Transcript: Introducing and Operationalizing Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education

Rebeca Cerna:

Okay, great. Okay, thank you. Welcome everyone. We’re glad that you can join us today. Today’s session is on introducing and operationalizing culturally responsive and sustaining education. My name is Rebeca Cerna and I will be supporting as a moderator for today’s session. So this session is being hosted by the Stronger Connections Program, an initiative of the California Department of Education. And as part of this program, we provide technical assistance to grantees, private schools, and schools at large. In California, we aim to increase the capacity of LEAs to improve learning environments and promote positive school climates. So topics for sessions hosted by stronger connections, focus on safety, bullying and harassment prevention mental health, among others. Today’s topic was selected as a topic of interest by stronger connection grantees.

So this session will be 90 minutes. So during today’s session, participants will remain muted for the first part, however, we do encourage you to engage in the chat. And in the last segment, we will have an opportunity to engage in discussion for those who are able to stay. And we welcome folks to turn on their videos and engage in conversation. So feel free to, the first part of the session will be recorded and will be posted on the California Safe and Supportive Schools website, and the discussion portion will not be recorded. Our objectives for today are to establish agreements that support engagement throughout the session to explore key principles of educational equity and to consider practices for implementing culturally responsive education across our educational system.

One additional note, we will be hosting a Zoom office hour with our speakers next week on Wednesday, March 5th at noon, in case there are any follow-up questions by attendees. And all participants from today’s session will receive an invitation and you’re able to join at any time during that particular hour. So now I would like to introduce our speakers. John Jacobs is a technical assistance specialist at WestEd. John is a skilled facilitator in areas related to culture and identity such as ability, social class, and race, and an experienced collaborator who has worked to embed equity and cultural responsiveness throughout district and state level policies and programs including MTSS and PBIS. David Lopez is a director of Equitable Systems at WestEd. And in this role, David delivers technical assistance and expert consultation. He develops research, evidence-based tools and resources and provides research and policy support to state education agencies, district leaders and school-based educators focus on creating culturally responsive and equitable systems. And with that, I am going to pass it to my colleagues.

 

John Jacobs:

Great. Thank you so much for that introduction. Rebeca. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. Okay, awesome. Again, thank you so much Rebeca for that introduction and getting us kicked off. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to share the space with this team, with my colleague and friend, David, where we’re going to talk a little bit about introducing cultural responsive and sustaining education. As Rebeca said, we’ll talk about some key research and principles related to it. Give folks a chance to consider what it looks like in your context to get us kicked off. I have a little what’s called a synectic, or what I call a synectic here for you all. Using the chat, please respond to the following prompt using these images. They’re numbered here. So in the green at the top of the slide, it says My school or schools are like, and then you’ll insert the number because, and we’re not going to define what the images are. Take a second and review the images and what they represent and consider how your school or education context is like any of these, all of them, a certain number of them. And then briefly in a sentence or so, describe why in the chat.

I’ll pull up the chat.

Give folks a moment to get settled. Again, if you’re just coming in, take a second and look at these images and respond to the following prompt in the chat. Or I should say complete the prompt. My school or educational community is like, insert the number because see, number six, because we value relational importance of learning. Six, we see a kid and a grownup snuggling on a couch. Love it. Number seven, because student groups are divided and kept separate. Yes. Sometimes that stands out to us. We’ve got number seven, the images of, I think those are beads there separated. Got number five, trying to explore and discover new needs and root causes. Oh, the roots. Wow. I didn’t even think about the roots in that image. I love that connection. Digging in the dirt, getting to the roots.

I see number three, way too many kids lost and we do not know why. Okay, thank you for that. Yeah, you have another moment for a couple more people to respond. Our educational community is like three because we are constantly navigating difficult topics and conversations. It’s true for many of us right now. Thank you all for taking a moment to engage in this little warmup for us here. I’d like to start off with this because these images represent the metaphors that can connect us to a lot of the topics we’re going to talk about. But a lot of the key ideas, values related to educational equity and cultural responsive education, right? When we’re working toward equity via culture responsive education, we need to consider the extent to which we are providing mirrors to reflect back to kids, their culture, their values, their identities. We need to consider whether we’re providing them windows or doors into other worlds.

Somebody pointed this out in connecting to number seven, we need to be aware of how we’re sorting kids. Sometimes ranking kids is number four, kind of alludes to or represents or sorting them as number seven is. And we need to maintain our connection to the importance of safety and love and connection between adults and kids. That is essential to safe and equitable school environments. And then this one down here in the corner number five that I put in here, I thought it represented exploration and joy of kids, but getting to the root causes as well. Great. Thank you all so much for engaging in that. So for we have a brief, simple agenda to guide the next 80 or so minutes together we’re going to ground ourselves in a couple of community agreements or norms to help support us through the session. We’ll talk about and define educational equity, what it means to us, what it is, what it isn’t, some examples of it. And then we’ll introduce cultural responsive and sustaining education and provide some examples of what it looks like across different components of our system and explore the implications on our own context and practice. Pause there, see if my co-host David as anything wants to add to our agenda before I turn it over to him anyway. Alright, cool.

 

David Lopez:

Well good. I appreciate you John, and happy to be with everyone. So typically we like to do some community agreements, but really these are going to be some session norms that we offer because true community agreements would require us to build those together. And unfortunately with time and so on, we can’t. So what we’re hoping that we all can commit to today is to listen, to understand particular in this day and age, I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around what culture responsive and sustaining education is and what it’s meant to do. So we hope that folks are here to listen, to understand from us, but also from each other as well. I know we are here to do that as well. We ask that you push your growing edge, it’s really beautiful in a comfortable place. But for us to get better, for us to address some of what was already highlighted, such as students being separate, not knowing why, so on and so forth.

We want to make sure we’re pushing beyond what we already know. But while you’re doing that, you can expect and we hope you will accept lack of closure. And one, John and I do not have all the answers. We don’t pretend to have all the answers and we definitely don’t have the answers for everybody’s local context. But we do think we have some things to offer that you could apply to your local context. We often say we’ll be more successful in 80 minutes. That’s about what we have left if you leave with more questions rather than answers. And we’re also asking that you focus on impact versus intent. So we believe educators have good intentions, they don’t want kids to feel separated, they don’t want kids to feel lost. So let’s keep our intentions, but let’s focus on the impact of what is actually happening as that will actually help us move the needle forward. And then just as a reminder, the session is being recorded. John, is there anything you want to add in terms of what we’re offering for today?

 

John Jacobs:

I’ll just remind people the session is being recorded and it’s my understanding that when we have our discussion portion at the end of the time that we will stop recording whether it’s breakouts or whole group, right? Rebeca?

 

Rebeca Cerna:

Yes, that’s correct. We will stop recording during discussion time.

 

David Lopez:

Great. Alright, wonderful. All right. So let’s move right into defining equity as we move forward. Let’s just head to that next slide. So in the chat, what we would like you to do is, in your own words, define equity, what does equity mean to you? But in particular to the educational institution that you belong. And then we want you to think about where it does or does not exist for whom and how do you know? So for instance, somebody shared that they picked the picture with the different beads because the kids were separate. Who are those students? How do you know they’re separate? So that’s kind of what we’re looking for. Take a minute to think about your definition and just drop that in the chat. Every student gets the specific sports they need to succeed rather than simply treating all students the same provides access to mastery learning for every student based on who they are and where they are coming from. Every student getting what they need to succeed without judgment, it’s wonderful. And if some folks want to talk about in their context, where does it and where does it not exist, that would be great as well, because that’s the real work is also uncovering where we, both, where inequities exists, but also where we are being more equitable.

Remove barriers, personalized support, safe and inclusive environments, resource distributed fairly, support students and families in culturally responsive ways. Evening the playing field. We’re providing relevant support and resource to marginalized communities within our student body. And so I think a lot of us, our equity definitions includes around giving students what they need based on their needs and moving away from this notion of equality where every student gets the same thing regardless of what they need. So we really appreciate that and I think we want to offer a very similar definition as well. So we often lead on Glenn Singleton’s definition of equity. Many of you are probably familiar with his work around courageous conversations and Singleton defines as raising achievement of all students. Jordan put irrespective of individual starting points, every student reaching the same goal by receiving tailored supports, narrowing gaps in outcomes and experiences.

So I want to highlight, it’s not just the numbers, but how are folks experiencing their educational system as well? And then eliminating the racial or any other identity based predictability. We should not be able to identify how students are going to do based on their race, their zip code, their socioeconomic class, their gender, so on and so forth. But a lot of the national research tells us that we still can, and that does not take away individual merit, but we’re talking about a system that allows us to predict as a whole. Some of those characteristics that we want to norm here is that equity acknowledges historical and contemporary systems and conditions of inequity. So we can’t reach equity, know what students need, erase the predictability of outcomes if we are not honest in talking about both what has previously happened to communities, particular communities, and what is currently happening to those communities.

So for instance, I’m from the Bronx, New York, my schools. Schools I’ve gone to are often the subject of all the reforms and interventions and research studies. But the void of the history of what it means to live in the Bronx, the Bronx history of changing demographics, socioeconomics, the way that our political system has positioned the Bronx, we are unlikely to reach equity without being honest about those pieces. As many of you said, it addresses unique needs beyond equality, beyond everybody getting the same thing. Some examples that we want to offer. So you can find equity in your curriculum through elevating the voices of marginalized communities such as black, Latina, indigenous, queer, so on and so forth. We want to understand that different does not equal deficient. So just because folks come from a different culture, those are often normal cultural differences that we make as a deficiency or we pathologize, we say that there’s something wrong with folks because of how they are.

We need to resource disparities is a big one in ways that we can reach equity. Who’s getting what? Who has access to high quality teachers, who has access to clean and safe facilities? And then some non-examples, right? So some non-examples of remediation programs that aim to fix the student. We’re not saying that interventions aren’t important. I want to make sure. I think sometimes people hear that and they’re like, well, how are we supposed to meet students where we are? If there’s a student behind, of course we want to give that student the right supports, but if we think we’re going to reach equity would by solely remediating students rather than fixing the systems and conditions under which they go to school, we’re going to be in this endless loop of individual interventions.

And then another queued one is ignoring bias, prejudice and bigotry. So that notion around we see everyone the same. We can’t be equitable if we think that every student experiences the same and folks should be treated the same and ignore that historical presence of bias prejudice, and prejudice said to the next one, John. And really to reach that equity, and I talked a little bit about this in the previous slide, we have to move away from this notion of fixing students, families, and communities, right? Students, families and communities are not broken. We far too often will focus on things like achievement gaps. So we’ll hear often Latinx students are two times more likely to be suspended or black children are three times more likely to insert outcome. But to really solve that in a equitable way that really prioritizes what students need. We have to move from achievement gaps to opportunity gaps. What is our system providing students?

I would say it’s opportunity and access gaps. Because often most schools, whether private or traditional district schools have many opportunities for students. But not all students have access to those opportunities. So for instance, I worked with a school district that had a really prized Montessori elementary school in their district. And so obviously when we spoke about the disproportionality that lived in their district, they touted the Montessori as an opportunity that every student in the district has. And on paper, every student did have an opportunity to attend that Montessori. However, when we dug deeper, what we found was many students didn’t have access to the Montessori because it was located on a wealthy side of town.

The school didn’t provide transportation. So while they could technically apply to the school and get in, for many parents there were too many barriers to accessing the actual building. We want to refocus ourselves on adult and environmental interventions. And then how do we create culture responsive systems, whether that’s climate, environment or relationship, really anything that you could think about in terms of your educational system. We often think about culture, responsiveness and equity as the plate. Everything else is the addition. So the testing is the addition, the climate is the addition. How we do schooling should be equitable and culturally responsive.

 

John Jacobs:

And David, I want to build off of something in your example there from our work. David and I have a history of doing disproportionality work together around both behavior and placement within special education. And I think that you can really see this, the need for this paradigm shift away from fixing students to fixing systems in that world really closely. One of the ways you can operationalize the shift a bit is in thinking about when we have a student who has, or a group of students who appear to be having a higher rate of misbehavior, whatever that might mean. Often what we do, I mean educators educational systems, is we individualize that problem. We blame that student. We say this is happening in a vacuum and it’s only happening to the student and the students to blame. So we think of student level interventions. The student is the only unit of change in the equation.

We create behavioral improvement plans, right? I’m not saying there’s nothing wrong with behavioral interventions and that we don’t need to support healthy development in our students and young people through student specific interventions, but we do that without ever considering what’s the relationship dynamic like between that student and their peers. What’s the relationship like between that student and their teacher? What’s the access that student has to responsive, relevant, engaging curriculum and instruction that they have in their classroom? I’ve been doing walkthroughs in this work with, I think David may have been along in this one, I can’t remember where we are going into two classes, middle school classrooms, they’re both doing ratios and proportions next to each other. And we walk into one in the classroom. They’re doing this abstract activity with manipulatives and it’s collaborative. They’re working in small groups, they’re talking to each other, they’re out of their seats.

We go to the next classroom that is an inclusion classroom that has special education students, students with an IEP in it. And they’re sitting at their desk covering the exact same material, the exact same material using worksheets and an overhead on the screen. And we wonder why the students with IEPs in the building might be getting referred for behavioral infractions at a higher rate. We have to examine the environment around, and I should say those students were overwhelmingly our black, indigenous, and other students of color in the school with IEPs who are having less access to rigorous, engaging, relevant instruction and instead are being punished and having collective problems individualized.

 

David Lopez:

And then another piece that we really wanted to offer is that we both identify the inequities but also the solution to inequities in an educational systems, beliefs, policies, procedures, and practices. And so it’s really important to hold because I think a lot of times in my experience, schools focus on the policies, procedures, and practices that are changing, but often avoid the conversation around what belief systems are at play when we develop or our policies and procedures and when we enact our practices. So for instance, let me start with an example, and I’ve seen this in real life as well. So if I hold the belief, I’m a senior leader in a school district and I hold the belief that students learn to change their behavior when they are punished.

If I hold that, that’s an individual belief I might hold and I may act upon that individual belief, whether that be in my classroom or as an administrator, dulling out consequences when students are referred to my office. But those beliefs are not just individual beliefs nor individual practices. Those beliefs are often codified in our policies and procedures. So again, if I’m that senior leader that has say in how we revise or how we write our code of conduct, for instance, I might ensure that punitive measures are ever present because my belief is that that is the best way to change student behavior. And so we have to begin to excavate what are the belief systems that undergrade our policies, practices, and procedures. Because without that, we often are aiming to do change in a way that is not sustainable or understandable. And so we really want to make that clear.

And what we also have seen is that belief systems also become important in implementation as well. So I’ve been to a lot of places where senior leaders, if we’re sticking with the same example, are like we’re not doing punishment anymore, we’re moving to restorative practices. Our code of conduct continue will reflect a restorative framework. And then in our classrooms, because our educators aren’t being brought along and their belief systems around discipline aren’t challenged, the practices remain the same. And so what ends up happening to many students is we have a restorative code of conduct, but now they’re just punished in a circle for everyone to see them, right? And so that’s why we want to be able to focus not just on our policies, practices and procedures, but the belief systems that under grid them.

Then let’s keep it honest y’all. We can’t do this work alone. There’s no way. I think I often or we often encourage educators to focus in on what’s in their locus of control, but we often do not see major changes to a system when it is left to individual educators to make changes. And so we want to aim for a collective equity. And I think the example I gave you previously around the code of conduct and not bringing our teachers along shows what happens when we have a top down equity approach rather than something that’s collectively collective and really creates a shared responsibility for what our students will need to be successful in our educational systems. Let’s head to the next one, John.

 

John Jacobs:

Alright, cool. Thank you for that, David. I think one of the ways we think about this relationship between equity and culture responsive education that I think that Frayer model slide alluded to a little bit and David talked about is that equity is kind of the what, it’s the principle of what we’re working toward. We’re working toward a system that can differentiate supports, that does acknowledge historic and contemporary systems of marginalization, of oppression and works to address those disparities. Cultural responsive, culturally responsive and sustaining education is one of the ways we can do that. It’s like the how equity is kind of the what and CRSC is the how often. When we introduce cultural responsiveness, we like to kick it off with a little simple prompt for us to engage in. So we have a little word cloud poll everywhere here. What we want you all to do is think back to one of your favorite educators and we’re going to loosely use the term educator. Could be a teacher, it might be a counselor, it might be a coach, maybe it’s somebody who taught you piano lessons. Maybe it was a mentor you had at church. What are some of the characteristics or qualities of that favorite educator? And I’m going to go ahead and go here. I just know it’s going to work.

I activated it. And again, you can use a QR code on your phone and here’s another way you can join. You can respond by text. We’ll give folks a moment. What are the characteristics or qualities of your favorite educator? Again, it could be, oh, I’m seeing, okay, cool. I was worried that I assume the chat message I got was about problems. All right, give folks a chance. Again, this could be a coach. You had an adult in your life where you’ve respectful, organized, kind, patient, knowledgeable, kind, they cared. Yeah. Oh, empathetic. They were fun, creative patient. Look at patient, pop out in the middle like that.

They’re responsive, kind and patient empathy. Yeah, empathetic, fun, curious, observant. Courageous. They were critical. This activity never gets old when we do it to introduce cultural responsiveness. We love to do it because educators know. Adults know we know what worked for us. We know what was impactful for us. This kindness, patience, that understanding that comes with being patient. Empathy, the ability to take different perspectives other than your own that you have to be able to do to be empathetic, your sense of emotional connection with people and allowing yourself to be affected as an educator by the wellbeing of the little humans around you in your charge. These are all central components of what it means to be cultural responsive. Additionally, it’s important for us to think about which young people have access to kind, empathetic, and patient educators and which don’t.

This work is about recognizing these are the foundation and interrogating which groups of students, whether it’s by gender or race or ability, have access to that kindness, patience, and empathy in which do not. Thank you all so much for completing that. Oh, it’s still going. Values driven. I love it. Intellectuals, one other thing that always comes out of here is competence is some version of competence. They’re knowledgeable, right? They’re creative, they’re dedicated. Oh, they listened. This is great. I could keep watching this all day. Okay, exit. Awesome. Thank you all so much. Cool. So this is a definition of culturally responsive and sustaining education that comes from the New York State Education Department. I’m coming to you from New York. I’m a little biased. This framework, if you ever want to check it out, is a fantastic framework. Research-based shows strategies across different interest holder groups, fantastic resource.

The foundational thought leaders and researchers and culture responsiveness came together to help create it. Okay, enough of my pitch for that framework, culture, responsiveness. Sustaining education is a view of learning and human growth that values differences in culture and identity as strengths that should be included in teaching and learning. Culture responsiveness is asset based. It’s asset based. It recognizes that everybody who walks through the schoolhouse door, through the classroom door brings with them rich culture, history, experiences and identities that have to be included in teaching and learning. It recognizes that all teaching and learning is social and cultural and the inclusion of who we are as people is essential to learning. Always. It explores the relationship between contemporary conditions of inequality and ideas that shape access participation and outcomes for our learners. This is the connection to equity that we were talking about here. It acknowledges that there are inequities that certain groups are consistently and persistently underserved and excluded by our schools in positions at this asset-based approach as a way to address those inequities.

Gloria Ladson-Billings is one of the leading researchers, the foundational thought leaders around culture responsiveness. And she defined her research on successful teachers, found that the students gain academic skills needed for success. That is, it’s not enough for kids to come into class and have fun and have a good relationship with their teacher. Kids have to, those are important and necessary. They have to gain the skills needed for success that they develop and maintain their cultural competence. That means they know themselves, they’re confident and knowledgeable in the community, their family, their people, history and culture and identity, and they can connect across culture and identity with other people. And lastly, she said that students develop critical consciousness. That is the understanding of systems and history and contemporary systems that drive differences in outcomes. So students have to learn about ableism, misogyny, colonialism, racism, and develop the skills, classism, develop the skills to challenge those patterns of inequality in the world around them.

Another person research we want to highlight here is Django Paris. Django Paris builds on the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings and goes a little further and says, it’s not enough for us to just respond right lovingly. We must sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of communities. That is schools as parts of communities, right? As centerpieces of communities. It’s our job to help those people in our communities sustain our cultural practices and languages and further that work. We need to think about it and position that work as a part of sustaining our pluralistic democracy, that we’re sustaining cultural pluralism as a part of the democratic project of schooling, which has always been, and most certainly today is an essential thing that we should be working toward.

Lastly, kind of in sum, some of the goals of cultural responsiveness, again from the New York State framework are to affirm racial and cultural identities. That is kids need to know who they are and how they are, to be right and good. We know that there’s differences. Kids don’t know that how they are is right and good. They think the way they talk. Some kids particularly are black, indigenous, and other students of color are students with disabilities. Our L-G-B-T-Q-I-A students, they don’t learn to internalize a sense of goodness all the time because we send them messages to the contrary. So it’s our job to counter those messages. Again, foster connection across identity and culture and empower students as agents of social change. The knowledge and skills we’re working to build in. Students should help them name their world, understand the world around them and act on it. And lastly, we always want to nurture student curiosity, growth and critical thinking in schools, connecting to their interests, their desires, their aspirations, right? It is student centered at its core.

Cool. So I’m going to come up for air and take a drink real quick. So the next thing we want to do is we want to give folks a chance to see some examples of what this looks like across different components of systems that shifting our gaze slide had in green. Text some examples like climate, relationships, curriculum, stuff like that of different components of the system that we know we have to examine here. On the next few slides, we have some examples. I’ll talk through some examples as I’m talking through them, and right after each of the next three slides, I want you all to think about what these practices look like or don’t look like in your context. How do they look, sound or feel in your context? Each of these that I’m going to flash in the screen and talk through, feel free to use the chat, the chat here. Even as I’m talking, as you’re listening, something comes up, please enter it into the chat and then we’ll pause after each one and we’ll call out some of the things that are in the chat.

Cool. So this first one, foundational. It’s foundational. We’re going to watch a video that one of the first thing that gets shared, I’m going to steal Jose Vilson’s thunder here and say that foundational cultural responsiveness is thinking about children as humans. They’re fully human. They’re fully human, and required or entitled to the safety, the rights, the compassion, the dignity that comes with being fully human. Their status is children, doesn’t mean that they don’t get that. So this first one, staff build and maintain relationships with students nurturing trust in a sense of belonging. So some of this is just good teaching, right? This is just what it means to be a good educator. I feel like inquire about important things in kids’ life, right? Here’s where it gets a little bit more critical though. Be conscious of the ways students want to receive praise. We got to gas our students up, make them feel good about themselves and we avoid, just as an example, we avoid negative public callouts of students, put downs in other forms of disrespect.

I think that as somebody who’s done professional development for the last eight or nine years, if I treated some of the adults in my sessions the way that I’ve seen students get treated by adults in classrooms, the adults would walk out and I’d probably get fired for my job and you wouldn’t see me here today, right? Kids are fully human and central. Cultural responsiveness is avoiding or not disrespecting students, especially publicly and being mindful of the people, the situations where it’s easy for us to do this and when it’s more difficult and accepting that responsibility. In other words, we know our biases, our stereotypes impact our ability and willingness to do this with all children all the time. I’m going to open up the chat and see what we’re getting here.

Let me go back. Alright, another one is teachers and staff express joy. What a novel idea to see staff expressing joy and warmth in ways that resonate with students, right? So when I’m doing walkthroughs in schools, one of the things I always look at is what the patterns of interactions are between staff and students, which students and which families? How are educators expressing warmth and joy in ways that appear to resonate with students? How is that connection happening? We know it’s different across culture, right? Cultural responsiveness calls us to understand the cultural norms that impact how that happens across lines of differences. We demonstrate unfailing optimism for students and what they’re capable of, encouraging them through the productive struggle. That is every child needs a champion and they need us to champion them and believe in what they can do no matter what. And lastly on this one, teachers and staff show empathy and compassion in cultural responsive ways using empathetic statements in classroom environments.

So that is staff console and check in with students when they’re upset before jumping to a conclusion and publicly calling out a student. We check in with the kid and again, we take responsibility for monitoring and acknowledging differences in when that happens and for whom we know that you’re not going to love every kid in your class the same. There’s going to be kids that’s easier and kids that it’s harder. We got to be honest with ourselves about what the situations are when it’s easier and what the situations are when it’s a little more challenging. And again, rather than blaming students for challenges that they’re having, we check in about whether their needs are met and find out what’s happening in their environment that’s driving. Okay, this next one is welcoming and affirming environment. The first piece of this is that staff use inclusive language, so that means no microaggressions or no stereotypes based language.

Microaggressions are seemingly every day slight in how we talk that are predicated on stereotypes around race or gender or nationality or ability that communicate messages around value. So we don’t want to have any microaggressions in those stereotype based language and we want to respect multiple forms of dress, hairstyles, expression or speech. And it’s not just respecting. I think it’s important that we recognize that in the United States, there’s a very specific set of ways of dressing, talking, walking, combing your hair and looking that are set up and privileged as right and good, and acknowledging that there are some that are set up as bad deficient and needing to be punished. And it’s our job to explicitly counter those pieces. This one kind of builds off the relationship. The next one, we greet everybody. When I do school walkthroughs, we walk into the front office and I love to see what the vibe is in the front office. Who gets greeted? If I’m with a colleague, which one of us gets greeted? Does the six three white dude, myself, get greeted or does my often female and or colleague of color get greeted? What’s that interaction like, right? Are there family members in there?

Teachers demonstrate proficiency and conflict mediation. A big piece of this is, I’m take a deep breath and say it. Staff regulate their own emotions and maintain a firm yet warm tone with students. This is a big piece of it. We have to be able to regulate our own emotions as adults and accept responsibility when we make mistakes or cause harm because we’re humans. I’m a parent, I have a 7-year-old. I know what it means to be dysregulated as a grownup with a child. And you don’t have to be a parent to recognize that either anyone who’s been in a school does. It’s not about perfection, it’s about repair. And again, central to this is we have to understand the role identity and culture plays and which students is it easier for us to regulate our emotions? Which students don’t? We have stereotypes and biases about that don’t trigger us as much and which ones do.

And lastly, an inclusive physical environment with diverse representations. Our walls should be reflective of the culture, the identities, the languages, the values of our community. And again, we have to recognize there are some groups that are privileged and set up as normal, right? And good. And often our physical spaces reflect that and others that are set up as deficient and they’re erased and not valued and not present in physical environments. A quick story and then I’ll be quiet and hear, we can unmute from people. My partner is an elementary music teacher, and I’ll just show you the importance of what we might think is subtle and that kids don’t notice, but they do. She’s a music teacher at the time, she was teaching in East Harlem here in New York City, and she had solfege hands, which are do re mi fa so la ti do, the symbols hands, and they’re on our bulletin board. And we had met one day for lunch and I was in her classroom and she didn’t have students and I’m looking around her classroom deciding whether I want to enter into the dangerous territory of critiquing my wife’s bulletin boards, but I did. And I said, what’s with the solfege hands? Why do you have white solfege hands?

I don’t know if she had any white students at the time. And she’s like, that’s the only ones I could find. Leave me alone, kind of thing. A little defensive. And I was like, okay. When I left, she printed off, she found and printed off a diverse skin tone, solfege hands, put them up on our bulletin board and had a kindergarten class. After lunch, I left and she texts me an hour and a half later and said, within five minutes of our kindergarten students being in the classroom, they pointed out the skin tones of the solfege hands on the bulletin board and noticed that. They were like, why did you change the solfege fish hands? And they got to have that conversation about, well, who’s in our school community? And people can look all different kinds of skin tones. The point being kids, five-year-olds looked up at the bulletin board and noticed immediately that the skin tone reflected theirs, right?

Kids know, all right, I’ll be quiet now. What from the welcoming, affirming environment, what does this look like? Whether it’s the physical environment, how we reflect our school community back on walls or the climate. Do all people feel safe emotionally, psychologically? Do they feel valued? Are they being micro aggressed, their stereotyped? What does this look like in your context? What’s resonating with you all? And you can use the chat or feel free to unmute. Alright, cool. So lastly, curriculum instruction. I won’t hit all of these. So cultural responsive curriculum. These top three pieces, we should see incorporation of family and community, what we call funds of knowledge. That is whether it’s faith, the occupations of your families, entertainment or hobbies. One example of this is in my elementary school class, my grandfather got invited in to share, he was a beekeeper, and to share an observation hive and teach my class about bees. My grandmother, who is a small town mayor in Pennsylvania, led a walking tour and a local historian led a walking tour of our small town pointing out local history.

What’s the word I’m looking for? Not monuments, but important places in the town and so on and so forth. I got an experience that centered and included the expertise of people who are really important to me, who I saw as valuable and influential in my life, and they were brought into the school and their experience and expertise was valued in the school setting. Not everyone gets that experience. My family fits within middle class, white, Judeo-Christian norms as well. And so they were brought in. Everybody deserves to have some experience like that. Our curriculum materials have to have accurate portrayals of cultural groups. We can’t exclude them, can’t exclude certain groups. I know that often we whitewash our history. We exclude the contributions of our black, indigenous, and other folks of color. We exclude the voices of women, L-G-B-T-Q-I-A folks, and we include inaccurate portrayals. Can’t do it. It’s problematic, it’s harmful, can’t do it.

And we include relevant issues, issues nationally, locally, or personally to students’ lives. The last one was in the classroom. I helped our students. We did a unit or we were doing a review of ratios and proportions, and at the time in New York, the practice of stop and frisk by NYPD was being challenged in federal court. So we looked at data by neighborhood and the composition of each neighborhood by race and the composition of stop and frisk stops by race and practice our ratios and proportions. That way we have to include issues pertinent to our children’s lives. What does instruction looks like? Being intentional around our discourse. Who gets to participate and have a voice in the class? Are we reproducing patterns with the loudest most confident voice, most central to most conversations, our able-bodied white cshe males typically, or are we disrupting those? Are we empowering students to lead and drive conversation and disrupting patterns of engagement? We have to recognize that in schools standard American English is generally valued, and culture responsiveness is about recognizing and valuing home native languages and dialects and discourse styles in schools, right? It’s a core piece of how we have to operate. I think we also, students need to have the culture of power and understand conventional and be able to read and write in conventional English, and we can value, that’s not mutually exclusive with valuing the way students come into our buildings, our classrooms.

 

Participant:

And in the language of their choice as well.

 

John Jacobs:

That’s awesome. That’s great. I think this goes back to, I think, David talking about access and opportunity. These pieces on this slide ensure access to rigorous learning for all students. We don’t all start on a level playing field, if not all of us are portrayed accurately, fairly correctly in our curricula. If not all of us have the same opportunity to contribute to academic talk and dialogue and learning in a classroom. Thank you so much for that.