Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Cultural Relevance has been an issue on my mind lately. I was recently asked by my principal if I would like to teach a culturally relevant pedagogy classroom next year. I asked him what culturally relevant pedagogy actually is and what I would be required to do. He told me that there is no curriculum for it and it is more of a way of teaching than an actual subject. My current class consists of Bosnians, Latin Americans, Tongans, and so many others that don’t fit into those categories. So I set off and did my own research on this topic. I must say that it seems this is a subject that is just beginning to bloom, and therefore there are not as many in depth explanations on the Internet as I would have liked to find. However, I did find a few things that caught my interest. I found a power point that was posted by a teacher named Tracy Wagner that teaches in a culturally relevant classroom and from her one power point my search expanded. I discovered a book entitled The Curriculum: Problems, Politics, and Possibilities. There is a section on Cultural relevance in the book so I am waiting for it to arrive and I am excited to start reading it.
This is the perfect time to be given the opportunity to teach a class around cultural relevance. We are at a turning point in our country right now. The white man, the woman, and the African-American are all in line to be our next president. If that doesn’t scream cultural relevance I don’t know what does. I am still wondering what has taken this world so long to reach the point of having cultural relevance enter the classroom. For so long it has been an actuality that we as educators have put on the back burner. I only wish I had the opportunity to attend a culturally relevant class when I was in elementary school. We cannot change the past only the future so I am just so glad that I will now be able to teach in a class centered around cultural relevance.
