and the myriad of influences Latinos have had on American popular culture.

Enhancing the materials found on this website with selected readings from literary works by Latina authors, Sandra Cisneros and Alma Flor Ada (both available in English or Spanish), I used the following framework to build an integrated Spanish literacy and culture unit:  

Each week, students would study a different city, rotating through thematic stations to develop a comprehensive understanding about how Latinos have contributed to popular culture in each area. They listened to Latino-influenced music from the region and heard interviews with artists from each place.  They read and analyzed vignettes from the Cisneros and Ada books, with attention to Common Core literacy standards, and they planned drafts of their own personal narratives connected to a theme drawn from one of their books, also aligned to Common Core writing standards. 

As the final product of the unit, students developed one of their drafts into a full personal narrative that demonstrated an element of their culture as Latinos living in Madison (We called it “Madison Sabor”).  We then turned these stories into cartoneras, which brought another element of artistic expression to the literacy unit.

Throughout the rest of the year, the students were empowered with this foundational knowledge of the diversity of Latinos in the U.S. as they built a more complex understanding of the historic experience of struggle and achievement of people from various Latin American countries in the United States.  They were also able to make meaningful connections to their learning in a fun and unique way.  As an added bonus, we spent the quarter listening to a lot of great music!

The Complexities of Complexion: Race, Heritage, and Culturally Responsive Teaching

By outward appearance, I look white.  My skin tone is fair, my eyes are hazel, and my hair is dark blonde. By all accounts, I display the Norwegian-American traits from my dad's side of my family.

My mom's Mexican-American side of my family shows through in my Spanish language skills, my affinity for Mexican literature and artwork, travel throughout Mexico, and investigating all there is to learn about the history of Mexico and the complex political relationship that exists between our two countries.  It is the reason why I am a bilingual educator today.

In a nation so fixated on defining ourselves based on complexion and appearance, I have struggled my whole life to figure out where I fit in. What do you do when the complexion with which you were born does not reflect your culture or heritage? When people are quick to identify the privileges associated with being born with a light complexion, how do you convince them of the pressure associated with it? How does one explain the juxtaposition between being seen as a "white" person but not seeing oneself that way?

To me, complexion is incredibly complex.

My complexion has provided me the privilege of being praised for my bilingualism:  "You speak Spanish so well! Where did you learn it?"  But it has pressured me to explain myself to everyone I meet:  "Well, I am white, but I grew up mainly with my mom's Mexican side of the family, so I heard Spanish growing up, and that's what made me want to learn it formally."  

My complexion has provided me the privilege of observing the deep-seeded racism so evident in our culture, without being an actual recipient of it.  For example, when I was younger, I attended a friend's family gathering where someone thought it would be funny to scrawl "Mexi-" in front of the "Cans Only" sign posted over the recycle bin. Knowing they didn't see me as Mexican, I was pressured to choose between suffering in a silent rage at their ignorance or standing up and risking rejection. 

My complexion has provided me the privilege of having an educational experience where the standard lessons about history, literature, and cultural expression all involved people who looked like me. Wondering why I never learned about the brown, Spanish-speaking people who helped build this country, those who wrote beautiful literature and shaped our nation's culture, I was pressured to choose between blindly accepting the notion that only white people had academic value, or to seek out counter versions of history told from the perspectives of the oppressed.  

Reconciling the duality of seeing myself as Mexican while my complexion tells a different story has been a lifetime struggle for me.  And, perhaps, there's a reason for that.  Perhaps I should not feel the need to choose one identity over the other.  Perhaps, I need to forge for myself a new identity, an identity that is more inclusive of ALL of who I am.  And, perhaps, just perhaps, it is this identity that has already given me the the perspective that I needed to become an effective culturally-responsive educator.

My goal is to demystify the concept of identity for my students.  My belief is that all humans are cultural beings with multiple identities, some of which are racial, linguistic, gender, regional, national, religious, and etc.  Some identities are fixed while others are fluid.  Some are imposed upon us, and some can be self-selected.  Contrary to traditional belief, we do not have to choose one identity over the other; instead, our various identities serve to make us the complex and unique people we are today.

Traditionally, our schools have operated under the assumption that identity is something that belongs at home or with friends.  In the rare instances when we engage in shallow discussion of culture, there is this assumption that only people with complexions darker than my own have a culture. This falsehood strips people like me of any cultural validity and further confuses us.

Our school system, with our standardized curriculum and expectations, is designed to ignore students' identities and cultural needs. We spend billions of dollars training students to conform to the cultural expectations of those who have political and economic control over our schools instead of guiding students toward developing innovative ways of solving our modern problems and planning for a sustainable future. Multicultural, multilingual competence is ignored in favor of standardization and a "one size fits all" business model. 

When educators help students develop both cultural-competence (the intellectual understanding of what culture is and how it is expressed) and cultural-fluidity (the capacity to appreciate and navigate interactions with diverse populations) they bring us one step closer to breaking down social barriers and alleviating the tensions associated with racial and cultural conflict.  We are also fulfilling our obligation to provide a meaningful, engaging educational experience for all of our students, which will result in higher achievement and a competent new generation.  

Educators who, regardless of complexion, are able to unpack their own complex identities, and use their experiences to bridge to the experiences of others make a powerful impact on their students. Having the courage to engage students in critical thinking around multiple points of view in history builds their understanding of our current experience as co-creators of the history of the future.  Routinely incorporating the words of literary figures of all complexions into our curriculum ensures that we can connect with all of our students.  Helping students understand and see themselves reflected in our connected history, look for patterns in behavior and circumstance, and problem solve around issues of power and privilege, is the foundation for culturally-responsive teaching.

Truly culturally-responsive teaching begins with our teaching students to appreciate themselves for who they are, in all of their complex identities.  In breaking down social barriers and undoing stereotypes, we can help students get to know each other as individuals and appreciate each other's qualities and experiences. Cultural responsiveness is predicated on a resistance to standard norms and privileged status.

Through a broad lens of cultural responsiveness, we can help create a more peaceful society whereby all of our identities are valued and all people feel responsible.  By being culturally responsive educators, we will not only alleviate the identity crises that plague ourselves and our young people, but we will also help our next generation of leaders, human service workers, entrepreneurs, and parents achieve greatness beyond our own, learning to work together to solve our complex problems in an ever-changing world.