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.

A Virtual Field Trip to Analyze the Olmec Civilization

What if the history of African people in the Americas did not begin a few hundred years ago with their enslavement? 

What if, instead, it began thousands of years prior with their empowerment as great leaders and members of highly-advanced ancient civilizations? 

What if we have more in common with each other, sharing a deeper ancient history in this part of the world, than is traditionally taught?

And how would we ever know this, much less teach our children about it, if our textbooks fail to mention it?

My teaching teammate and I encountered this challenge a few years ago as we set out to design an integrated unit about the Maya people of Mesoamerica.  As we researched this civilization, we discovered that they weren’t the first advanced people in the region.  There was actually an older civilization that existed before they did.  This civilization, the Olmec civilization, was so influential that it is known as the Mother Culture of Mesoamerica. 

We searched for resources to teach our students about the Olmec, but they were sparse.  This led us to apply for, and be awarded, a grant to travel to México so we could research the Olmec and Maya and gather primary sources we could bring back to our classroom.

 

Based on our excursion, we created a virtual field trip to Veracruz, México, where our students would encounter and analyze artifacts left by the Olmec.  The unit begins with a video of us walking through the museum of La Venta.  We make it appear that we are trudging through the subtropical forests of eastern México and encountering a gigantic stone head (a classic Olmec artifact) at the end of our path.  We ask students to think like archaeologists and engage in collaborative discussions about the features of this artifact.  They generate a list of characteristics and begin to make conjectures and record guiding questions for the rest of the unit.

The facial features of these Olmec heads are unmistakably African and Asian.  This is fascinating to students, who have traditional worldviews of what they think Mexican people look like.  We take this opportunity to discuss the diversity of people living in México today, and to observe the diversity of our own classroom.  The Olmec heads help our students understand our common ancient history, and they begin to make cross-cultural, multi-racial connections.

Once we pique students’ interest in learning more about this mysterious civilization, we engage them in cooperative learning groups where they analyze the pictures we took of several Olmec artifacts found at La Venta and other museums in the region.  Again, they make observations, generate questions, and make conjectures about what we might be able to infer about the Olmec based on their artifacts. 

We then highlight specific Olmec symbols and their meanings, using materials from the de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and teach the students how to reanalyze the artifacts with the specific purpose of looking for these symbols.  They apply their understanding of iconography by designing their own “Olmec” artifact and writing an expository paragraph to explain the meaning behind their artifact.  We display the pictures of these artifacts in the classroom as part of a mock archaeological dig called the “Olmec Art-ifact” wall.

This investigation serves as a wonderful launch to a more thorough investigation of the Mayan civilization.  Equipped with background knowledge about how to think like archaeologists, our students are able to analyze Mayan artifacts and structures.   They also use their critical thinking skills to make conjectures about the rise and fall of the Mayan city-states.  Because there is a wealth of written materials and primary sources with which to teach about the Maya people, we are able to integrate social studies, language arts, math and science into this unit.

Beginning with an experiential investigation, based on a virtual field trip to this region, students are inspired to make new connections and to deepen their understanding of thousands of years of human history.  With their blend of various racial characteristics and their location in Mesoamerica, the Olmec are a fascinating way for students of all races and ethnicities to see themselves reflected in their learning.  The Olmec also taught me that when traditional textbooks do not provide the learning experiences that students will find compelling, it is up to us to find creative ways to design them. 

Common Core, Collaboration, and Cartoneras...Oh My!

It all started with a piece of cardboard.  

A while back, a co-worker of mine mentioned the cartonera movement as a way of engaging learners in my Spanish Language Arts classroom.  Always thinking it sounded like something I wanted to do as part of my instruction, I tucked it away until the right opportunity presented itself.  This past summer, while participating in a district-level realignment of our Spanish and English language arts curriculum to the Common Core State Standards, I discovered that the cartonera would be the perfect vehicle for integrating Spanish and English language arts with social studies and art to build bilingual language proficiency and family engagement for students in our school

The title of this unit, Cartoneras:  cuentos sobre la comida y la cultura (Cartoneras: Stories About Food and Culture), indicates what we studied for the first quarter.  Sixth grade students began the year learning about diversity and creating their own classroom community.  They were also studying narrative writing.  The cartonera project is exactly that on a larger scale.  Cartoneras are beautiful books made from recycled cardboard and distributed by publishing co-ops that began in Latin America and have spread to many places in the world.  The purpose of cartoneras is to build community, create art, and continue to publish literature at an affordable price for the public. Throughout the quarter, students would read and write various stories about culture, celebrations, and food.  Their finished product was to make their own cartonera to be displayed in our school.

To design this unit, the 6th grade English Language Arts teacher and I, the 6th grade Spanish Language Arts teacher, collaborated to discuss the goal of the unit.  Because SLA and ELA have the same language arts standards (Spanish Language Arts is a fifth core academic period for students in our bilingual program), we wanted to make sure that we co-planned our instruction so that students would not be subjected to the same lessons between our two classes.  We outlined the theme (culture and food), and chose two mentor texts (novels) that would support that theme.  The two texts we chose had copies in English and Spanish. They were also comprised of vignettes, short stories that could be taught in the time frame we were given. We agreed on which chapters of our mentor texts would be taught in Spanish and which would be taught in English.  We then decided that the purpose of working with these texts was twofold:  1.  to make connections to the cultural celebrations and food discussed in the vignettes, and 2.  to teach students how to analyze the parts of a story and then use that understanding to write their own narratives about a celebration or family cultural event that also involved food.  Everyone had to write a narrative in English, and the students in my class had to also write a different narrative in Spanish.  

In my Spanish Language Arts classroom, students spent the first three weeks working with oral storytelling in Spanish, while the English Language Arts teacher used children's books in English to identify the components of a narrative.  During the second three weeks, we expanded to use the chapters from the novels we had chosen as mentor texts.  In Spanish Language Arts, students read three different chapters in Spanish, analyzed them, and drafted three short stories about their own cultural events that were thematically-connected to the ones they read about.  In English Language Arts, students read different chapters in English, and did the same kind of writing.  For the final three weeks, students in each class chose two different drafts to finalize and publish--one story in English and one story in Spanish.  The students then created cartoneras in which to place their published stories.

The cartonera was an authentic purpose for students to present their writing in a creative way.  By blending art with this writing assignment, students were able to express themselves visually and linguistically. Their stories are also complete with a recipe for the food described in the event from their personal narrative, and we are planning to host a family potluck as the culminating event.  Families will be able to share their culture, build community, and take pride in their children's work, all at a collaborative event held at our school.  

Who could have guessed that a little piece of cardboard would become a unique way of showcasing students' talents and inviting families to our building?  

Changing the Perception of English Language Learners Through an ESL/Bilingual Skills Class

"Why am I in this class?  I know how to speak English!"
"ESL is for kids who don't know English!  I don't want to be in here!"
"How can I get out of this class?"

I was shocked to hear these comments from my students the first year I took a new position as an ESL "unified arts"/"exploratory" teacher in my middle school.  Our school is committed to full-inclusion, and for three years prior, I had been a social studies/language arts teacher whose main job was to teach these two content areas and adapt my instruction to build language proficiency for the ELL's that were on my team. Having built a positive rapport with students in the building, I took for-granted that students would totally accept a stand-alone class taught by me.

Students in my school all receive ESL and special education services through their core instruction.  Because we teach them that we all have different learning needs, students are often unaware of differentiation and curriculum supports their peers are receiving in class.  Generally, they are very supportive of each other's learning, and respect their needs.  Creating an ESL/bilingual skills class, to give them an extra hour of language instruction a day, rocked this full-inclusion boat as students, who were used to being educated together, began to be physically separated for certain instructional hours in the day.

To change the student perception in my school about the ESL/bilingual skills class, I had to create an environment where the students felt safe and respected so that they were able to learn.  This meant: addressing stereotypes associated with ELL's, explicitly teaching students about language proficiency and academic language at the middle school level, and empowering students to embrace their bilingual/multilingualism and to see themselves as fully-capable, high-achieving learners.

The most common stereotype associated with ELL's is that their English language proficiency is an indicator of their intellect.  In the worst case scenario, people believe that they cannot learn until they have mastered English (something that research shows takes seven to ten years!).  One of the first things students learn in my class is that there are many ways to show what they know and that language is just one of these ways.  I also teach them that, because of their unique positions as English Language Learners, some of whom have also lived in other countries or gone to school in different places, they are highly intelligent and have many interesting things to teach us. We talk about what school is like in other places around the world, and celebrate students who attend Saturday culture schools.  I look for opportunities to highlight students' knowledge about subjects that are unique, and constantly tell them how much I appreciate them for teaching me new things everyday.

In addition to teaching my ELL's that they are intelligent, I explain to them that my class is about giving them the academic language they need to express their intelligence in interesting ways.  We do a lot of work differentiating between academic and social language. Many of my students are well-versed in their social language, and this causes teachers to assume they understand everything that is happening in class.  Without structured academic language support, however, our ELL's miss deep concepts in core instruction and do not make progress in their language comprehension.  I am very clear with students that our class is a place for them to practice using and understanding academic language (or the "language of school").  I challenge them to use this language in their core instruction so that they are prepared for high school, where the language gets even more complicated.

One of the ways we build academic language comprehension is to help students see how their other languages actually help them develop academic English.  For speakers of romance languages, I encourage students to find cognates (words that sound similar and are spelled similarly, with the same meanings between languages).  When students are taught to see their bilingualism as an asset, they feel a sense of pride in themselves as learners and they are more willing to take on academic challenges.  We routinely talk about the long-term benefits of bilingualism:  the range of job opportunities, travel, friendship, and education that can be had because of being bilingual/multilingual.  This change in tone--from bilingualism as a deficit to an asset--recently resulted in a significant number of students self-selecting English 9 Honors, Hmong for Hmong Speakers, and Spanish for Spanish Speakers as they chose courses for high school.  In previous years, our Spanish speakers, presumably ashamed of their Spanish, chose to take French, if they took any language at all.  I am overjoyed to see that they are reclaiming the honor in their home language as well as challenging themselves with the English Honors course.

In conclusion, over the past three years, I have successfully built a program that has changed the way ELL students see themselves as learners.  They are empowered, know they are intelligent, see bilingualism as an asset, and are building the language comprehension they need to access higher level instruction.  The most recent comment I heard from a student about my class is that it's his favorite class of the day.  What an amazing positive change from the negativity I experienced three years ago!