How can teachers become culturally competent

For example:. Our students need us now more than ever, and we have to roll up our sleeves and do what we must to close the achievement gap.

Culturally responsive teaching is one step in the right direction. The outcome is a student body that loves learning, excels academically, and has teachers who respond to their needs. Being culturally responsive encourages students to feel a sense of belonging and helps create a safe space where they feel safe, respected, heard, and challenged.

Next Steps Now that you have conducted an internal self-audit, your curriculum will need one as well. For example: Encourage students to make a social media campaign that champions their favorite cause, and have them bring evidence of their results to class to discuss the role social media plays in social change. Use current songs that students might love to analyze the use of literary techniques and imagery in music videos.

This ideology is embedded throughout our society and manifests in behaviors that allow people with darker skin to be discriminately marginalized, negated, denigrated, ignored, or criminalized in systems.

In recent years it has been increasingly documented through cell phone footage, films, and documentaries. But there is also sufficient evidence of its ideology in schools through the documentation of disparate educational outcomes for students of color.

If every educator demonstrated cultural competence, we could make tremendous strides in our ability to create a more equitable educational system — a system that has for too long been largely unapologetic in terms of refusing to examine its own biases in practices and policies that perpetuate inequity.

The world has awakened to a broader perspective on systemic racism this year and the resolve to dismantle or disrupt practices that support it was demonstrated by organizations across the globe.

Vernita Mayfield grew up in Los Angeles, California, where she began her career teaching elementary school. As a teacher, Mayfield found her first love serving and supporting students who have been historically marginalized. Since then, she has continued to do so through numerous positions of service, including secondary school principal, researcher and lecturer, and educational consultant at state and national levels. Her ASCD book Cultural Competence Now: 56 Exercises to Help Educators Understand and Challenge Bias, Racism, and Privilege offers strategies and tools to help school leaders explore urgent and uncomfortable issues of race, bias, and privilege with their teachers throughout the school year.

Visit her consulting website Leadervation Learning to learn more. Tags: Black Lives Matter cultural competency educational disparity structural racism Vernita Mayfield. MiddleWeb is all about the middle grades, with great resources, book reviews, and guest posts by educators who support the success of young adolescents.

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Flipping over Flippity: Flashcards and More. Assessing Digital Stories in the Middle Grades. Rediscovering the Best Version of Ourselves. It is only when we truly understand ourselves that we will be able to understand others. The article focuses on strategies through which educators can offer culturally competent teaching and learning process in the classroom. Before imparting lessons in cultural competency to students, teachers must be encouraged to critically analyze their own cultural assumptions.

Reflecting on the ideas one holds is the first step towards removing fallacies and stereotypes. Culturally-responsive teaching can then talk to students about using self-awareness in reflecting on their own assumptions.

For example, in a culturally diverse classroom, one student may believe that his learning has nothing to do with timely arrival to class, while another may view punctuality as a sign of respect. In such situations, all the students are surely learning, but each may consider the others as disrespectful, troublesome, and even indolent. Culturally-responsive teachers can help students shrug off their long-held cultural assumptions and teach them to respect individual differences by reflecting on their own beliefs.

Taking a cue from the above point, teachers should acknowledge the fact that every student comes from a different cultural background with unique aspects to it. Several experiences gained from one's traditions and values give rise to and reinforce various belief systems. Learning new things by employing multiple ways of knowing and learning can be beneficial for everyone. When there is little diversity in a given setup a classroom, in this case , the overpowering presence of one particular cultural identity can be daunting for students from other cultures and races.

However, a culturally-responsive classroom that employs inter-cultural communication can engender respect for the needs of each learner and every cultural message can be heard peacefully. It is a good idea to populate the classroom library with culturally diverse reading material for students to discover and learn from. It is an unconscious process and we are not consciously aware of the negative biases that develop over the course of our lifetime. It is often far less egalitarian than what we explicitly think about differences, and if we are unwilling to confront these issues is self-reinforcing and perpetuates systemic inequity.

Before taking the Harvard IAT , read about the test and its implications here. The website provides support materials and other experiences to help students further explore this content.

While reflecting on your IAT results, consider that a key reason to learn more about our own hidden bias is to be aware of how our actions—conscious or not—impact our students. When we think about intercultural communication, we can unintentionally offend others. Our intentions are not as relevant as the impact we have on the person we offend. Becoming aware of our implicit bias allows us to address our behavior and be intentional in how we interact with our colleagues and students.

It is natural to have bias, but it is essential to identify and address it so that we do not act upon it. Check out this video of an interaction that had a different impact than the initiator most likely intended. To overcome unconscious attitudes, educators must counter negative stereotypes and look at each person as an individual.