Cultural Competence in Today’s Classroom
Is there a compelling reason to support diversity in today’s classrooms? Do we, as educators, need to be culturally competent? How does our level of cultural competence, or views about diversity, impact student success in our classrooms? Our answers to these questions can inform and impact how we interact with students. We support cultural competence in ourselves and our students when we reflect upon and practice our answers about diversity in the classroom.
Creating a Framework
In order to acquire the knowledge, awareness, and skills to work in today’s diverse classroom setting with the goal of student success, a healthy understanding of the know yourself, know your students, know your practice framework is essential.
Know yourself
Most teachers don’t have much time to really reflect upon who we are—in our cultural identities, our racial identities, our gender—the diversity identities we carry within ourselves and into the classroom.
If you don’t know yourself, your students are at risk to be exposed to your biases or areas of unknowing, insensitivities, and/or lack of awareness. While knowing yourself may not create a fully culturally competent being in every moment of your life, at least you know some of your hot-button issues or struggles. A conscious awareness of these issues is key to being a good teacher. You can uncover some of your hot-button issues or triggers at http://www.uww.edu/learn/diversity/triggers.php
Know your students
Knowing your students is another lifetime of learning skill. The knowing is multidimensional in the sense that who your students are is part of their cultural backgrounds, their family connections, their past experience of education, who they are in relation to their skill level, their learning style, and how they’re smart. When you’re teaching 25 students in a classroom in elementary school, you may have a better chance to know them at a deeper level than if you have 150 students entering your classroom as a high school teacher.
Continuing to increase your knowledge of who the students are and decrease that arena of unknowing is key to cultural competence. There are many surveys, questionnaires, and informal assessment tools online that can help you get to know your students, and you may even want to develop some of your own surveys. Here are a couple examples to get you started:
http://literacyworks.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html
or
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/firstyear/1294
Know your practice
Knowing your practice is the vast arena of knowledge which we can never fully acquire, even in a lifetime. There’s probably nothing more complex than knowing the knowledge that we need to be a first grade teacher, a middle school teacher, a high school teacher, a counselor, a principal—whatever our role in education. It is the whole arena of not only the legal structures and the history of education but also our pedagogy, our teaching practices, instructional strategies, knowing the processes to whatever a particular curriculum is—whatever our content is—to be able to deliver that most effectively.
Knowing your practice is something you personally customize for your individual teaching circumstance. It is your specialty and you are good at it. Now that you know that consciously getting to know yourself and your students are two keys to cultural competence, you will only become stronger at your practice.
Check out our related on-site graduate course Cultural Competence: A Transformative Journey™ Online .
Promoting Skills for the 21st Century: Partnership for 21st Century Skills
The 21st century interdisciplinary themes of global awareness and civic literacy are emphasized in this course. By knowing yourself, your learners, and your framework, you will be better situated to promote life and career skills for yourself and among those you teach.
Did you know?
Knowing your practice, yourself, and your students—each one is a dynamic, lifetime learning process but also the core three levels of knowledge. They reflect what we need to know as teachers (Howard, 2006).
The global economy makes it more important than ever for all of us to understand people who are different than ourselves (DYG, 1998).
References
DYG, Inc. (1998). National survey of voters. Retrieved March 3, 2010, from http://www.diversityweb.org/research_and_trends/research_evaluation_impact/campus_community_connections/national_poll.cfm
Howard, G. (2006). We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools. New York: Teachers College Press.