Eileen Hernon
Culturally Responsive Teaching
Teachers have a responsibility to make school welcoming and inclusive for all students. This means creating a space where students can celebrate their backgrounds, meaningfully engage and connect with academic material, and feel empowered to challenge discrimination and inequity. Additionally, culturally responsive teaching requires educators to expand students' worldviews by exposing them to cultures and identities they otherwise wouldn't engage with.
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Below are some examples of culturally responsive teaching I used during my student-teaching experience. The school where I interned served a predominantly white, middle-class student population. Therefore, many of my students do not think about race, culture, or privilege regularly. Throughout my experience, I used read-alouds to engage them in age-appropriate conversations about prejudice, systems of oppression, and social justice.
Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney paint a grim but accurate picture of slavery in Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman. Many of my students had never heard of Harriet Tubman or the Underground Railroad before we read this book, and I felt it was important to give them an introduction to the ugly history of American slavery in the safety of our classroom. My students felt comfortable asking questions about slavery, expressed sadness and outrage at the injustices experienced by African American slaves, and participated in a discussion about how we should treat people fairly and respectfully. When I have my own classroom, I plan to teach about empowering historical figures of different races, genders, religions and ethnicities, because I think the best way to combat and prevent prejudice is by exposing students to backgrounds different from their own.
Those Shoes tells the story of a boy from a low-income family who desperately wants a pair of trendy, expensive new shoes. Young students aren't often exposed to stories about financial instability. In fact, most children's books are about royal families or wealthy superheroes, and even realistic fiction books never mention socioeconomic status. Such topics are "off limits" for children. However, I believe it's important that students hear stories about low-income families. It instills empathy in children who come from financially comfortable homes, and it gives children from low-income families literary connections.