Culturally Responsive Practice - It's not just for the kids: Exploring a CRT framework for professional learning
Year: 2011
Type: other
Abstract: Culturally diverse nations such as the US must provide educational contexts for students that allow them to maintain aspects of their community culture while also facilitating the development of a large social structure that fully includes and embraces all cultural groups (Banks, 2004).School, teachers and principals have a moral and ethical responsibility to successfully support the learning, achievement and socio-cultural development of all children and youth in our schools.Unfortunately, like many states, Alaska has faced a persistent and seemingly intractable problem with respect to the continuing achievement disparities among ethnic/cultural minority groups within the state.Although this disparity exists for nearly all the ethnic minority groups represented in the state, Alaska Native students are by far the least well served by the educational system.As a group, they experience the highest drop-out rates in the state, and the lowest pass rates on the state-required graduation exam.These data hold regardless of whether the students reside in small, rural communities or one of the major urban centers in the state (Goldsmith & Howe, 2004).It is clear that schools in Alaska continue to search for more successful ways to support the learning and development of the majority of Alaska Native youth.This was one of the challenges taken up by the Alaska Educational Innovations Network (AEIN) in 2006.AEIN's overarching goal has been to close the achievement gap in urban and rural schools by enhancing teacher quality and school leadership through a school-university partnership model.Specifically, the project partners have used a capacity-building model of school improvement by leveraging several core strategies, including the cultivation of culturally responsive practices within the P-12 partner schools and the university.This paper presents a documentary account of how a school-university partnership has used a culturally responsive framework (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 1995) in designing and delivering professional development (PD) for P-18 educators in Alaska, and how this process has deepened our understanding of teaching and learning with regard to collaboration, engagement, examination of practice, and pedagogical change. Culturally Responsive Teaching and LearningCulturally responsive practice is fundamentally rooted in a multicultural theoretical perspective.As such, it is grounded in the assumption that there is a special knowledge base,
Authors: Fickel Lh, Patricia Chesbro, Nancy Boxler
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2782715325