CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING PRACTICE AS IT RELATES TO TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES
Date
2020-05
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Abstract
As the ethnic and linguistic diversity of school populations continue to increase, it becomes essential for school systems to engage in culturally responsive teaching, which emphasizes the need for students’ culture to be at the forefront of their learning. Culturally responsive pedagogy takes into consideration student culture, teacher relationships, expectations, and curricula as elements contributing to educational attainment. The methodology of the study is a mixed methods explanatory study that used two data collection methods, a survey and interview. The data collection was completed in two phases. The first phase was a self-reporting Likert scale survey gathering quantitative and qualitative data. The next phase involved followup semi-structured interviews with a strategically selected subsample of participants. The
sample consisted of 119 teachers from varied age groups and experience levels, ranging from beginning to veteran teachers. Participants also came from various grade levels, primarily the elementary, middle and high school levels.
Participants defined Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) as the integration of students’ culture and strengths in their education, allowing them to make connections to what they are learning and to build on their knowledge. The findings suggest that to implement CRT, there should be increased use of instructional practices that encourage social justice, challenge the status quo, and provide different cultural perspectives that need to be applied. The findings also indicated a moderate positive correlation between teacher perception and
CRT practices. The barriers identified described participants' experiences related to their load of responsibilities and time constraints. The supports and resources identified were leadership, professional development, and coursework
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Keywords
mixed methods, social justice, culturally responsive teaching