Culturally Relevant

One Saturday afternoon, while driving on the highway in Richmond, Virginia with two children, Che and Darron, ages 5 and 6, a popular R&B song, Jump Jump, came on the radio. Both children began to sing the lyrics: “...Kriss Kross will make you jump jump. “ I was shocked the children knew the lyrics, so I turned the radio down to see if they really knew the words. Even though I had lowered the volume, they continued to sing the song. For the next hour they sang almost every song on the radio.

Several hours later, I noticed how uninterested Che and Darron became when we attempted some introductory reading activities in a phonics reading skills book. As a beginning Learning Sciences graduate student eager to try out my teaching skills, I was discouraged and tried to think of some way to keep my uncooperative subjects’ attention. Finally, I said, “let’s try to read the lyrics to the song Jump Jump.” Both Che and Darron excitedly agreed, and we spent the next hour that day, and about fifty minutes the following day, reading the lyrics to some of their favorite songs.

Cultural Disconnect

The story of Che and Darron told above highlights a problem that occurs all too often to too many of America’s children. Many times children are disconnected from the instructional practices that are used in the classroom. As a result students are classified as being uninterested in learning or too lazy to apply themselves. In reality many of these students are not uninterested or lazy but unmotivated because of the failure of teachers, researchers, textbook authors and parents to connect what the students know to what we want to teach them in schools. Since students have no voice when decisions are made regarding the selection of instructional materials and strategies, they are an easy target to be cast in the role of scapegoat when the materials and strategies do not prove successful.

This situation has proven especially problematic for members of minority groups because most of the instructional strategies and materials they used were not developed with their experiences, strategies, and knowledge in mind. As a consequence, minority students in schools across the country are experiencing difficulty achieving. When the problem of the achievement difficulties of African-American students has arisen the solution many times has placed the blame with the students by labeling them “deficient” and in need of fixing.

Researchers such as Hirsch (1988) have argued for the alignment of the knowledge and experiences of minority students with the knowledge and experience of majority students by requiring minority students to read a predetermined list of books that are believed to contain the knowledge necessary to acquire the knowledge posessed by the majority culture. When these methods have been tried they have led to further isolation on the part of the minority student and continued academic problems. The persistence of poor performance leads some researchers (e.g. Herrnstein & Murray 1994) to argue more adamantly for the ”deficit” model. In effect a spiraling downward cycle exists in regards to minority students’ motivation and academic achievement which eventually results inmany minority students giving up on the educational system.

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Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

In response to the continued motivational and academic problems of minority students, researchers (e.g., Guittierez 1994, Ladson-Billings 1994, Lee 1992, Moll 1992) have called for a new approach to addressing these problems. They reject the “deficit” model and embrace the “cultural affordance” model. The “cultural affordance” model focuses on the knowledge and experience students bring to the classroom as the beginning point in the development of instruction.

Culturally relevant pedagogy calls for instruction to be made relevant to the student by finding an intersection between (a) the student’s knowledge and skills and (b) school’s knowledge and skills by engaging the student in active investigations so she can discover the connections between what she knows and what teachers want her to know (Lee 1992).

The premise of this model is that learning is most efficient when students are able to draw upon knowledge of concepts, procedures, and strategies they know well in order to construct for themselves a mental representation of the new concept, procedure and strategy. It is important that students are actively emerged in this process so they can discover how the new knowledge and old knowledge are linked, how they are the same, and how they differ. In addition to helping students learn information, culturally relevant pedagogy motivates students to learn by contextualizing their learning.

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Culturally Relevant Reading Instruction

Most teachers have accepted the concept of individual differences, this acceptance unfortunately is not generally reflected either in their pedagogical practices or in the structure of the reading programs in which they teach. Educators continue to spend the majority of the school day engaged in whole-class instruction. Reading programs frequenctly mandate activities which clearly conflict with the individual differences of children. If a reading program is to be truly effective, educators must close the gap between committement and practice. Reading programs must provide for the individual differences of children.

As researchers search for methods to bring teachers’ views and practices more inline, technology has risen as a possible tool to help bring individual instrution to the classroom. Many researchers have studied the ability of technological interventions to help teachers make this transition. This dissertation attempts to focus on such technology by defining the necessary components to create an individualized computer-based learning environment for beginning reading instruction. The use of technology as the medium of delivery for the instructional methodology outlined above is crucial because of the pressures that the implementation of such a methodology would place on teachers. In order for teachers to implement a reading curriculum that draws from diverse reading material and multiple instructional strategies they would need to:

Such expectations might be reasonable in classrooms with a ratio of five children to every teacher, but we are dealing with classrooms with a ratio of thirty children to every teacher. Fortunately, technology enables us to provide reading software that aids the teacher in implementing individualized reading instruction. The decreasing cost of educational technology makes it reasonable to provide software for the classroom.

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Culturally Relevant Computer-based Learning Environments

The work of Lee (1992) around culturally relevant English instruction and Ladson-Billings (1994) around culturally responsive teacher education are excellent examples of culturally relevant pedagogy in practice. These researchers provide models for others to consider in designing instructional units and materials. In this chapter, I wish to extend their research on culturally relevant pedagogy in another direction by discussing how the culturally relevant pedagogical model can serve as a framework for the design of culturally relevant computer-based learning environments.

I choose to focus on the adaptation of the culturally relevant pedagogical model because:

The consequences of these two factors require educators and technologists to ponder answers to the question of “What role, if any, will technology play in improving the educational outcomes of all of America’s children, especially the outcomes of minority children?”

Just because a classroom has ample computer hardware does not mean that the computers will be used effectively. Once the computers are in the classroom the burden turns to creating software that effectively achieves learning goals for all students. Many times the only battle fought is to get computers into the classrooms; once installed there is no effort made to make sure appropriate software is purchased, built, or used.

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Last modified: April 12, 1998