Calla Wright
Hip Hop Pedagogy
Prof. Kersha Smith
15 October 2008
A Critical Moment:
The Importance of Culturally Relevant
Teaching in U.S. America’s School System
The Importance of Culturally Relevant
Teaching in U.S. America’s School System
Introduction
It is no secret that the public education system in the United States has its share of problems. From a lack of funding to a routine of all-or-nothing high stakes testing, school districts have been struggling to makes ends meet and graduate students. By most standards, a good school district is one that focuses on pushing students through the system with enough knowledge to pass the standardized tests. The even better school districts are those which also strive to send their students to institutes of higher education, whether or not the students desire to go. It is rare to find a school that does more than this. However, educating the United States’ youth should be far more complicated than banking knowledge to them for thirteen years and expecting that they have become enthusiastic and able citizens. Education should be active and engaging. Instead, the standard education is detrimental to many students across the country, especially to those who are already marginalized, i.e. students of color and students in the lower socio-economic stratum. This educational system focused around high stakes testing and the banking system is problematic for a number of reasons: the education process becomes a procedure of dehumanization, critical thinking is not taught, lessons are not focused on social realities and schools become a place of political indoctrination that teach students to accept the status quo. It is through admitting culture into the classroom, and thus admitting students' life experiences and communities into the classroom, that educators can begin to find solutions to these deep-rooted problems. The Current State of Schools
The banking system of education requires little of students. They must be open to receiving knowledge, receive that knowledge by listening to a teacher list facts, memorize that list of facts, and regurgitate what they’ve memorized into their homework and onto their tests. This approach, as Friere (2000) asserted, is a dehumanizing one which "turns [students] into 'containers,' into 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the teacher" (p. 72). This system implies that students enter the classroom with no knowledge, formal or informal, of the subject matter being taught. The educator is the sole source of wisdom and the students are the sole recipients of wisdom. There is no exchange of ideas. Duncan (2000) put it aptly when he said, "Knowledge is transmitted passively from teachers to students" (p. 38). The key word here is 'passively.' The process is not one in which a student must be engaged to do well. The process is not one in which the student must think for his/herself or draw any new conclusions.Even if a student desires the opportunity to analyze the information bestowed upon him/her, this system does not allow for critical reasoning. And as Friere (2000) explained, "Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a character of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as a process of inquiry" (p. 72). He went on to state, "The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness" (p. 73). In other words, in order to achieve a high level of success in school, a student must master the banking system. However, as a student masters this method of memorization and reiteration, s/he does not develop the skills for critical reasoning. This leads to a student's inability to engage with larger society on a critical level. The routine trains students to navigate the world without the ability, or even the will, to question their surroundings or challenge the set social order.
Students remain untrained to protest their surroundings not only because of the way in which they are taught, but also because of the subject matter they are taught. As Rossides (2004) illuminated, "schools do not stress knowledge that can be used! Schools stress abstract skills presumably applicable to social policy or personal problem areas. But everything we know about learning tells us that humans behave in this way (know how to apply knowledge) only if they are trained to do so!" (p. 681). Nowadays schools are forced to focus more and more of their energy ensuring that students pass high stakes tests, causing the subject matter taught to become more and more abstract. Not only is this classroom time focused around one pre-set curriculum, but the end result of this curriculum, the test, has no bearings on real world progress. Rossides (2004) noted, "Researchers have been unable to find a positive relation between grades of test scores and success later in life" (p. 677).
Perhaps the most important problem plaguing schools, is that students are expected to accept the status quo. Students are disciplined to memorize facts unrelated to their own social reality, facts which often run counter to their own observations. (For example, students are taught that the Civil Rights movement equalized power between European-Americans and African-Americans. If asked to explore this statement critically, most students, of any ethnicity, would see the flaws in it solely by examining their own informal knowledge.) This process of route memorization results in students who are indoctrinated with "the American Dream" : democracy is the only way to govern, education is the great equalizer, anyone can achieve greatness if s/he tries his/her hardest. This breads an attitude of contentment, or at least of apathy.
Students, to their own disadvantage, are not taught to view their educational experience as one designed to keep those at the top and those at the bottom in their respective places. However, many have argued that this is just what it does. Rossides (2004) clearly stated, "The American system of education is thus, as much as anything else, a way of transmitting class position from one generation to the next" (p 677). Duncan (2000) insisted "the main purpose of urban public schools in the lives of students of color has been largely to prepare them to occupy and accept subordinate roles within the U.S. economy and, by extension, society" (p. 29).
Schools are not built equally. To start, schools are largely funded by the communities in which they are located. Thus, a school in an affluent community will be better equipped to serve its student population than a school in a poverty-stricken area will be equipped to serve its own. Additionally, access to higher education more attainable when a family can afford to pay for it, when generations of that family have already attended universities, and when schools have the opportunity to focus all of their efforts on making sure students ace all appropriate tests and get involved in enough extracurricular activities. More often than not, these ‘successful’ schools are the schools of middle-class suburbia.
The Role of Culturally Relevant Teaching
One way to combat these problems is to introduce culturally relevant teaching into the classroom. As culture is fluid over time yet feels concrete in any given moment, it is imperative that teachers realize that students’ identities cannot and will not be easily understood. Glutstein, Lipman, Hernandez and de Los Reyes ( 1997) suggested the complexities of culture when they defined it as “the ways in which a group of people make meaning of their experiences through language, beliefs, social practices, and the use and creation of material objects" (p. 712). Though the definition is about a group of people, individuals within that group will inevitably disagree on what their culture is or what their culture represents. Individuals have different global, national, and community-based identities within a culture. Nonetheless, the Glutstein definition offers a glimpse into the complicated nature of culture: culture is not dependent on one aspect such as social practices or beliefs; it is dependent on a combination of complex factors and the way these complex factors help “a group of people make meaning of their experiences.” It follows that if a teacher changes the names in a mathematical word problem to those of the students in a class, and changes the location of the word problem to the community in which the school is located s/he is not engaged in culturally relevant teaching. The only considerations such an exercise makes are the location and possible language of students. The exercise essentially ignores students’ culture(s); it ignores the way students understand their daily experiences. Ladson-Billings (1994) wrote, “for teachers with culturally relevant practices, students' diverse cultural backgrounds are central" (p. 49). This means that curriculum must be planned around students’ own experiences, not that a curriculum should contain seemingly culturally relevant words every so often. Mahiri explained “acceptance [of subject matter] was more likely when students' personal knowledge was incorporated into instruction in conjunction with a responsive style of classroom discourse'" (as cited in Paul, 2000, p. 248).
One way to avoid this simplistic notion of what cultural relevance means and to assure actually culturally relevant teaching is to go directly to the students for an understanding of their culture(s). Focusing classroom discussion, whenever plausible, around students’ communities and prior knowledge and experiences combats many of the problems discussed earlier in this paper. As Ladson-Billings (1994) pointed out, "students come to school with knowledge and that. . . knowledge must be explored and utilized in order for students to become achievers" (p. 52). A curriculum which focuses on the personal experience of the students removes the abstractions of a lesson. Such a curriculum discourages the banking system as students are forced to engage in conversation and thus engage in thinking. This, in turn, gives students a voice within the classroom and hones an ability to speak out in other settings. It also removes some of the threat of political indoctrination as students’ help dictate the subject matter of the classroom. And finally, by focusing discussions around students’ own communities and personal realities, relevant social issues become central. A discussion about the Great Depression moves to a discussion about what the current financial situation means for students and their communities, enabling students to draw parallels and discover the important differences between the two situations. All of this can lead to what should be the goal of educators: getting students to engage with material on a critical level. Students should be analyzing material and reflecting on the ways that material relates to their own worldviews instead of accepting what they hear or read at face value.
Challenges of Incorporating Cultural Relevance into Teaching
Of course, integrating students’ communities and personal knowledge and experiences into the classroom setting is not an easy task. Paul (2000) suggested that "teachers who are often cultural outsiders in the communities where they work misunderstand or misinterpret the cultural nuances present" (p. 247). Glutstein et al (1997) added to this sentiment, "One can be familiar with students' culture and experience yet still hold a deficit orientation" (p. 727) Furthermore, depending on the grade level with which an educator works, students may have already experienced years of the banking system’s discouragement of critical engagement. An even more overwhelming challenge: students still need to be prepared to pass all of the state mandated standardized tests; thus, a teacher’s curriculum is not entirely his/her own. These challenges are not insurmountable, and many teachers have found ways to successfully integrate culture into the classroom. Glutstein et al (1997) described these successful teachers as those whose “approaches to instructional practice are rooted in particular ideology, orientation, and world view that are essentially emancipatory and are aimed at helping their students develop personal and social agency in contexts of marginalization and disempowerment" (p. 722). These are the teachers who take the time to understand, as Rossides (2004) put it, that “social classes exist and that they have a contrary interest in education” (p. 669). By exploring this theme, an educator can become dedicated to making sure motivation exists within each student to challenge the status quo. These are teachers who will work to understand students’ cultures and will work to do so without essentializing these cultures, independent of how connected or removed they feel themselves from such cultures.
Culturally relevant teachers are also the ones who understand, as Ladson-Billings (1994) asserted, that ignoring a child’s race or ethnicity “is dismissing one of the most salient features of the child's identity” (p. 33). Teachers who insist on remaining ‘colorblind’ make the assumption that sameness is equivalent to equity. Ladson-Billings (1994) contended that this is not the case. If anything, the opposite can be argued. Teachers must cater specifically to students’ unique orientations in the world, or else some students have an initial advantage over the others. To accomplish this means ignoring the banking system, and finding ways for students to feel comfortable engaging in classroom activities. This idea of classroom involvement will look different in every class as students’ needs are never identical. However, if a teacher is patient enough to develop activities that work for his/her students s/he can slowly break students away from the comforts of the banking system. By forming lesson plans that inhabit different students’ differing needs, many students will actually be better prepared for high stakes testing compared to those students who sat through lesson after lesson while the banking system was employed.
Finally, culturally relevant teachers are those who understand the importance of community. Rossides (2004) established throughout his article, Knee-jerk formalism: Reforming American education, that students in poor and working-class communities cannot succeed in school simply because the school is adequate. The community as a whole takes part in the formation of citizens. Thus as Ladson-Billings (1994) explained, "Teachers with Culturally Relevant Practices See Themselves as Part of the Community, See Teaching as Giving Back to the Community, and Encourage Their Students to Do the Same" (p. 38) By teaching students to embrace and improve their communities instead of to move up and out of them, and by leading by example, teachers send an important message not only about communities, but about the culture of a students community. Students are taught to take pride and ownership in their communities. They are taught that every community is a valuable asset and that where they come from and the people around them matter.
Consequences of Culturally Relevant Teaching
As with anything in life, bringing cultural relevance into the classroom is not without its consequences. There is always the risk that, despite a teacher’s best efforts, some of the challenges mentioned above will not be overcome. However, if a teacher does not at least attempt to engage his/her students in critical and culturally relevant thinking, the results may be more dire to students’ overall life experience than failing a test. For example, as stated earlier researchers have not found a correlation between test scores and success later in life. (Rossides, 2004) Yet, it is clear that oppression and class stratification are not often openly challenged; it is thus imperative that, even though tests are inevitable, teachers spend time with their students learning the skills needed to fight against the status quo. In addition to the challenges previously mentioned, Paul (2000) explained that using rap music in a classroom lesson, one way of brining in cultural relevance, may result in parental protest. The consequence: certain students are removed from a classroom during a lesson in critically analyzing hip-hop, or teaching through hip-hop is all out banned from school lessons. However, this parental desire to control what their children experience in a school setting is not unprecedented. In my own high school, parents objected to the reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye because of the graphic rape scene. Yet, since book banning has become taboo, all students in my ninth grade class were still required to read it. Because, in much of society, rapping is not as respected as an art form as novel writing, it is easier for parents to win a fight against hip-hop in school than against Toni Morrison. However, just because one genre is not overwhelmingly respected does not mean it is not relevant and important to a student’s educational experience; just because something isn’t respected doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be respected. It is therefore important to push culturally relevant material despite potential parental protest.
Conclusion
Though the potential for negative consequences exists when culturally relevant teaching is considered, it is far more likely that positive consequences will emerge. Students learn to think critically and take ownership of a lesson. Students are presented with the opportunity to express their knowledge and teachers have the opportunity to learn from their students; this teaches children that power structures are not set in stone, but can and should be altered. Community activism and social realities become important lessons within school, forcing the abstract out of the classroom. Perhaps most importantly, the banking system disappears. This then allows students to understand their position in school and become successful through activities that highlight their own strengths. As Friere (2000) explained, "Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world." (p. 79) That, after all. is the clearest goal of culturally relevant teaching: to ensure that students are not dehumanized as they are when the banking system is retained. On the contrary, the goal is to ensure that students are treated as conscious beings capable of achieving success and enacting social change. References
Duncan, G. A. (2000). Urban pedagogies and the celling of adolescents of color. Social Justice, 27(3), 29-41
Friere, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (pp. 71-86). New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Glutstein, E.; Lipman, P.; Hernandez, P.; and de los Reyas, R. (1997). Culturally Relevant Mathematics Teaching in a Mexican American Context. Journal of Research in Mathematics Education, 28(6), pp. 709-737.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Paul, D.G. (2000). Rap and orality: critical media literacy, pedagogy, and cultural synchronization. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44(3), 246-252
Rossides, D.W. (2004). Knee-jerk formalism: Reforming American education. The Journal of Higher Education, 75(6), 667-703.
Once again, I'm not fixing this reference list or the lack of indentation on the paragraphs' behalf.
Love, Calla
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