Culturally Responsive Teaching and Religious Literacy
Erin Reid
(DRAFT version — this resource was originally created for graduate students and is in the process of being updated for faculty)
This chapter examines the following:
Culturally responsive teaching
Occupying a liminal space between being a professor with full control over curricular and pedagogical choices in the classroom and being a student who is on the receiving end of those choices, GTAs have a unique position and a unique set of needs when it comes to responding to these issues. This chapter seeks to clarify conceptual understandings related to teaching in a culturally responsive manner, but aims to also provide strategies tailored to the GTA’s unique position.
What is culturally responsive teaching and why it is important
The call for culturally responsive pedagogy or teaching is not new, with scholars such as Ladson-Billings (1994) and Gay (2010) urging educators to consider cultural diversity among their students for decades. Culturally relevant or responsive teaching is important because it aims to educate students “intellectually, emotionally and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills and attributes” (Ladson-Billings, p.17). Culturally responsive teaching is important because without this approach there is a danger that those educators in higher education, including GTAs, who are a part of the privileged dominant population (still largely white middle class), will unwittingly perpetuate structures that marginalize diverse students through cultural insensitivity.
Watch celebrated author, Ngozi Adichie discuss “The danger of a single story”:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk reminds us of how, regardless of our background, we all may fall into the dangerous habit of understanding a culture through only one lens or story. Given the important role of educators on their students, and given the increasing cultural diversity present in Canadian university classrooms today, it seems crucial that as GTAs, we reflect on our own level of cultural (in)sensitivity.
Cultural Insenstivity
As Bennet (1996) has outlined, this cultural insensitivity can be categorized in six stages:
- Denial: Does not recognize cultural differences
- Defense: Recognizes some differences, but sees them as negative
- Minimization: Unaware of projection of own cultural values; sees own values as superior
- Acceptance: Shifts perspectives to understand that the same “ordinary” behavior can have different meanings in different cultures
- Adaptation: Can evaluate other’s behavior from their frame of reference and can adapt behavior to fit the norms of a different culture
- Integration: Can shift frame of reference and also deal with resulting identity issues
Reflection:
- Can you think of times when you have been at earlier stages of cultural sensitivity to a culture that is/was not part of the dominant culture?
- Can you think of times when you witnessed or experienced cultural insensitivity?
- Can you think of something that happened that allowed you to become aware of this insensitivity?
- How might you respond if you were to recognize cultural insensitivity happening in your classroom?
Strategies for becoming a more culturally responsive educator
There are many ways to become more culturally responsive and bring more equity into your classroom, as will be explored in subsequent chapters of this book. Here, we will look at two examples from scholars about strategies they use, A) Paul Gorski’s Ground rules and B) Kimberely Tanner’s 21 Strategies.
A. Setting ground rules
Educator Paul Gorski has noted how “Ground rules should be developed and adapted for every unique context. Appropriate ground rules may depend partially on age, region, and other contextual factors. The following list of common ground rules from equity, diversity, and social justice related classes and workshops should serve only as a starting point for your process of creating a similar list suitable to your own situation”:
- Listen actively — respect others when they are talking.
- Speak from your own experience instead of generalizing (“I” instead of “they,” “we,” and “you”).
- Do not be afraid to respectfully challenge one another by asking questions, but refrain from personal attacks — focus on ideas.
- Participate to the fullest of your ability — community growth depends on the inclusion of every individual voice.
- Instead of invalidating somebody else’s story with your own spin on her or his experience, share your own story and experience.
- The goal is not to agree — it is to gain a deeper understanding.
- Be conscious of body language and nonverbal responses — they can be as disrespectful as words.
–To deepen your learning, go to Paul Gorski’s website.
B. Twenty-One Teaching Strategies
Kimberly Tanner shared this checklist of strategies she uses to promote student engagement in her biology class. Use this as a self-assessment tool.
Self-assessment of equitable teaching strategies
| Giving students opportunities to think and talk about biology |
| _________ 1. Wait time |
| _________ 2. Allow students time to write |
| _________ 3. Think–pair–share |
| _________ 4. Do not try to do too much |
| Encouraging, demanding, and actively managing the participation of all students |
| _________ 5. Hand raising |
| _________ 6. Multiple hands, multiple voices |
| _________ 7. Random calling using popsicle sticks/index cards |
| _________ 8. Assign reporters for small groups |
| _________ 9. Whip (around) |
| _________ 10. Monitor student participation |
| Building an inclusive and fair biology classroom community for all students |
| _________ 11. Learn or have access to students’ names |
| _________ 12. Integrate culturally diverse and relevant examples |
| _________ 13. Work in stations or small groups |
| _________ 14. Use varied active-learning strategies |
| _________ 15. Be explicit about promoting access and equity for all students |
| Monitoring (your own and students’) behavior to cultivate divergent biological thinking |
| _________ 16. Ask open-ended questions |
| _________ 17. Do not judge responses |
| _________ 18. Use praise with caution |
| _________ 19. Establish classroom community and norms |
| Teaching all of the students in your biology classroom |
| _________ 20. Teach them from the moment they arrive |
| _________ 21. Collect assessment evidence from every student, every class |
| Other equitable teaching strategies I use … |
Equitable and Culturally Responsive Strategies Activity
- Read through Gorski’s guidelines and Tanner’s checklist above.
- Reflect on the following questions:
- Which of these strategies do you find the most useful in becoming a more culturally relevant teacher and why?
- Which of these strategies do you find the least useful and why? Another way to think about this is which of these strategies seems problematic to you, or unrelated to being a more equitable and culturally responsive educator?
- Which of these strategies will you/have you tried in your classes? Can you give an example of how you will use (or how you have used in the past) this strategy and what challenges you predict may occur?
- Post your response to one of the these questions here on Moodle.
To learn more about culturally responsive or relevant pedagogy, check out Inclusion Canada’s resource here.
Religious literacy
For decades, educational theorists have been calling for a culturally relevant pedagogy (Delpit, 1995; Banks, 2006; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2014; Nieto, 1994, 2017) that encourages teacher education programs to consider these intersections, but until recently, these calls generally neglected to include religious and/or spiritual identity as an aspect of diversity (White, 2009; Subedi, 2006). Given increasing religious diversity in Canadian higher education institutions, this lack of attention to equipping educators for religious and spiritual diversity in their classrooms is problematic for multiple reasons, including the potential to harm students through a failure to recognize an intrinsic part of their identities (Patrick, 2015; Guo, 2015).
Religious literacy is a kind of cultural competency that specifically focuses on religious or spiritual aspects of a person or community’s identity. Harvard Divinity scholar, Diane Moore has defined a person who is religiously literate as possessing:
1) a basic understanding of the history, central texts (where applicable), beliefs, practices and contemporary manifestations of several of the world’s religious traditions as they arose out of and continue to be shaped by particular social, historical and cultural contexts; and
2) the ability to discern and explore the religious dimensions of political, social and cultural expressions across time and place. has an awareness of both the basics of diverse religious beliefs and practices, but also of how religion influences and intersects with other aspects of our society, including social, political, economic, and historical realms.
Certainly, there are those who argue that religion or spirituality is something that should be relegated to the private sphere and has no place in a secular university. Indeed, you may ask, “Why think about religious literacy? Why isn’t cultural competency good enough?” However, as multicultural theorists have argued for decades, students bring their whole selves into the classroom. When we completely ignore or are ignorant of a part of someone’s identity that is at the core of who they are, not only do we risk creating the harm of misreocgnition (Taylor, 1992), but we also miss an opportunity to understand our students better.
To learn more about religious literacy, watch this two-minute video from Harvard University:
Extend your learning through these resources:
References:
- Bennett, C. (1995). Comprehensive multicultural Education: Theory and Practice (3rd ed.). Massachusetts: Allen & Bacon.
- Gay, G. (2000).Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
- Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
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Tanner, K. (2013). Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity, CBE—Life Sciences Education, 12:3, 322-331.
