Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Reflection: Putting Theory to Practice

Format

Individual Presentation

Presenters

Chasity D. Tompkins, University of GeorgiaFollow

First Presenter's Institution

University of Georgia

First Presenter’s Email Address

CTompki1@uga.edu

First Presenter's Brief Biography

Tompkins is a doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia. She is studying educational theory and practice with a dissertation topic on culturally responsive teaching practices in middle grades agricultural education programming.

Location

Session One Breakouts (Scarbrough 3)

Strand #1

Head: Academic Achievement & Leadership

Strand #2

Heart: Social & Emotional Skills

Relevance

1. This session focuses on academic achievement and leadership of teachers and admin to close achievement gaps and promote learning for all youth through self-reflection and critical personal-analysis of culturally responsive teaching practices.
2. Once adults can self-reflect and critically personal-analyze, the information in this workshop can help foster social and emotional skills for all youth.

Brief Program Description

This session will introduce the Culturally Responsive Education Model (CREM) and its importance in educational spaces. The presenter will review the model and culturally responsive teaching theories that can be used in classrooms. Research on this model in middle school agricultural education programming will be used to guide the session. Participants should be prepared for self-reflection during the session.

Summary

For this session, the Culturally Responsive Education Model (CREM) will be used as the conceptual framework to guide self-reflection and critical personal-analysis (Manns, 2021). The CREM is different from other culturally responsive models in that it is not a step-by-step model but a lens to engage education and leadership in schools. Designed for teachers to want to enact major changes in content and curriculum, this wheel places self-reflection and culture of belonging at the center. Manns (2021) states, “when a person understands self, they can better understand a diversity of people – a person’s values and beliefs shape that person’s perceptions, defining the way they see the world” (p. 9).

The five spokes are based on Banks and Banks’ (1995) scholarship surrounding multicultural education and include, content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowering school culture. The outer circle reminds teachers and instructional leaders that culturally responsive teaching is community supported, student-centered, authentic and connected, and occurs anytime, anywhere (not just one day in the classroom).

The CREM was used in doctoral research to investigate school-based agricultural educators’ perspectives of diversity, equity, and inclusion as they related to their practices in the context of their involvement in classrooms and laboratories, SAE, and FFA programming during the 12-month contract year. Specifically, this study examined middle school-based agricultural educators’ perspectives about culturally responsive teaching practices in middle school programming. Additionally, this study sought to identify factors that influenced teacher perspectives of their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across contexts.

Evidence

The discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion in educational spaces is not a new one. During the 2018-2019 school year, Georgia public education served approximately 409,253 (23.8%) middle school students out of 1,717,887 students (Georgia Department of Education, 2019). Of the total number of public-school students, 38.9% were white, 36.6% were Black, 16.1% were Hispanic, 4.3% were Asian, and 4% identified as Other (Georgia Department of Education, 2019). While the United States has been referred to as a melting pot (Booth, 1998), some could argue that it is more like a salad bowl, allowing individuals to retain their own cultural identity within the larger society. English et al. (2014) believes that our society’s push toward a more inclusive educational program can positively impact agricultural education programming.

Culturally relevant teaching, an example of culturally responsive pedagogy, contains three domains for success in educational settings: “(a) students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order” (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 47). This student-centered approach to education gives space for students’ cultural identities while also ensuring that teachers understand and appreciate these identities in a beneficial manner for students.

Other scholars have used this work to develop new understandings within culturally responsive teaching using students’ reserves of knowledge of events and activities from their homes and communities to enforce culturally centered education (Moll and Gonzalez, 1994), cultural modeling for instruction that leverages knowledge of youth (Lee, 1995), and through sustaining pedagogies “to perpetuate and foster – to sustain – linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as sot of the democratic project of schooling” (Paris, 2012, p. 95). Historically Responsive Literacy as a model for schools and classrooms center beliefs and practices to students’ cultural identities with the identities of others within historical and current social times (Muhammad, 2020). These researchers add to the scholarship from Ladson-Billings efforts on culturally responsive pedagogy while bringing a unique perspective to the field of teaching and learning.

However, these culturally responsive pedagogies fail to include an additional perspective of consideration and contextual ideas and language (Banks & Banks, 1995). The dimensions of multicultural education used by Banks included content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, an equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure (1993). This work, along with research from other culturally responsive scholars, helped form the Culturally Responsive Education Model (CREM) (Manns, 2021). Used as the conceptual framework for this study, CREM centers culturally responsive pedagogy with self-reflection to support educators through their career with students.

Designed for teachers who want to enact major changes in content and curriculum, the wheel places self-reflection and culture of belonging at the center with five spokes containing Banks’ perspective of multicultural education (e.g., content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowering school culture). The outer circle of the wheel design situates culturally responsive pedagogy efforts in a space that is community supported, student-centered, authentic and connected, that occurs anytime, anywhere, not just for one day in the classroom.

For this study, educators’ experiences were collected via interviews to produce a rich narrative. Each narrative was taken into consideration as an individual and throughout the context of middle grades agricultural education. Stake (2006) believes, “The cases have their stories to tell, and some of them are included in the multicase report, but the official interest is in the collection of these cases or in the phenomenon exhibited in those cases” (p. vi). A multicase study method was chosen for this study because it allowed space for multiple perspectives in various school systems in a wide range of geographical locations. Direct observations were excluded from this study.

Learning Objective 1

…identify and describe the CREM model.

Learning Objective 2

…determine ways to apply CREM to their educational spaces.

Learning Objective 3

…critically self-reflect on their practices and create a plan of action to move forward.

Keyword Descriptors

culturally responsive teaching, self-reflection, CREM

Presentation Year

2023

Start Date

3-6-2023 10:15 AM

End Date

3-6-2023 11:30 AM

Recommended Citation

Tompkins, Chasity D., "Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Reflection: Putting Theory to Practice" (2023). National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference. 37.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/nyar_savannah/2023/2023/37