Culturally Relevant Teaching Practices can Transform your Students' Connection to the Classroom.Through incorporating lessons and units that take into account your students' interests, cultural heritage, and values, you can create a classroom community that is connected and empowering, leading to increased academic success for all learners.
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Culturally Relevant Pedagogy & Student SuccessThe growing Hispanic student population and their academic disparities highlight the need to address educational outcomes at national, state, and local levels. Despite being the fastest-growing “minority” group, Hispanic students consistently show lower academic achievements compared to their non-Hispanic peers in both graduation rates and test scores. This calls for a deep self-reflection on the part of educators and administrators to ensure schools are providing the same spaces and opportunities for all students in the classroom. It is time to adapt teaching practices to better serve this growing group, ensuring their educational needs are met as they transition into the workforce and prominent societal roles in the 21st century.
To address these inequities, teaching practices can incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy, which includes understanding and integrating the cultural backgrounds, experiences, and meaning-making structures of students into the curriculum - and not just in terms of content, but in the way we assess as well. Seminal researchers such as Geneva Gay, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Zaretta Hammond advocate for this approach to education, which has shown to increase student motivation, interest, and academic performance. By aligning the curriculum with the students' realities and interests, and taking into account their cultural practices and perspectives, this research measured significant changes in engagement, connection to the classroom, and subsequently academic outcomes. |
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Thank you to the Napa Valley Education Foundation for your support in this opportunity to further my learning as an educator! I am forever changed and inspired by the tools I've learned in this program.