Culturally Responsive Teaching Essay

Every person has a culture. From birth, we are socialized into a cultural group by our parents, families, and communities, but over time our culture changes as a result of other influences like education, income, geographic location, and peers. The importance of that is that culture affects how we think, how we communicate, how we interpret the world, how we problem solve, and how we make decisions. It is the central component of both teaching and learning. Because of this, I believe that educators need to view teaching and learning as cultural acts. Many educators who practice culturally responsive teaching do so because they have a strong sense of their own culture. They understand cultural differences, they value cultural groups, and they avoid privileging one group over another. Educators must utilize teaching methods which reflect the linguistic and cultural …show more content…
That understanding can help educators to avoid labeling behavior as inappropriate, when in reality may be deemed as appropriate in the students culture. The teacher may need to teach the student a new way of behaving, but they can do that without communicating to the student that their way is better than the way things are done in the child’s own home or community. What culturally responsive teaching really stresses is the ability to provide opportunities for students to understand that different cultures have different expectations and practices for a student’s behavior and that certain situation may elicit a behavior that is different than the one they are normally used to seeing. The ability for students to adapt their behavior to the context of a situation is going to be critical to their academic and social success both in their personal and professional