Notes on: Ladson Billings, G. 1995. Toward a
Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American
Educational Research Journal 32 (3): 465 –
491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465
And her 'remix'
Dave Harris
[V thoughtful piece on empowering pedagogy
encouraging a critical stance towards official
curricula -- very like my own very wonderful
approach in Arksey and Harris (2007) re UK HE.
Good on proper action research too]
She proposes a role for collaborative and
reflexive research based on the pedagogic
practices of eight exemplary teachers of
African-American students.
There's been much debate about reforming schools
by re-educating teachers but what the work lacks
is a theory of 'culturally focused pedagogy' (466)
building on 'educational anthropological
literature'.
There's been a tradition of trying to match home
and community cultures of POC, for example by
allowing them to use 'talk – story' in Hawaii, a
'language interaction style common' among children
there, or similar work with Native American
students where language interaction patterns were
based on those found in the home and again
improvement was reported. Mixed forms,
'"culturally congruent"' also had some success.
Other experiments referred to culturally
responsive or culturally compatible forms
[references 466 – 7].
Each proposes to fit students to schools, however,
and this implies hierarchy based on meritocracy
and this is likely to do no more 'than reproduce
the current inequities', train minority students
to succeed in mainstream society (467) [what's
wrong with that?]. Only culturally responsive
approaches imply a more dynamic relationship, a
way to bridge the gap between home and school.
Most of these have been on small-scale
communities, although one or two have focused on
larger urban settings and African-Americans. Some
scholars have pointed to the wider structural
implications. There is a lot of work on the
struggles of African-Americans to achieve well in
schools, and some analyses of successful schooling
(468). This work is helpful at micro-and macro
levels, but the issue is intersections as well.
There is the concept of 'cultural synchronisation
[citing Irvine 1990] where learning is maximised
in a suitable interpersonal context that doesn't
just focus on speech and language, but takes into
account a whole range of cultural practices
concerning 'mutuality, reciprocity, spirituality,
difference, and responsibility' (469). It also
allows students to affirm their own cultural
identity and develop critical perspectives that
challenge inequities in schools — this is what she
means by 'culturally relevant pedagogy'. Questions
arise about what constitutes student success,
especially whether academic and cultural success
can be complementary in schools, and how pedagogy
can promote critical forms of student success —
and what follows for teacher education.
Educational research is usually greeted with
suspicion among practitioners as too theoretical,
and among academics as not theoretical enough. She
thinks this is because theoretical underpinnings
are insufficiently made explicit, and
practitioners and researchers often fail to
articulate them. This affects even theories of
social reproduction or neoconservative traditional
theories as well — these are not made explicit and
their objectivity unquestioned. Knowledge gained
on the basis of this experience is seen as
inferior. Grounded theory has helped as has action
research involving reflective examination of
practice, and others contributing to the debate
have included Rist pointing out the particular
appeals of paradigms beyond the methodological.
Researchers are increasingly asked to situate
themselves, and face the problem of a native
perspective [often claiming to be insiders because
they share the same background as, say,
African-American students, like she does?]:
Narayan points to the differences between educated
students of anthropology doing fieldwork and those
from impoverished minority backgrounds located in
the Third World. She also realises the possibility
of bias, vested interests in African-American
communities. She has found Collins's work
useful: concrete experiences, dialogue in
assessing knowledge claims, the ethic of caring,
the ethic of personal accountability.
By way of context, she investigated eight teachers
in a small predominantly African-American school,
low income, elementary, in Northern California.
These were nominated as outstanding teachers by
the parents who rated them according to whether
they were accorded respect by the teacher, whether
students are enthusiastic and whether they
displayed other positive attitudes. They were
checked against the list provided by principals
and teaching colleagues which included matters
such as management skills, objective test scores
and personal observations. There are all females,
five black three white. She did ethnographic
interviews to get their ideas about classroom
management curriculum and involvement, and then
she observed them on unscheduled visits, a regular
pattern of visits, three days a week for almost 2
years. She took notes and audiotapes, and talked
with teachers. And finally videotaped them based
on what she had observed. Then she got them all
together as a research collective to view segments
of each other's videotapes, analyse and interpret
their own and others' practice. This led to
formulations about culturally relevant pedagogy.
All along she had wanted to challenge deficit
paradigms.
She draws on Collins on the value of concrete
experiences, arguing that experiences give
expertise more credibility. Parents' experience
was used to rate teachers, for example, teachers
are themselves quite experienced. She pursued dialogue
in ethnographic interviews and during the research
collaboration afterwards. Teachers 'were able to
make sense of their own and their colleagues
practices' (473) and, after dialogue, 'to
re-examine and rethink their practices'. She
practised an ethic of caring. That did not
mean that teachers were always affectionate or
demonstrative towards their students, but they are
all concerned about the implications their work
had and for the welfare of the community and for
'unjust social arrangements' (474). In terms of personal
accountability, Collins prefers this instead
of discussions of objectivity, since researchers
have to admit their commitments to ideological
value positions. The teachers talked about the
need to defy the administrative mandates
sometimes, or of actions they took which were
'more consistent with their beliefs and values',
say in altering a mandated reading program and
suggesting an alternative. Ladson Billings saw a
personal responsibility to spell out what she
meant by culturally relevant pedagogy.
There have been lots of explanations for the
failure of African-American students, some looking
to their 'caste -like minority' or 'involuntary
immigrant status [this is Ogbu!], Cultural
differences and cultural mismatch. Little has been
done to examine success, although there has been
some work on effective schools, based on how some
schools managed to achieve above predicted levels
on standard tests. The students she observed did
achieve at higher levels, although still lagged
behind middle-class communities. They all
demonstrated additional student achievements, such
as 'an ability to read, write, speak, compute,
pose and solve problems at sophisticated levels…
[discuss] their own questions about the nature of
teacher – or text pose problems… [undertake]
peer-review of problem solutions' (475).
The literature has also identified that academic
success sometimes brings a problem with
well-being, including cultural well-being, the
need to act White, the risk of being ostracised by
peers. The effects have been seen in failure to
thrive after elementary grades, and the social
isolation of successful students, partly to avoid
negative stereotypes from teachers (476). So there
is a matter of negotiating here, and culturally
relevant pedagogy must provide a way to do this.
One example is to use lyrics of rap songs to teach
poetry, before moving on to more conventional
poetry, encouraging rappers, or channelling
peergroup leadership, even among dropouts and
truants into other forms of leadership [it all
looks like Kes], permitting distinctive
dress and language style, so that students 'were
able to see academic engagement as "cool"'.
Students should also understand and critique
social inequities, presupposing that teachers do.
Teacher education is not very good at this [little
else these days!] , and a model might be seen
instead in the work of civil rights workers in the
USA. She also likes Freire and other critical
scholars like Giroux or Ellsworth. Some teachers
were able to localise this, working in the
community and its early history, or looking at
regulations that divided up their local town to
permit alcohol sales in poor communities.
She gradually developed 'a grounded theory of
culturally relevant pedagogy', since the practice
she observed was successful. Actual pedagogy,
though, varied — some was 'more structured and
rigid', others 'more progressive'. They did have
commonalities, though, 'broad propositions (or
characteristics) that service theoretical
underpinnings of culturally relevant pedagogy'
(478). We should not dichotomise these or see them
as fixed, but we can systematise them a bit to
make them more accessible. We can divide them into
three broad propositions:
Conceptions of self and others. The decline
of the status of teaching as a profession
increases when you work with low status students,
but these teachers challenge that notion,
believing all students were capable of academic
success, seeing their pedagogy as an art, seeing
themselves as members of the community, and
believing in giving back to the community. Some
had a 'Freirian notion of "teaching as mining"… or
pulling knowledge out' (479). These were
constantly demonstrated. Students were not allowed
to choose failure, they were cajoled, pestered and
bribed, they were not subjected to a language of
lack, they were not referred to as coming from
deprived backgrounds. Teachers referred to their
own shortcomings and limitations instead. Teachers
displayed spontaneity and energy and were willing
to take risks, and to respond to particular views
that emerged in the classroom. Three of them lived
in the school community, and the others visited
the community. One used the community as a
resource and even invited guest speakers,
presenting proposals to the city council, to
revive the status of the community.
Social relations. Good classroom social
interactions have long been advocated, including
cooperative learning, heterogeneous ability
groupings and the like. These teachers maintained
fluid relationships, tried to demonstrate a
connectedness with all the students, develop the
community of learners and encourage students 'to
learn collaboratively and be responsible for one
another' (480). They were equitable and
reciprocal, for example students were allowed to
act as teachers sometimes to explain concepts or
aspects of student culture, asked whether they had
helped other learners, made sure that they thought
they were 'working with smart classes', teachers
even sharing their experiences as graduate
students. Ladson-Billings observed occasions where
students themselves were able to use teacher
discourses about educational objectives or
metacognition to describe their own activities.
Both formal and informal peer collaborations we
used, in one case a buddy system where buddies
checked each other's home working class
assignments, tested each other, checked up on each
other at home. They saw themselves as the family.
Conceptions of knowledge. Knowledge is not
static but shared and constructed, to be viewed
critically. Teachers were passionate about
knowledge and learning, saw themselves
scaffolding, facilitating learning. Assessment
'must be multifaceted, incorporating multiple
forms of excellence' [it would be interesting to
see how that one works!] (481). Knowledge was
active, and involved things like identifying areas
in which they had expertise, nominating students
as classroom experts, asking them to make
presentations on their expertise. Classmates were
expected to be attentive take notes, ask
questions. Topics could include rap music singing,
cooking, hair braiding, or reading, writing and
mathematics. Teachers helped students do critical
analysis, for example of some of the textbooks
they met, and sometimes students were 'enlisted…
as allies against the school district's policies'
[!] (482). With assessment, some teachers
'actively fought the students' right answer
approach… without putting the students down'. They
did 'talk aloud', asking why questions are
important, or what students were thinking, whether
they were satisfied with the answer. They
distinguished between 'an intellectual challenge
and the challenge the authority of their parents'
they were 'affirmed in their ability to code
switch' between African-American and standard
English and also 'in the attempts at role
switching between school and home' (482). [Not
negative at all, then,but a good coping strategy!]
Sometimes they chose between the standards of
evaluation and their own evidence they could use
as proof of mastery. Apparently none of them
'seemed to have test anxiety' but saw the tests as
'necessary irritations, took them, scored better
than their age grade mates at their school, and
quickly returned to the rhythm of learning in the
classroom [brilliant! Couldn't do better myself!].
Overall, researchers still need to help prepare
teachers deal with students in urban poverty, by
understanding their own and others' cultures and
how it functions. They should not exoticize
diverse students as other, which is the tendency
in multicultural education or human relations
courses, but develop a culturally relevant
pedagogy that problematises teaching [hear hear!.]
They might systematically include student culture
as 'authorised official knowledge' and encourage
praxis as in Lather. We need to do more research
and find additional exemplars to ground our
research in. This means we need to take excellent
practitioners seriously and develop methodologies
accordingly, with 'meaningful combinations of
quantitative and qualitative enquiries' (484).
Can only certain teachers do this? The teachers
themselves are quite diverse, but what they shared
was beliefs grounded in the educability of
students. Of course there are implications for
those who do not share this belief, but she sees
the need to proceed, especially working with
'young middle-class white women' who are the bulk
of her teacher trainees.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2014) Culturally
Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix. Harvard
Educational Review. 84 (1): 74--86.
She summarises the 1995 work, now re-described as
three major domains 'academic success, cultural
competence and sociopolitical consciousness' (75).
This work has been widely cited and extended. It
has been argued that it should be more political,
or possibly more feminist. But there have been
other changes in scholarship especially 'a more
dynamic view of culture'. Conceptions like youth
culture are still not easily defined, although
they still have notions of membership language
beliefs and so on. There are other changes,
including those produced by three generations of
Hmong in the upper Midwest, with mixed identities.
The title of this piece indicates that there may
be future versions and remixes.
[Apparently there has been a symposium to develop
culturally sustaining pedagogy] to chart the
changes and adaptations of culturally relevant
pedagogy and how marginalised students might
contribute to it. There is interest in other than
African-Americans: she focused on them because
nothing was written and they were seen as the most
underachieving ones. The new conceptions of
critically sustaining pedagogy still has the same
idea of students as subjects. Growth and
adaptation is crucial to avoid 'academic death'
(76).
Cultural relevance itself has become rather
static, losing 'fluidity and variety within
cultural groups', or ignoring the sociopolitical
dimensions and critical edge. She saw new
possibilities after working with 'First Wave, the
innovative spoken word and hip-hop arts programme
at the University of Wisconsin – Madison' (78).
There was a 'learning community of spoken word
artists… A commitment to fully integrate hip-hop
culture into the Academy'. The idea is that youth
culture, hip-hop especially, can change the way in
which people think learn and perform. It is global
but still largely absent from universities, but
the University program intended to 'recruit and
financially support student artists' just like
they had with athletes. They were enrolled on an
existing undergrad major, quite often education.
They have to meet conventional university
requirements and 'this is where we began to see
some cracks in our programming'.
Many expressed a desire to give back, most
commonly by becoming teachers, but many were
disappointed 'in the quality of the programs',
finding themselves in conventional teacher
education courses mostly filled with 'young White
women from suburban (and some rural) communities
who still thought about POC… in deficit terms'. Of
those who left, some opted for alternative
certification routes.
So she created a special seminar course —
'Pedagogy Performance and Culture', open to any
undergraduate, but with at least half (10) slots
reserved for First Wave (FW) students. There was a
concurrent public lecture series after each class,
so that each of the lecturers could be invited to
the seminar. They included 'scholars, artists,
community activists and media personalities',
often with particular interests in hip-hop. The
students depended on her, but she depended on them
to lead into new ways of understanding popular
culture and how it might be used 'to engage in
conversations about critical theoretical concepts
such as hegemony, audit cultures, and
neoliberalism as well as develop new pedagogical
strategies' (79). The session might start by
somebody prepared to 'spit a poem' and these were
often very successful and engaged in various forms
of social injustice, and also demonstrated that
learners can be the source of knowledge and
skills.
They had conventional syllabus, discussions and
assignments, and read 'canonical social
theorists', but they also had alternative texts
like hip-hop lyrics, videos of hip-hop, protest
poetry. The final assessment was a performance,
originally a public performance incorporating
concepts discussed in class, or, for non-First
Wave, a curriculum project using hip-hop, but the
students began to collaborate among themselves —
one borrowed from FW students techniques to
increase dramatic expression. So eventually all
students participated in a final 'cypher' (80),
with self formed groups, although they had to
include FW and non-FW, and could work with the
artistic director. The point was to show how
education research was 'melded' with this new
cultural form. Before the public performance, they
rehearsed, FW were particularly nervous about the
limited time they had to develop their art, while
the others are just nervous about performance.
However the performances were 'seamless' and
non-FW were sometimes prominent. Some of them
admitted that they had never expected POC to be
'raising the critical questions and pushing the
discourse'.
[Shame no examples really]
She included examples mostly from
African-American, Latino and Southeast Asian
immigrant cultures, and addressed a recent
controversy about including Mexican-American
studies in Arizonan schools. This demonstrated for
her the need for change to meet new generations.
So gradually, culturally sustaining pedagogy
worked and the other authors in this volume [?]
show some developments. She had been taught the
importance of theory in educational research at
the beginning of her career, especially in Cohen's
notion of '"status equalisation"' (81) which
suggested that in the classroom, some students
would disadvantaged 'just by virtue of who they
are', the demographics limited their opportunities
because they were used to make judgements about
their abilities. Cohen had developed a remedial
instructional strategy — 'cooperative learning'.
However, that was developed in very different
ways, and became a mere activity, used to change
the pace in classrooms. She learned that
'consumers of your ideas feel free to use (or
abuse) your idea as they see fit'. She noticed the
same with Zeichner and his notion of reflective
teaching and how it had become a buzzword,
especially at conferences, turned into some sort
of process without content. Her own work on
culturally relevant pedagogy has also had a life
of its own and has become 'totally unrecognisable…
often a distortion and corruption of the central
ideas I attempted to promulgate' (82). People had
added some books about people of colour, had a
particular ethnic celebration or posted diverse
images. We need to remain vigilant and steadfast
and guard against degradation
[Review of the contributions
ensues]. Paris and Alim consider hip-hop but are
critical of much of hip-hop education that
currently exists, which is voyeuristic and trendy,
and does not break with hegemonic hierarchy.
McCartney and Lee talk of culturally revitalising
pedagogy working with indigenous youth and trying
to revitalise their disappearing languages and
cultures, and wonder whether this can be done
without national sovereignty.
In a coda, Ladson Billings says that we need more
significant theoretical grounding, not just to
abbreviate summaries of data but to explain why
things happen. She likes Giroux and Simon on
critical pedagogy, developed especially for 'the
subaltern or underclass' (83). She recognises that
'in this era of state-mandated high-stakes
testing', conventional 'mundane content and
skill-focused curricula' cannot be ignored, but
this requires teachers to take on a dual
responsibility, to meet both demands.
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