Zaretta Hammond: Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain

 When I describe the process I am undergoing to renew my teaching license, the response invariably includes some form of the phrase, "It's like they don't want people to become teachers."  This a natural response to the poorly thought out, meaningless, and copious work that is part of the process.  The current step I am tackling (the penultimate in a series of a dozen or so) is filled with outdated materials, broken links, false or inaccurate content, and--perhaps most inexcusable of all--boldly featured misspellings.  It would be hilarious that one of the required tasks is titled "Compentency 2" if it were not so tragic.  I just finished submitting around 100 pages of reports, each section of which was returned with a perfect score within 20 minutes of submission.  The odds of the evaluator having even perused the work are self-evident.  And these 100 pages represented merely a third of a single step in the process.  I almost gave up and began looking for jobs as a copy editor.

But.

Buried in the casserole of incompentence [sic] was an interview with the author of this book who was so clear, knowledgeable, and visionary that I simply had to order her book and add it to my goals for the coming school year.  She pointedly avoids specifics, focusing on principles that underlie culturally responsive pedagogy, rather than quick additions to ornament a fossilized practice, so it is not as simple as most would hope--rightly so.  The mindset she prescribes reinforces that of Christopher Emdin: that viewing students' home culture as a deficit is insulting and harmful, in the same way that so called "Native-American Schools" were to their students.  To approach education of marginalized students as a project in "fixing" fixing them not only is wrong on ethical and moral levels, but it simply doesn't work, and the achievement gap's persistence is evidence.

The culture in which a child was raised is not a deficit or an obstacle.  It is an asset which can be leveraged into real learning--provided the teacher is secure and insightful enough to step outside of her or his preconceptions about "success" and "achievement".  The quote Hammond offers from Ralph Ellison sums it up: "If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility. . . ".