What is Culturally Responsive Teaching? (Blog Post 2)

Genius hour question: How can mathematics be used to teach cultural responsiveness?


Hello Everyone,

This post will discuss what culturally responsive teaching is and what it may look like. 

Firstly, being culturally responsive means that you are able to "understand cultural differences, recognize potential biases, and look beyond your own cultural contexts" (Cultural responsiveness, 2023). This is what we want to teach our students. The goal of this entire genius hour assignment is to explore how Mathematics, a subject characterized as numeric, rigorous, and structured, can be used to teach cultural responsiveness to students.

Culturally Responsive Teaching is "a pedagogy that uses students' customs, characteristics, experiences, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction" (Will & Najarro, 2022). This means knowing the diversity of your class, representing a wide range of cultures through images and class material, using multicultural instructional approaches, and understanding various cultural backgrounds and their values/traditions/contributions. Be mindful that culturally responsive teaching is more than just having students of color see themselves in images, it is about changing your way of instruction so that it does not unintentionally contain bias. 

Ultimately, culturally responsive teaching will help students to develop their cultural competence and critical consciousness. It will even help to further students' intellectual abilities, problem solving abilities, and appreciations of other cultures. 



Reference:

Cultural responsiveness. (2023). Child Welfare Information Gateway. Retrieved from https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/cultural/#:~:text=Being%20culturally%20responsive%20requires%20having,are%20different%20from%20one's%20own.

Will, M., & Najarro, I. (2022). What is culturally responsive teaching? Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/culturally-responsive-teaching-culturally-responsive-pedagogy/2022/04#:~:text=culturally%20responsive%20teaching%3A%20a%20pedagogy,as%20belonging%20in%20academic%20spaces. 


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