6 Ways To Create A Culturally Responsive Classroom ▬ eSchool News

6 Ways To Create A Culturally Responsive Classroom

Culturally Relevant
Classroom

eSchoolNews: 11.30.2020 by Jose A Vianna

A culturally responsive classroom is an encouraging and nurturing place for diverse students with different backgrounds and experiences

The U.S. reached an important milestone several years ago—minority students now comprise the largest demographic group in our nation’s public schools. While there is great diversity within our student population, the majority of educators still do not share the same cultural experiences with the diverse students they serve.

However, many effective teachers have consistently been sensitive to and culturally aware of student backgrounds. These educators intuitively understand that the more inclusive their classroom is, the more engaged their students will be, and that engagement ultimately leads to achievement.

Culturally relevant teaching respects the traditional backgrounds of students as an asset in the classroom.

Here are six steps to help you get started:

1. Tap into culture: Learn about your students! This is the key to culturally responsive teaching.

2. Design visual diversity: Students should be able to identify themselves in the displayed images, bulletin boards, classwork, and books that support their learning.

3. Create a student-centered classroom: Students that are truly engaged take ownership of their own learning.

4. Pronounce names correctly: Making the effort to pronounce your students’ names correctly builds trust and honors students’ cultural heritage.

5. Set high expectations: Use technology to meet the various needs of students.

6. Embrace an asset-based mindset: Reflect on students’ individual strengths.  READ MORE ➤➤

Automatic Readability Checker

Based on 7 readability formulas:

Grade Level: 10

Reading Level: fairly difficult to read.

Reader's Age: 14-15 yrs. old

(Ninth to Tenth graders) 

Graphic Novel Text Sets and Social Justice Inquiry Projects ▬ ILA

Graphic Novel Text Sets and Social Justice Inquiry Projects

ILA: 7.17.2020 by Erik Jacobson

Teachers who are attentive to their students’ reading habits have picked up on the increasing popularity of graphic novels, and many teachers have introduced these texts into the classroom. However, those working with older learners, including adults, sometimes express trepidation about working with these types of texts because they are concerned that these books might not be challenging or edifying enough. They are still often dismissed as “just comics.” Another concern of teachers is knowing what graphic novels to select for learners to work with. If teachers are not comic book or graphic novel readers themselves, they can be unsure about where to start. 

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1 Graphic Novels as a Teaching Tool in Adult Literacy

Over the last few decades, graphic novels have begun to take their place in K–12 classrooms alongside more traditional texts. Now there is growing interest in ways that these texts can be used within the adult literacy context, too.

2 Graphic Novels as Part of Adults’ Self‐Directed Learning Projects

The very diversity of graphic novels means that teachers and students should work together to assess when a particular graphic novel might be a good fit. Graphic novels vary in tone, language, and style of art, so they may or may not appeal to a given adult literacy learner.

3 Text Sets and Social Justice Inquiry Projects

As an example, the following is a text set of three graphic novels (one is a three‐book series that is available as a set) that confront white supremacy in the United States. They vary in terms of time period, but read together, they raise questions about what the most productive ways to combat systemic racism are.

Nat Turner by Kyle Baker begins by portraying the violent enslavement of people in Africa, moves onto the deadly Middle Passage, and then shifts to the selling of enslaved people in the United States.

The March series (books 1–3) by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin focuses on Lewis's experiences in the Civil Rights movement.

The Life of Frederick Douglass: A Graphic Narrative of a Slave's Journey From Bondage to Freedom by David F. Walker.  READ MORE ➤➤

Automatic Readability Checker

Based on 7 readability formulas:

Grade Level: 13

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: 18-19 yrs. old

(college level entry)

Story & Pictures By: The Documentary You’ve Been Waiting For via SLJ

@CCBCwisc

Story & Pictures By: The Documentary You’ve Been Waiting For

SLJ: 11.03.2019 by Elizabeth Bird

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A new Golden Age of children’s literature is here. And it matters.

Emmy®-nominated Director Joanna Rudnick follows three contemporary children’s book authors and sheds a light on the artistry and industry in Story & Pictures By. (Watch O2:02)

“The stories that we read [children] are forming their worldview. They are the building blocks to how they make sense of the world and how they understand themselves. And the more diverse and expansive those stories are, the more diverse and expansive that worldview is going to be.” – Joanna Rudnick, Director

Director Joanna Rudnick is familiar with taking inspiration from her life and turning it into cinema. Her first film In the Family (PBS 2008) was a deeply personal exploration of living with an inherited risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Having survived breast cancer in her late 30s, coinciding with the birth of her two daughters, she threw herself into raising them and found that one of the most intimate experiences she had was reading children’s picture books at bedtime. This sparked a curiosity about the creators, history, and power of this often overlooked and underappreciated art form and became fodder for her current feature length film in production, Story & Pictures By.

The film explores the power of children’s picture books through the lens of three contemporary authors/illustrators: Mac Barnett, Christian Robinson, and Yuyi Morales. Together, they represent a new generation of storytellers who are working to challenge, transform, and expand the stories and experiences portrayed in children’s literature, marking a new Golden Age in the art form. From experimenting with gender identity to children visiting parents in prison—all creators, protagonists, and experiences are welcomed behind and in the pages of picture books.

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According to statistics from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), in the past 24 years, only 13% of children’s books featured multicultural storylines or characters. In 2002, 5% of protagonists were African American, 3% Asian American, 3% were Latinx, and 1% were American Indian. In 2018 these numbers slightly increased to 10% African American, 7% Asian, 5% Latinx and 1% American Indian. While these gains in diverse representations mark progress, we still have a long way to go. In a world where children of color continuously face increased levels of childhood trauma, it is incumbent upon children’s literature to represent their perspectives and experiences.  READ MORE >>