ELM 375 Overview

Culturally relevant teaching embodies collective empowerment in the classroom and rests

on the pillars of academic succes, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. This semester,

throught activites and assignments that we have seen implemented in the classroom, I have

learned the importance of teaching with culturally relevant pedagogy.

I hope that my classroom will embody culturally relevent pedagogy through academic

success. I plan to do this by providing students with leadership roles in our morning meetings,

encouraging student-to-student discourse throughout each class, and teaching with a growth

mindset that thrives on challenges and sees failure as an opportunity to grow. I believe that

goal-setting and giving expectations regularly will set students up for academic success. I hope

to incorporate this practice during transitions to read alouds, independent work, and station work.

I want to also give the students as many opportunities as possible to observe many different types

of materials and demonstrations through hands-on activities to make sure the information is

understood.

I plan to foster cultural competence in my class by creating a welcoming classroom space

that allows us to understand, appreciate and interact with people that are different than us. I hope

to acomplish this through assignments that allow students to share things about themselves.

Examples of these types of activities are community building excersises and student I Am

poems. Knowing these differences that make up our classroom will allow me to effectively

support, promote, and embrace cultural differences that my students have. I hope to have a

classroom that models cultural competence through kindness in the ways we act and the words
we say. I can encourage students to use kindness by keeping a bullentin board up called “Words

that Respect'' throughout the year.

A tool that I will implement to help my future students develop critical consciousness is

using Reader’s Theater in the classroom. By having students play different roles, they can more

easily learn from the different points of view in the script and gain persepctive for the social

issue being discussed. I want students to embrace self-identities through activities such as star

student of the week. As a class we can learn to celebrate our differences and use them to come

together to learn more about the world. I also will use culturally relevant literature to engage my

students in the learning of other cultures, values, and norms. I want to create a classroom of

helpers that take action and encourage students to explore more.

I have learned how critical it is to teach with culturally relevant pedagogy and have felt a

shift in my own mindset throughout this semester. Culturally relevant teaching embodies

collective empowerment in the classroom and rests on the pillars of academic succes, cultural

competence, and critical consciousness. I learned how important to people-first language and

growth mindset are for individuals’ academic success. What I have found from learning about

cultural competence through our assignments is that if we can help close achievement gaps

through implementing instruction based on our students’ cultural needs, then we are helping

students reach their full potential. Lastly, I learned how using different literacy tools can foster

students critical consciousness and that students actually want to take action in social issues.