Supporting CLD Learners
Supporting culturally and linguistically diverse learners means actively celebrating diversity and all forms of identity in your classroom.
In the U.S., most curriculum and schools are based around a white, middle class culture, but not all of our students will be coming from the white middle class. To be a culturally responsive teacher, it is your responsibility to first assess your own identity. What are the aspects of your own identity? What are key aspects to your own culture? What teachers made you feel seen? What teachers made you feel less than? And how? What is your identity in relation to race, gender, sex, sexuality, religion, class and etc? What are the biases, explicit or implicit that you might be bringing with you and how can you counter that? We have to begin by asking ourselves these questions.
In the U.S., most curriculum and schools are based around a white, middle class culture, but not all of our students will be coming from the white middle class. To be a culturally responsive teacher, it is your responsibility to first assess your own identity. What are the aspects of your own identity? What are key aspects to your own culture? What teachers made you feel seen? What teachers made you feel less than? And how? What is your identity in relation to race, gender, sex, sexuality, religion, class and etc? What are the biases, explicit or implicit that you might be bringing with you and how can you counter that? We have to begin by asking ourselves these questions.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
After examining your own identity, get to know your students' identities! Culturally responsive pedagogy means understanding and celebrating the ethnicities, cultures, identities, and communities of your students. Get to know all of your students personally to learn more about them. What are the funds of knowledge that they bring into the classroom? How can you use these to learn from your students and use their expertise in their area of knowledge to help them connect to the material and have worth and empowerment in the classroom space?
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Celebrate your students' funds of knowledge by finding ways to incorporate them into your curriculum. How can you learn from your students? Your classroom should be built on equal relationships of learning, in which both you and your students learn from each other.
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Disposition towards community
Photo from: https://www.ascd.org/communities
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Part of loving and celebrating your students and fostering a relationship with them, is also embracing their community. Who is involved in their community? How can you create relationships with their family or community and include these relationships in your classroom?
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Create student biography cards.
In her book Biography Driven Culturally Responsive Teaching, Herrera explains the importance of creating biography cards to learn about all your students. She provides a template for student biography cards that I've added here. This can be constantly added to with sticky notes as you learn more and need to make note to yourself. |
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Check out these articles and books for more on Culturally Responsive Teaching:
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Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain by Zaretta Hammond
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Biography Driven Culturally Responsive Teaching by Socorro G. Herrera
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The what, why, and how of culturally responsive teaching by Geneva Gay
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But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Gloria Ladson Billings
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And check out this webinar: Zaretta Hammond: Culturally Responsive Teaching
Teaching Linguistically Diverse Learners
Like cultural diversity, multi-linguism is something that should be actively celebrated in every classroom. Being multi-lingual is a gift and it should be taken advantage of.
How can I create a linguistically inclusive classroom?
Here are a few suggestions and ideas to help create a linguistically inclusive classroom:
Here are a few suggestions and ideas to help create a linguistically inclusive classroom:
- Introduce vocabulary alongside images or pictures to help student understanding.
- Use lots of oral practice in the classroom that students are also involved in such as discussion or pair-sharing. As the teacher, use elaborate vocabulary to increase vocabulary knowledge.
- Use templates such as the Frayer Model found on the Writing page to help students learn more vocabulary.
- Promote language conversation in the classroom in different languages.
- Have a multi-lingual library and make sure parents and students know that reading in their first language is just as important and helpful as practice reading in English.
- Allow students to work in their preferred language. They can then explain the meaning of their work to you if you do not understand it.
- Discuss with your class how languages are used in different ways and the beauty of being able to think about and describe things in different languages.
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Try this!
Here is one activity that you can use to learn more about your students and their funds of knowledge and help language learners with: |
Before beginning a lesson, introduce new vocabulary that will be key to the lesson. On a piece of paper, have students write the word, then draw what they think it means, and brainstorm as much as possible of what they think of when they hear that word. This helps with learning vocabulary, but can also tell you a lot about your students. You might also be able to incorporate some of their background knowledge into the lesson as well.
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