Infusing Culturally Relevant Teaching in Teacher Education Curriculum at an Urban HBCU

Introduction

Presently, there is an attack on educators- what we teach, how we teach, who we are as teachers, why we present certain content, and which materials we use. This attempt at the extinction of truth-telling about American history, racism, sexism, enslavement, and other truths about the lived experience of people of color in the United States directly impacts current and future K12 teachers. As a teacher educator this is simultaneously worrying and empowering but leads to radically embracing culturally relevant pedagogy as a foundation for instruction in teacher preparation. According to Ladson-Billings (1995), culturally relevant teaching (CRT) is “a pedagogy of opposition (1992c) not unlike critical pedagogy but specifically committed to collective, not merely individual, empowerment” (p. 160). This is a theory rooted in opposition to standardized instruction and driven by communal engagement. Gay (2002) shares that culturally responsive teaching “is defined as using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively” (p. 106). In other words, knowing and valuing students’ various (i.e. family, school, community, faith, etc.) cultures affords us the opportunity to be highly effective teachers have a deeper understanding of student needs and experiences.

In the Fall of 2018, the process began to revitalize the current teacher preparation program offerings at a mid-Atlantic urban Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Across early childhood education human development, early childhood education, elementary education, and special education, there was an objective to infuse culturally relevant pedagogy into the program content. Since the program had not been changed in decades, this was necessary, not only for relevance of content, but also for the need to prepare highly qualified teachers to work with a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse student population. The plan was to create three new courses that explicitly detailed the components of CRT. Table 1 includes new course titles and descriptions. With these changes, there was also a desire to engage preservice teachers around their understanding of CRT and what this means for them in their future classrooms. The process of infusing these new courses into our teacher preparation programs included the input and approval of faculty at the department, college, and university level. Faculty was supportive of the change and inclusion of courses including culturally relevant content that would provide for opportunities to make our teacher preparation programs more aligned with current theoretical and pedagogical approaches. The courses were approved in Spring 2019 and two of the three courses were added to the academic schedule in Spring 2020, as is standard for the university, per the policy of waiting one semester after approvals are made to implement changes.