Mar 6, 2017

Beware of Culturally Responsive Teaching as Mere Education Professor Shibboleth

Beware of Culturally Responsive Teaching as mere education professor shibboleth.  Much like Social and Emotional Learning, such phrases sound good to hippy-dippy liberals while earning skepticism from revolutionary street-based activists such as myself.

 

A few months back, then Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin (she has since been demoted to Deputy Chief Academic Officer) brought in Macarre Traynham to serve as executive director of the Department of Teaching and Learning.  Traynham’s putative expertise is in the area of Culturally Responsive Teaching.

 

Culturally responsive teaching is a practice that either a hippy-dippy liberal or a ground-based practical revolutionary if the Saul Alinsky type could appreciate.  But a capitalized Culturally Responsive Teaching as education professor mantra so appealing to hippy-dippy liberals dims in luster when held under the revelatory light of the ground-based revolutionary activist.

 

Culturally Responsive Teaching represents the idea that teachers should be sensitive to the particular cultures and ethnicities in their classrooms and emphasize curriculum that resonates with students’ cultural and ethnic contexts.  The driving force behind such a curriculum is the cultural orientation of the students;  the broader aims of a knowledge-intensive liberal arts curriculum are secondary matters with such an approach, if indeed they matter at all.

 

By contrast, culturally responsive curriculum is embedded in the Core Knowledge approach of E. D. Hirsch;  this University of Virginia-based professor has superintended the development of a logically sequenced, grade by grade curriculum detailed from prekindergarten through grade 6, with a great deal of work having also been done for grades 7 and 8.  I have continued this approach for high school students, college students, and intellectually ambitious adults in my nearly complete Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.  Knowledge-intensive curriculum brings the full array of knowledge and skills sets pertinent to specific cultures and in the aggregate to the race called human. 

 

One can see the delirious effects of the promotion of Culturally Responsive Teaching over Core Knowledge at work in key departments of the Minneapolis Public Schools:

 

As Deputy Chief of Academic Affairs, Susanne Griffin promotes Culturally Responsive Teaching as having more importance than knowledge-intensive instruction.  For the entire three and one-half years of her tenure, Ms. Griffin has had the opportunity to promote Focused Instruction, which has potential as a conduit of sequenced, grade by grade, knowledge-intensive instruction of the kind developed most thoroughly by E. D. Hirsch and me.  Bringing in a Culturally Responsive Teaching practitioner over a Core Knowledge advocate was a telling decision on Ms. Griffin’s part.

 

In meetings with me, Macarre Traynham admitted no familiarity with Core Knowledge.  This was true, too, of Christina (Tina) Platt, who is the Project Manager for Focused Instruction and a staff member of the department headed by Traynham;  thus, in the case of Platt, the absence of such familiarity represents specific ignorance of the best curriculum for fulfillment of the purposes for which Focused Instruction should be utilized.  

 

The damage that Traynham inflicts with her approach is manifest in her department and the MPS offices and departments that should be working toward an education of excellence.  Despite the fact that Trayham has a staff of about a dozen people working on curriculum at the elementary and secondary levels, elementary curriculum lacks knowledge intensity, middle school curriculum is underdeveloped, and at the high school level dedication to commonly studied curriculum has given way to a “multiple pathway” approach in which student goals and credit recovery as necessary are paramount.

 

At the Office of Black Male Achievement, Michael Walker pursues an approach resonant with Culturally Responsive Teaching.  In the context of a situation wherein fewer than 20% of African American males in the Minneapolis Public Schools are proficient in math and reading, Walker and his office of about 10 staff members have articulated a program emphasizing African American culture;   two and one-half years into the program only 175 of the approximately 7,000 black male students enrolled in the schools of the district participate in Mr. Walker’s program.  A similar approach undergirds that taken by Anna Ross, Director of the Department of Indian Education.

 

I have written three books pertinent to African American history and culture, run an academic support  program that serves African American and Hispanic students, and have street-level comfort communicating with the most impoverished people of Minneapolis.

 

Take this, then, very seriously:  Our students must have a knowledge-intensive curriculum that conveys the full richness of the human experience, imparted by teachers capable of conveying the human legacy to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

Our students must, that is, experience culturally responsive teaching with academic substance rather than Culturally Responsive Teaching as education professor shibboleth.   

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