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Informal Notes on the Presentation by Gloria-Ladson Billings:

Cultural Diversity and Pedagogy, October 11, 2004

Virginia Richardson

University of Michigan

It is so exciting that culturally relevant pedagogy has entered mainstream thinking about teaching and teacher education. These words, or words that are similar in meaning, have become a part of most current teacher education text books, and the names of Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Peter Murrell, and William Tate are included in the discussions of such teaching. My comments, today, will relate specifically to culturally relevant pedagogy within teacher education.

Now that the term ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ has entered the teacher education textbooks through research conducted by those interested and indeed passionate about these issues, my life as a teacher educator has become a little easier. For a number of years, I included writings on cultural relevant pedagogy in course packs, but now I don’t need to. Further, now that the construct is a part of the mainstream literature, it has legitimacy in the eyes of the students that allows it to enter into their vocabulary much more easily. However, as an aside, teacher education students’ use of such a term in their speaking and writing does not mean that they have internalized it. It is important to dig a little more deeply to determine whether ‘studenting’ (Fenstermacher, 1986) has lead to the students figuring out what terms to use in order to do well in the class, or whether they have indeed come to understand and respect a particular concept. This is particularly difficult at an institution such as the University of Michigan where the students are very bright and ambitious.

There are always two questions that become a part of the conversation when new normative constructs concerning teaching enter the conversation. The first is “How is culturally responsive pedagogy different from standard conceptions of good teaching?” and the second question—usually asked by pre and inservice teachers--is “But what do I do with this?

The question related to good teaching is easier to answer than the second one, particularly these days. National conceptions of “good teaching” focus primarily on teachers’ content knowledge and student learning, with some consideration of appropriate (research-based and often scripted) method and curriculum (for example, No Child Left Behind Act, 2002). While there are usually statements made regarding multicultural education, they are brief, set aside as separate sections in the document, and not particularly helpful from the standpoint of the teacher. Culturally relevant pedagogy is a powerful concept that asks teachers to engage in a considerably expanded set of activities than those suggested in the national conceptions of good teaching. These additional activities include working to understand the nature of cultural learning, local cultural learning, planning and instructional activities based on this learning, and the development of different forms and content of classroom dialogue. Thus, much more is asked of teachers who use culturally relevant pedagogy than in current national conceptions of good teaching.

But the second question—“What do I DO with this”? --is more difficult to answer, and one that plagues us in teacher education when working with interesting and important theoretical constructs that do not (and should not given the nature of the construct) include specific prescriptions for practice. When I was working on these notes over the weekend, I talked a little about the concept with my son who is a musician in Oakland, CA and visiting for the weekend. He is not in education, but has been hanging around it for a long time. I talked about culturally relevant pedagogy as I usually do—as a construct that centers around cultural differences in classrooms, moral responses to them, and thoughts, in general, about how teachers should consider cultural differences. Hardly waiting until I had finished my explanation, he rushed to his important questions—important for the practitioner. “Does this mean you adopt a vernacular in the classroom? So, I mean, what are you supposed to do with this?”

When a teacher or teacher education student asks me questions related to: “But what do I DO in the classroom?”, I have a tendency to ask questions of them. For example: Having a sense of the classroom may help—e.g., what are the demographics of the classroom? What do you know about your students’ background? What do you know about the culture of your students—their parents, caregivers, community—what do they expect from you as their teacher?” But ultimately, we can’t say much, in the short run, beyond “Well perhaps you could. . .”, and suggest something for them to try.

Preservice teacher educators have three possible ways of working with the construct in class, each of which I use:

1. Readings, including original conceptual and research articles, as well as derivative text and practitioner articles, accompanied by dialogue, and various large and small group activities The derivative and practitioner articles often include ‘bullets’—the sort of Phi Delta Kappan short statements that come at the end of the article and summarize what you should do or think, each preceded by a bullet. All of us who engage in research on practice are pushed toward the bullets. In the textbook that we are using in my class called Teaching in Elementary School, Dick Arends (2004, pp. 75-76) has summarized Dreamkeepers (Ladson-Billings, 1994) in terms of how successful teachers work with African American Children in four bullets each accompanied by short paragraphs. (I want to point out, however, that he apologizes for trying to summarize full chapters in this way.) The bullets are “Seeing Color, seeing Culture”, Developing “We Are Family”, “Having Passion for Knowledge”, and “Focusing on Literacy and Numeracy”.
2. Case Studies. In an attempt to bridge the written analytic/descriptive work on constructs and teaching practice, teacher educators also use Case Studies—either written or video, or a combination of the two (see, for example, Lundberg, Levin & Harrington, 1999). For relatively new constructs such as culturally relevant pedagogy, it is felt that case studies are effective and useful for teacher education students and teachers. Thus, students should read and discuss case studies such as those in Dreamkeepers to develop a somewhat more authentic understanding of the construct that is possible in texts and articles.
3. Reflective activities are asked of students who are in practicum situations in the field, and are designed to help students bring together the formal constructs with activities and situations in real classrooms.

The reason that there are no definitive prescriptions for classroom action that are derived from culturally relevant pedagogy is that it implies is a relational activity, so well described by Lampert (2001). It has to do with the relations among the teacher and students, the students and students, and the curriculum. Guidelines may be given, and negative behaviors related to strong and agreed upon humanitarian values may be outlawed or cautioned against, but effective actions tied to relations between and among people are difficult to write rules about, and certainly difficult to mandate. And further, of course, the nature of teaching is remarkably context-specific, and classrooms are diverse in many different ways. As indicated in Ladson-Billings’ Dreamkeepers, and other works such as Williams’ (2003) study of two teachers with strong cultural missions, the teaching approaches of teachers who are identified as both effective and culturally relevant can vary dramatically. Thus, “good teaching” in the expanded sense requires the sense of agency on the part of teachers to craft and define their own cultural missions.

So what can we do? Well, first, the construct itself must enter the consciousness of the teachers and prospective teachers. That alone actually can make a difference; but if the construct it is quite new to the teachers, this can be a difficult and lengthy process as indicated in all of the studies on beliefs and changes in beliefs (Richardson & Placier, 2001). This change can begin to happen with the processes that I just mentioned—reading and dialogue about the construct, case studies-- either written and/or video-- and reflective thinking activities that include extensive dialogue with such processes as practical arguments. However, what is happening in these processes is that the teachers/students are being asked to think in very different ways about the students, learning and teaching.

But, also, I believe that continued research, analysis and political action must be brought to bear on the construct in order to provide clarification, more case studies for instruction, and to develop a better understand how students, themselves, are taking in and responding to the actions of a teacher who understands, values, and acts on the basis of a culturally relevant notion of the classroom. I am thinking of the work of a University of Michigan, School of Education Ph.D., Nicola Williams, whose work on culturally relevant pedagogy examined the actions and beliefs of two teachers who worked in two different schools who were both committed to a cultural mission. She also interviewed the students in some depth to see how they viewed such things as their teachers’ expectations, their relationships with the teachers, and whether there were differences among the students in terms of the particular schools they attended, culture (in one school the students were white and African-American), and gender. To give you a hint of the findings, there were no differences in the view of the teacher between the white and African-American students, some differences between the two schools (one of which was African-Centered) but substantial differences in terms of gender perceptions in both schools. I do feel that continuing work on the construct as it plays out in the classroom, and in the perceptions of the students is important work.

It is this continued clarification of the concept through research and analysis that will be helpful in teacher education classrooms. For example, I recently began to think about culturally relevant pedagogy within or in relation to Fenstermacher’s (2001) notions of the elements of teaching as Method, Style, and Manner. These three elements are meant to attend to the moral, epistemic and personal dimensions of teaching.

Method refers to acts of a teacher undertaken with the intention of bringing about a change in a learner or group of learners. Style refers to the conduct of the teacher that reflects his/her own personality. And Manner refers to those traits and dispositions of the teacher that reveal his or her character as a moral and intellectual being.

Now you can only pull these elements apart for a while, since, in action, we believe, the differences are transparent. However, I am finding that the manner lens is particularly helpful in viewing culturally relevant pedagogy as now thought and written about, particularly about its relational nature. That is, it can be seen as a set of values, of virtues, that helps to guide the relational interactions in classrooms. And while the equity missions that are valued by the teachers who participate in culturally relevant pedagogy are somewhat similar across teachers, the classroom interactions are played out in different ways because of variations in personal style and method.

In summary, I have been addressing how constructs such as culturally relevant pedagogy, that do not prescribe what teachers should be doing in the classroom, can be introduced in teacher education, and can ultimately work to improve practice. The most important activities on the part of the teacher educator are to introduce the construct into the consciousness of teachers and students of teaching, provide them with a more in-depth understanding such that they can craft their cultural missions within the local context of their classrooms, and help them examine their styles and methods in relation to their missions.

Most importantly, research and analytic work such as that by Ladson-Billings must continue to shed light on the concept, on how it is implemented in classrooms, and the effects on students. The results of such activities will not only be available to the teacher education students, but perhaps more importantly to the teacher educators. For it is teacher educators who craft the activities in their own classrooms to help students understand, internalize, and value the concept of culturally responsive teaching; and they, themselves must also consider the nature of culturally relevant pedagogy in their own classrooms. I thank Gloria Ladson-Billings for being here and providing such wonderful and useful thoughts to all of us as we contemplate the improvement of practice that leads to a more equitable set of outcomes.

References

Arends, R. (2004) Learning to Teach (6^th Edition). Boston: McGraw Hill.

Fenstermacher, G. D. (1986). Philosophy of research on teaching: Three aspects. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 37-49) [Third Edition]. New York: Macmillan.

Fenstermacher, G. D. (2001). On the concept of manner and its visibility in teaching practice. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 33(6), 639-653.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Lampert, M. (2001). Teaching problems and problems of teaching. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lundberg, M., Levin, B. & Harrington, H. (Eds.) (1999). Who learns from cases and how? The research base for teaching with cases. New Jersey: Erlbaum

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-110 (H.R.1), 115 Stat. 1425 (2002)

Richardson, V., & Placier, P. (2001). Teacher change. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 905-947) [Fourth Edition]. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Williams, K.N. (2003). “If you can’t stand any love and attention, don’t come here”: How students and teachers talk about life in classrooms centered on “cultural” teaching missions and practices. [Unpublished dissertation] Ann Arbor: School of Education, University of Michigan.