Working with a small reading group early in my teaching career illuminated some equity issues that had always been there, hiding in the shadows. Perpetuating inequities right under our noses. As I sat with my group of five fourth graders, listening in on their text talks with their partners, I noticed a distinct lack of discussion around reading strategies. The discussions were content-specific, although they were asked to discuss how reading strategies supported their understanding of the content. I paused the group to ask which strategies students used to support their comprehension. I was met with blank stares. I referred to the anchor chart listing our good reading strategies, and inquired again about which ones they used. One student met my gaze and slowly opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself. I urged him to say what was on his mind, as I thought he had a strategy to share. What he said served as a wake-up call for me. He shifted in his spot and quietly asserted, “You did not tell us which strategy to use today.” He looked nervous, as though he was worried he accused his teacher of not teaching today. My heart sank, as I realized what had evolved. My students had become dependent upon me to tell them how to think. They had become dependent on my guidance, suggesting which strategies they use. What I should have done was teach them about strategies, guiding them to be critical thinkers who can independently navigate strategy use to facilitate their understanding.
An introspective dive into issues of equity in education reveals that equitable is a complex and nuanced objective to meet. It is about more than ensuring equal access and representation, and encapsulates the impact of our pedagogical choices upon student growth and development. Equity includes ensuring I support my students in developing skills that promote independence so they learn how to navigate new circumstances without the crutch of a teacher telling them how. It is essential that we are continuously reflecting upon the experiences and opportunities we provide our students, and take the time to truly understand how students are receiving the instruction we are providing. We are awarded the potential to catalyze profound transformative change within the lives of our students. We must leverage this power to elevate the voices and experiences of all our students, ensuring equitable access to an education that fosters intellective capacity and supports independence.
Fostering Equity in an Outdated System
This is a tremendous responsibility to wield, leaving many wondering how it can be effectively accomplished with the restraints of an antiquated pedagogical paradigm that continues to perpetuate systemic inequities that oppress marginalized and minoritized student populations. Scripted and packaged curricula promote this idealistic model that there is, potentially, a one-size-fits-all pedagogical framework that can elevate student success. However, these scripted ideologies endeavor to appeal to a mainstream baseline student demographic, failing to consider that nearly 40% of the student population in the United States is culturally and linguistically diverse. A mainstream model is not equitable, not culturally responsive, and promotes assimilation over the affirmation and celebration of diversity.
As an elementary educator, literacy specialist, educational consultant, and now professor, I endeavor to dismantle inequities pervasive in boxed curricula employed in schools across the country. I can recognize the appeal of such programs in supporting new teachers, ensuring a unified approach to teaching within a school or district. A scripted program alleviates some of the stress and pressure teachers carry as they strive to plan lessons, engage with families, participate in countless meetings, and remain abreast of seemingly insurmountable paperwork, all of which must be balanced and accomplished within unrealistic timeframes due to an overwhelming lack of actual planning time. I respect the commitment and resolve it takes to be an educator in today’s classrooms. However, a scripted program, albeit appealing on the surface, can serve to promote the status quo, elevating some students while relegating others to a life of dependency without developing their intellective capacity to be independent thinkers and learners.
Equity is Transitioning from Dependent to Independent Learners
I operationalize equity in education as providing educational experiences that promote independence for our learners. We are not merely teaching students how to read and answer questions about a text, but rather our aim needs to be teaching students how to think critically, examine content, raise questions, and be creative problem solvers. This cannot be accomplished leveraging a uniform pedagogical approach, as our students do not experience learning uniformly. A myriad of factors influence the brain’s response to learning, and culture plays an instrumental role in enhancing the brain’s neuroplasticity to grow new brain cells (Hammond, 2015). Leveraging cultural characteristics can help students make stronger connections between their lives and what they are learning, building intellective capacity that supports individuals in developing skills to learn independently through critical cognitive strategies. This is essential if we are to dismantle the opportunity gap for our culturally and linguistically diverse learners.
Well-intentioned educators minimize rigor in favor of test taking strategies in an effort to help culturally and linguistically diverse learners perform better on standardized tests (Hammond, 2015). Teachers endeavor to help their students feel successful and will utilize this softened approach as a means of demonstrating empathy towards their students’ experiences. Unfortunately, this approach can manifest a form of intellectual apartheid, which perpetuates the achievement gap and further oppresses diverse learners. All students enter school as dependent learners, and their transformation from dependent to independent learners evolves from exposure to rigorous experiences and advanced cognitive skills. Culturally and linguistically diverse students have less instruction in higher order skills development, and more instruction on simplified strategies to support testing advancement (Hammond, 2015). Strategy instruction is important; however, it is imperative that we teach strategies conceptually, helping students understand why strategies are used, how to use them, and how to determine when to use them, much like what was needed for the students discussed at the beginning of this article. This link to metacognition is critical in transferring knowledge so students can leverage their strategies across multiple disciplines. This element fosters growth from dependent to independent learning. Without this explicit instruction around metacognition, students continue to be dependent on their teachers to help them navigate complex learning.
Foster Metacognition with Culturally Responsive Curricula
Educators’ pedagogical choices are often well-intentioned. I posit the majority of educators endeavor to disrupt systems of oppression and inequities that further marginalize culturally and linguistically diverse students. This process can be challenging for teachers when they find their students cannot readily access the curriculum. When the curriculum is not culturally responsive, additional steps need to be taken to elevate student learning. Teaching advanced cognitive skills is arduous enough when students are engaged in a meaningful, applicable curriculum. Imagine trying to balance both rigorous cognitive skills with an unfamiliar curriculum. Students are being asked to catch up to the mainstream curriculum content, while simultaneously engaging in rigorous and complex thinking around this unfamiliar content.
The purpose of learning such higher order cognitive skills is to help students critically examine new content, helping them to navigate unfamiliar circumstances. However, asking students to learn how to think so critically while simultaneously navigating new content is not developmentally appropriate. Mainstream students acquire these skills while engaged in content that is relevant to their experiences and understanding. This helps to support critical skill acquisition before leveraging it to learn new content. Culturally and linguistically diverse students are at a disadvantage when the content used to teach these skills is unfamiliar to them.
This disadvantage begins early in learning, as I have experienced with early and emergent readers. While teaching young readers to employ the strategy of cross-checking, I found students became easily frustrated when trying to understand how cross-checking for picture clues with initial sounds worked while reading unrelatable texts. One compelling example I observed was with a student reading about forms of water, and the illustration is of frost on a flower. The student had only ever lived in the desert and had never experienced frost in the context of the illustration. His frustration with trying to utilize cross-checking with a picture that seemed so strange to him became evident. When his teacher directed him to focus on decoding the word, he determined the word was “frost”. His teacher asked him if he knew what frost was and he said he did not. His teacher then looked to me and commented how difficult it is to help her young readers when the texts are so unrelatable to their lived experiences. She spends significant time providing background knowledge to make it more accessible so students can focus on learning how to leverage the strategies they are being taught. Asking students to learn new strategies and new content simultaneously is increasing the cognitive load beyond what is developmentally appropriate at that stage of learning. It is imperative that educators strive to find content, or be provided content that is culturally relevant and accessible to students, allowing students to focus their attention on skill acquisition to build their repertoires as learners, which will assist them in critically examining unfamiliar content in the future.
Supplementing Existing Literacy Curricula for Cultural Relevancy
My role as an educational literacy consultant is to support educators in building their culturally responsive pedagogical repertoires. This often involves examining existing curricula employed by the school and critically examining its content, instructional strategies, and differentiation options. I have collaborated with teachers from coast to coast and am repeatedly asked to support educators in supplementing existing programs to make their instruction more culturally responsive. Teachers observe that some of the programs they are using do not align with the students before them. Students are engaged in material that is unrelatable, unrepresentative of their experiences, and taught in models that are not reflective of how they learn.
While reading provides an opportunity to learn about new experiences and new places, there must be a balance. Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) asserts that reading should provide a myriad of lenses and opportunities to learn, positing that books must serve as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Books must not only serve as windows into other worlds, but must also reflect who we inherently are. This comes naturally for the dominant, mainstream population. However, it is notably harder for minoritized students to recognize themselves and their life experiences in the books utilized in schools. Research examining the types of books published annually reveals disheartening statistics, noting that in 2018, 50% of children’s books featured White characters. The second-highest percentage of children’s books published featured animals or other entities as characters, coming in at 27%. Books that can be leveraged to serve as mirrors for culturally and linguistically diverse students were published as follows: 10% African American, 7% Asian Pacific American, 5% Latinx, 1% Native Americans (Huyck and Dahlen, 2019). These numbers are sobering and elucidate the amount of work we as educators must put in to make up for this gap and provide culturally responsive resources for our students.
Proactively Seek Culturally Responsive Supplements
Much of my work is presently focused within the Southwest desert region of the United States. The educators whom I support work tirelessly to leverage culturally responsive practices to build classroom community and promote the intellective capacity of their learners. They have found this to be a particularly arduous task with the limited number of publications reflective of their student demographic. We can more readily find books about the Southwest region, or books portraying Southwestern entities, such as cacti, as primary characters, than books with Latinx or Native American characters. There is much discourse in these schools about ways to enhance students’ literary experiences. Teachers have offered to write stories to ensure students have the opportunity to see themselves reflected in texts. Others have posited that we should reach out to local artists and writers, imploring them to craft stories with culturally and linguistically diverse characters. My experience has revealed this to be a more feasible approach than one may believe.
Beyond the Books
Culturally responsive pedagogy transcends multicultural literature. A core tenet of culturally responsive pedagogy is getting to know students, their lived experiences, and their backgrounds (Villegas & Lucas, 2002). This can be accomplished by engaging with the community. Local community engagement elucidates understandings around culture, values, and beliefs around education and approaches to learning. It also introduces educators to community leaders, models, and artists who can have a profound impact upon students’ academic experiences. Meeting local community leaders guided my colleagues and I towards local authors, who share and sell their self-published works at local fairs, festivals, and farmers’ markets. We also discovered small, locally owned bookstores which highlight local and regional authors. These resources bolstered our teaching repertoires, while simultaneously providing students with examples of authors who represent them. I recall the stunning moment I realized the profound impact of this experience upon our students. A visiting author came to share his experiences as a writer with the students, and a young student, no more than second grade, raised his hand and proudly announced, “Do you know you’re brown like me? And you’re an author?” The local author smiled, extended his arms to examine them, and replied, “Yes I am. And you can be, too!” The student’s complex look of shock and pride was evident, as he turned to his friend with a wide, exuberant grin.
Learning with a Purpose
There was a notable shift in the school climate following the author visit. Student confidence visibly rose as students of all ages took to the pages of their writing journals to begin sharing their personal experiences from traveling to Mexico to visit family, to helping prepare the family dinners. Students saw themselves in both the books they were reading and the authors crafting the stories. This experience proved to be transformative for students’ learning identities. It was instrumental in shifting students from dependent to independent learners; they suddenly believed in their intellective capacity to create, succeed, and share their knowledge and experiences with others.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Consider how we operationalize equity and be reflective of how students receive instruction. We are guiding students to transition from dependent to independent learners by nurturing their intellective capacity.
Examine the curricular materials to ensure they do not overwhelm the cognitive load appropriate for our students’ progressive development.
Supplement the curriculum to be reflective of our students.
Leverage culturally responsive practices and resources to learn the most effective way to engage students in meaningful, cognitively appropriate instruction.
References
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using
Books for the Classroom, 6(3), 9-12.
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic
engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Huyck, D., & Dahlen, S. P. (2019, June 19). Picture this: Diversity in children’s books 2018
infographic. SarahPark.com. https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/
Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002b). Preparing culturally responsive teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), 20–32.
Comments