Culture and Language
Language
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Culture
Former executive director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators Crystal Kuykendall, explains the significance of embracing and exploring the cultural backgrounds of each and every student, she aptly states in Kadhir Rajagopal's 2011 book Create Success, "culture determines how children perceive life and their relationship to the world. Because culture also influences how and what children learn, educators can use culture to improve self-image and achievement. Not only must teachers show an appreciation of cultural diversity, they must also incorporate teaching strategies that are congruent with the learning styles of their students."
Briggs (2014) identified traits of a culturally responsive education:
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Culture Influences Understanding: It helps students understand that people's experiences, values, and perspectives influence how they construct knowledge in any field or discipline. It acknowledges the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups, both as legacies that affect students' dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum.
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Culture Influences Meaning: It builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstractions and reality. It uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles to help deepen the relationship between knowledge and meaning.
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Culture Influences Perception: It teaches students to know and praise their own and each other's cultural heritage. It teaches the whole child by recognizing not only the importance of academic achievement but also the maintaining of cultural identity and heritage.
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Culture Influences Personal Growth: It approaches individual growth as an active, cooperative, and social process intended to develop strong skills, academic knowledge, habits of inquiry, and critical curiosity about society, power, inequality, and change. It guides students in understanding that no single version of "truth" is total and permanent by making authentic knowledge about different ethnic groups accessible to all.
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Culture Influences Experiences: It aims not to incorporate traditional educational practices with respect to nontraditional students but to use the cultures and experiences of these students as resources for teaching and learning. It empowers marginalized groups and transforms individuals by helping them develop the knowledge, skills, and values needed to become effective social critics. (sec. 1)
Scholastic author Hedy Chang writes in her 2018 article Ideas and Inspiration for helping young children thrive in a diverse society
“Your active support and validation of families' languages whether Spanish, Punjabi, or Japanese has a tremendous influence on how parents feel about your program and whether they get involved in school activities. Your actions also have a big effect on how children feel about their home language and whether they'll lose or retain it. To avoid communicating negative messages about home languages to children, ask yourself the following questions:
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Do I respond to children when they initiate contact with me in their home language?
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Do I encourage both children and parents to use their home language?
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Do I take care not to use the home language only to reprimand children or give them directions?
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Do I use the home language to give children positive reinforcement?
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Do I create opportunities for children to use different languages in day-to-day activities?
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Do I have classroom materials in the different home languages and are those materials equal in quality to the English materials?
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Do I work with parents to identify when to validate home languages and dialects and when to emphasize Standard English?
You can use this checklist now and throughout the year. By reinforcing home languages and communicating well with families, you'll be fostering the kind of classroom environment that can give children a strong start in life” (Many Languages, Many Cultures)