Culturally Responsive Instruction

Every nation and community is rich culturally. We currently live in a world where our knowledge about other cultures, languages, and traditions is extremely important to foster understanding and mutual respect, but can we afford to neglect understanding of local culture before going global; that  is something that always plays on my mind as an educationist.

In 1979 an interesting study on cross-cultural comprehension was conducted. The study had subjects from the U.S. and India read letters about an American and an Indian wedding after which they were required to recall it through tasks.  Interestingly, when subjects read the passage about the wedding from their own culture the researchers noticed that subjects read the passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information, and produced more culturally appropriate narrations of the content. However, while reading about the ‘other culture's wedding’, subjects read the passage more slowly, recalled much less information, and produced less accurate narrations of the content. The results indicated that cultural context influences comprehension, and that this phenomenon occurs regardless of an individual's background. (Steffensen, Joag-Deve, & Anderson, 1979).

Despite this study being 30 year old, for me as an educationist, this premise holds good. Translating this experience to Kashmir, it makes sense that if children were to read a passage where content is firmly connected with the local culture, they would be able to connect better, recall better and also produce a more detailed description of it as it is more relevant to their experience. Given that research, test data, and anecdotal evidence repeatedly confirm that culture plays a significant role in teaching and learning, as educationists it is critical to explore how best to tap the local to connect to roots, before tapping the global to create that much hyped ‘global citizen’. For what is a ‘global citizen’ when the ‘local citizen’ is missing and missing for want of sufficient attention to this through a culturally connected curriculum and a culturally responsive instruction that nurtures and nourishes respect, admiration, appreciation and pride in one’s culture.

The question is whether either one of these is sufficient or whether a dovetailing of the culturally connected curriculum with a culturally responsive instruction that is required and how do we start. As educationists, the first step is recognizing how our own cultural conditioning is reflected in our teaching: how we set up our classroom, establish relationships with students, even how we design and deliver our lessons. When we acknowledge that our classrooms are natural extensions of our own culture, we can begin to make room for the cultures of others.

A sound practice is to look for ways to integrating cultural traditions into the curriculum and in the classroom. This creates a welcoming and respectful school environment and promises great opportunities in the classroom for children to be more participative leading to improved communication which then leap frogs into more meaningful engagement with families.

It makes sense to also add classroom visuals reflecting the local culture but steer clear of long held harmful stereotypes. Of course there is a different excitement to having an event where families and children interact with other families and the culture is lived. Learning materials that contain themes that are both universal (importance of families, friendship, role of music, festivals etc.) and local play a great role in helping children explore with a greater connectedness where community events and traditions are focused upon.

Equally important is integrating local art, music and games into classroom activities and helping children put up shows that connect to roots. It goes without saying that reading, thinking and discussing from multiple perspectives is critical and for the older age group, current world events provide the platform for children responding to events from a variety of perspectives which will promote critical literacy skills as well as thinking skills and a forum for voicing disparate perspectives. Ultimately, all of these strategies for cultural responsiveness support our goals for student achievement in two ways. First, we build a democratic foundation for equal access to education. Secondly, we help students develop their own culturally sensitive skills to be successful in our diverse, multicultural, and global world, enriching not our classroom, but our nation as well.

The 4Cs of the 21^stcentury are clearly communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. However, for this to be, connecting to and nurturing one’s roots through the curriculum and culturally responsive instruction remains the foundation as it is this strong foundation that will create citizens that will be truly global.

Dr. Farooq Ahmad Wasil, a published author, Founding Director TSPL (Thinksite Services Private Limited). He has over 4 decades of experience in the field of education management – setting up, operating and managing schools.