Level Up: Embracing
Culturally Responsive
and Sustaining
Pedagogy for Emergent
Bilingual Students
The Value of Connecting Students’ Cultures, Languages,
and Life Experiences
Introduction
Culture in the Classroom
Culture goes beyond practices such as cuisines, art, music, and celebrations. Culture includes ways of thinking, values, and forms of expression as well as the components of a student’s identity.
Yet, in many ways, school practices reflect the norms of monolingual, white, middle-class students, unintentionally excluding students who come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
From relevant to responsive to sustaining: an evolution
Culturally relevant
pedagogy nurtures positive
ethnic and cultural identities
Culturally responsive pedagogy connects instructional practices to the sociocultural characteristics of students and teachers
Culturally sustaining pedagogy encourages
students to sustain their cultural and linguistic practices and positive identities while also providing access to the normative academic
What is Cultural Education
Race, economic background, gender, language, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and ability all contribute to culture (NYSED).
With approximately 5 million Emergent Bilingual students in U.S. public schools (NCES, 2021).
The classroom is a place where linguistic cultures converge every day.
Criteria
Culturally Relevant Teaching: A Good Place to Start
The nature of student-teacher relationships cannot be addressed without teachers getting to know the multiple identities and languages their students bring to the classroom (NSTA, 2021). Culturally relevant teaching focuses on multiple aspects of student achievement and helps students uphold their cultural identities. Conceived by Gloria Ladson-Billings, it’s based on three criteria (CDOE, 2020):
A teacher who enacts culturally relevant pedagogy believes Emergent Bilingual students can achieve academically, have numerous ways to demonstrate cultural competence, and can understand and challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate (NSTA, 2021).
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STUDENT LEARNING
CULTURAL
COMPETANCE
CRITICAL
CONSCIOUSNESS
Culturally Responsive Teaching: Taking It One Step Further
Teaching
Culturally responsive teaching insists that a different pedagogical model is needed to champion students’ identities and improve academic performances (NSTA, 2021). This approach emphasizes the use of cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of culturally diverse students to make material more relevant and more effective (Muñiz, 2019). Emergent Bilingual students have the simultaneous task of learning the same content as their peers
while also learning English. When educators view the latter as a barrier to academic success, they may provide simpler content until it’s deemed a student knows “enough” English to keep up with the rest of the class. However, watering down the curriculum does not accelerate learning.
[Learners] can be sources and resources of knowledge and skills…
– Ladson-Billings, 2014
It perpetuates a deficit model, which essentially aims to eradicate the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices many students bring from their homes and communities (Paris, 2012). The same consequence goes for having parents speak English at home, punishing students for speaking their first languages in school, or labeling Emergent Bilinguals as “SpEd.”Culturally responsive teaching uses the asset model to guide classroom instruction, knowing that students’ background knowledge and heritage languages are valuable in their English acquisition. Simply using the term “Emergent Bilingual” acknowledges that the student’s linguistic diversity is an asset he or she brings to the table. Compare this to calling someone an “English Language Learner,” which implies a void that needs to be filled.
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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Supporting the Identities of
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
Identities
Most recently introduced and promoted for use by educators, culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling (Paris, 2012) t values and meaningfully centers students’ cultures and communities in classroom
learning (IES, 2021). For Emergent Bilinguals, culturally sustaining pedagogy does not view students as needing to “catch up” with their English-speaking peers. It focuses on the language skills learners already have as well as the bilingualism they can successfully attain (Lexia Learning, 2021). In the process, they become bilingual and gain access to opportunities that knowing academic English brings.
The goal of culturally sustaining pedagogy: Provide access to dominant practices while sustaining home and community practices
Culturally sustaining pedagogy affirms and respects the key components of the asset based pedagogies that preceded it while taking them to the next level. Instead of just accepting or affirming the backgrounds of students as seen in culturally relevant pedagogy, or connecting to students’ cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and frames of reference as we see in culturally responsive pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy views schools as places where cultural ways of being are sustained rather than eradicated.
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Teaching
Eight Teacher Competencies that Promote Culturally Responsive
Teaching
Reflect on one’s cultural lens. We all unwittingly internalize biases that shape instruction and interactions. Accents, for example, are routinely used to identify someone as unfamiliar or foreign. But, while most people understand that discrimination based on visual appearance is wrong, bias against foreign speech patterns is not universally recognized as a form of prejudice (McGlone
& Breckinridge, 2010). Reflecting on our unconscious attitudes can help develop cultural competency
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Recognize and redress bias in the system. Institutional racism and other
systemic biases disadvantage some groups of students and privilege others. Some will assume that non-native English speakers don’t know as much as their peers when, really, emergent bilingualism is not an indicator of lesser intelligence or academic potential. Advocate for the disruption of school- and district-level practices, policies, and norms that hold students back.
Bring the real world into the classroom. In a global economy, countless industries depend on bilingualism every day to communicate and do business. Identifying applications like this shows Emergent Bilinguals that what they learn in school, combined with their native heritages, has value and relevance to their lives. Find out what issues students care about or what careers interest them so they can apply this mindset in a meaningful, forward-thinking way
Draw on students’ culture and language to shape curriculum and instruction. Speaking another language at home does not impede a student from learning English in school. Students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and existing knowledge can help bridge new learning. So, use cultural scaffolding to connect new academic concepts to students’ knowledge and lived experiences.
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Promote respect for student differences. Educators contribute to respectful, inclusive, and affirming learning environments by modeling how to engage across differences and embodying respect for all forms of diversity. A vast majority of the world’s English speakers are not native speakers, so exposing all students to different accents can help Emergent Bilinguals feel more secure and help their peers become more culturally competent.
Model high expectations for all students. Black, Indigenous, students of color, and other marginalized groups like Emergent Bilinguals are vulnerable to negative stereotypes about their intelligence, academic ability, and behavior. Culturally responsive educators know all students can meet high expectations if given
proper support and scaffolds, regardless of their identity or past performance.
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Communicate in linguistically and culturally responsive ways. A teacher doesn’t need to learn a student’s native language, but they should try learning about it. See if aspects of the heritage language, like phoneme blends or cognates, can be connected to English to help students capitalize on the linguistic knowledge they already have. Further, understanding how culture influences verbal and nonverbal communication can make students and families feel more welcome and inclined
to participate in schooh
Collaborate with families and the local community. Removing barriers to family engagement develops trust. See yourself as part of students’ communities and seek to learn more about their cultures, languages, values, and expectations for education.