Learning Experience: Blogpost4

Part 1

1. Following the during readings main topic of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, my LC group chose to emphasize the three key concepts of this way of teaching. Academic success, cultural competency, and critical consciousness are the foundations of being an educator that is “culturally relevant”. The quote by Gloria Ladson-Billings about the need for educators to “insert education into culture rather than culture into education” is what we focused on throughout the learning experience. It’s so important for educators to base their learning around who they’re teaching as opposed to what they’re teaching. Each student is different and needs to be culturally understood in order for the most effective learning environment to be created.
2. The learning goals implemented for our learning experience were to become familiar with the factors that make up a culture and how to incorporate culture into your classroom, to develop an understanding of what it means to teach with a culturally relevant pedagogy, and to recognize the importance of forming meaningful connections with students of all cultural backgrounds.
3. My interpretation of having a culturally relevant pedagogy is rooted in having a relationship with your students. The first step towards having a relationship with your students is getting to know each individual- a large contributor to this is their cultural background. For this reason, the activity I came up with was to have each student create a “culture web”. On this web, they can include things like, where they’re from, their ethnicity/nationality, what language(s) they speak, what music they like, what foods they eat, etc. I think this was a great activity that we can all use in our future classrooms to get to know our students and for them to get to know their teachers better!

Part 2 | Self-Reflection

1. I’ve learned so much about culturally relevant pedagogy, many of the topics we discussed about cultural competency, and critical consciousness are so much easier said than done. Ladson-Billings calls us teachers to not shy away from conducting our own research about our practice, this work is designed to challenge us to reconsider what we mean by “good teaching” and to challenge those that suggest it cannot be available to all children.
2. This topic matters to me because all students deserve to excel at all that they do in the classroom and beyond. And without culturally relevant pedagogy, some students can fall behind and become disinterested in education where their culture is not seen.
3. My contributions to this lesson were that I created the learning objectives and themes that we would be focusing on in our learning experience. I found a YouTube video to show the class which was a great introduction to the lesson. I talked about cultural synchronization and came up with an engaging activity for the class which allowed us to get to know our peers better and understand each person’s cultural background.
4. I was responsible for discussing one of the three pillars of culturally relevant pedagogy, which was cultural synchronization. I was responsible for finding quotes from the article to support my explanations, as well as coming up with a fun activity for the class to participate in.
5. Google Slides Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GxJAoJoZV6e0iv8WSdGBpDyoUh7GkfM-tglBBUsk1-4/edit#slide=id.g29abd27c8a0_2_62
6. During Reading Link: Ladson-Billings, G. (2016/1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. In E. Blair & Y. Medina (Eds.), The social foundations reader: Critical essays on teaching, learning and leading in the 21st century (pp. 285-292). New York, NY: Peter Lang.