Culturally Responsive Teaching

This guide is a collection text, video, and interactive resources intended to introduce faculty that are curious about Culturally Responsive Teaching to its core concepts and ideas. This guide is envisioned as a living document and repository that will grow and become more comprehensive over time. We encourage faculty to engage with this guide at their own pace while providing themselves the time and space to reflect on it contents, and how to most effectively integrate its contents into their curriculum.

Culturally Responsive Teaching uses the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively. It is building on what students already know and understanding how they learn to serve them best in academic settings (establishing a relationship with the material), At the same time, it is teachers building relationships with students so that students feel psychologically and physically safe while learning (belonging and inclusiveness) (Hammond 15)

3 Principles of Culturally Responsive Teaching

• Cultural Competence- using students’ values, beliefs, traditions, experiences, and perspectives to influence design and process
• Critical consciousness- naming inequities that are a part of the systems (historical political) that contribute to oppression
• Academic success- helping students SEE themselves as successful, then leading them to BE SUCCESSFUL

Goals of Culturally Responsive Teaching

• To address long-standing historic and systemic institutional barriers to student success
• To address the missed opportunity to educate ALL students (opportunity gap)
• To create a sense of belonging and inclusiveness that makes it possible for students to learn
• To help students learn
• To enlarge students' sense of who they can be

Equity pedagogy creates the type of educational experience students not only deserve but are entitled to. Also to have culturally responsive classrooms across the Curriculum is a part of FCC's Institutional Racial Equity Plan. Understanding students' helps instructors create belonging and success in the classroom and enables students feel respected and challenged.