For decades, researchers have found that teachers in public schools have undervalued the potential for academic success among students of color, setting low expectations for them and thinking of cultural differences as barriers rather than assets to learning.
In response, scholars developed teaching methods and practices—broadly known as asset-based pedagogies—that incorporate students’ cultural identities and lived experiences into the classroom as tools for effective instruction. The terms for these approaches to teaching vary, from culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy to the more foundational culturally relevant pedagogy. Though each term has its own components defined by different researchers over time, all these approaches to teaching center the knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities in classroom instruction. As a result, all students, and in particular students of color, are empowered to become lifelong learners and critical thinkers.
But as a growing number of states seek to pass legislation banning the teaching of the academic concept known as critical race theory in K-12 schools—as well as more broadly limiting classroom discussion on topics of race, gender, and sexuality—this work is caught in the fray. Some politicians have conflated culturally responsive teaching with separate academic concepts and initiatives, including diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. As a result, legislation gets written in ways that could stifle efforts toward equity in schools, such as policies that can help underserved students, researchers say.
This explainer unpacks what it means to be a culturally responsive teacher, how all these research terms are related, and where other academic concepts such as critical race theory tie in—or not.
Culturally responsive teaching means using students’ customs, characteristics, experience, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction.
The term was coined by researcher Geneva Gay in 2000, who wrote that “when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference for students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal, and are learned more easily and thoroughly.”
It’s the kind of teaching that helps students of color see themselves and their communities as belonging in schools and other academic spaces, leading to more engagement and success.
Culture refers to the customs, languages, values, beliefs, and achievements of a group of people. Students’ culture and lived experiences that influence how they understand and make sense of the world or themselves are an integral part of who they are as learners. As Emily Style, the former founding co-director of the National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), once wrote, “Half the curriculum walks in the door with the students.”
While more than half of public school students are students of color, most schools are organized around the mainstream culture of white Americans. The culture that many students experience at home and in their communities is not always represented at school—or is represented in a stereotypical way.
Also, 80 percent of teachers are white. Research has found that teachers are just as likely to have racial biases as non-teachers , and those biases tend to influence the expectations they have for their students and their ways of managing their classrooms. For example, past research has found that white teachers have lower expectations for Black students than they do for white students, and those can turn into “self-fulfilling prophecies” when students internalize them or when teachers change their approach to students as a result of their mindsets.
One study found that white teachers were more likely to praise a poorly written essay if they thought it was written by a student of color than if they thought the essay was by a white student. Teachers’ racial biases can also result in decreased access to advanced coursework and higher rates of suspensions .
Culturally responsive teaching stems from the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy, which was introduced by scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s. Ladson-Billings was tired of the commonly held narrative that Black children were deficient and deviant, and that there was something wrong with them. Instead, she wanted to find out what was right with Black children, their families, and their communities. To do so, she researched the practices of effective teachers of Black students.
For about two years, Ladson-Billings observed teachers who were identified by both principals and Black parents as being excellent. The teachers had different ways of teaching, but they all had high expectations for their students and fostered academic success. They also all valued and integrated themselves in the community from which their students came.
Ladson-Billings distilled the commonalities in those teachers’ beliefs and practices into the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy, which she defined as a model that “not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate.”
There are three components of culturally relevant pedagogy:
Gay’s research shows five essential components of culturally responsive teaching:
In short, no. While the academic framework of culturally responsive teaching and other asset-based pedagogies emerged from how to best support students of color, it evolved into a teaching approach that serves all students, regardless of their racial background.
Sharroky Hollie, the director of the nonprofit Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning, works with teachers to practice what he calls cultural and linguistic responsiveness. In his work, he talks about the rings of culture, meaning the various aspects of students’ identities that can impact how they interact with the world around them.
To Hollie, it’s not just about thinking of ways to validate and incorporate a student’s racial background into the classroom. It’s not about thinking of students in a one-dimensional, stereotypical way. Culturally responsive teachers must also consider the student’s gender, age, socio-economic status, whether they live in the suburbs or a rural area, and more.
“It’s not as simplistic as we’re trying to value our students of color,” he said. “We’re actually trying to value the rings of culture that they bring to our schools, regardless of their racial background.”
For instance, in predominately white school districts, there are white students who, due to where they live or their family’s socio-economic status, are underserved by their school district and could benefit from a culturally responsive approach to education, Hollie said.
Schools are still places where white norms are considered the default standard in the curricula, behavioral expectations, linguistic practices, and more. Culturally sustaining pedagogy says that students of color should not be expected to adhere to white middle-class norms, but their own cultural ways of being should be explored, honored, and nurtured by educators.
Django Paris, who coined the term in 2012, and co-author H. Samy Alim once told Education Week that culturally sustaining pedagogy “positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive, rather than subtractive, as remaining whole, rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits. … As such, CSP explicitly calls for schooling to be a site for sustaining—rather than eradicating—the cultural ways of being of communities of color.”
The framework builds on the work of Ladson-Billing and others but offers a “loving critique” that cultural relevance in the curriculum is not enough for students in today’s world, given demographic shifts toward a more diverse society. Paris and Alim also argue that asset-based pedagogies, like culturally relevant teaching, traditionally haven’t paid enough attention to young people’s more fluid relationships with their identities.
Ladson-Billings has embraced the evolution of her foundational pedagogy, writing in 2014 that “culturally sustaining pedagogy uses culturally relevant pedagogy as the place where the beat drops.” She also told Education Week that she is now paying close attention to how teenagers shape culture, an aspect that wasn’t present in her original work.
It’s important to remember that these asset-based pedagogies—culturally responsive, culturally relevant, and culturally sustainable, among others—are not in conflict with each other. While their frameworks vary, they all have the same goal of dismantling a deficit approach to educating students of color and focusing instead on their strengths, assets, and communities in the classroom.
