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The research tells us a lot about culturally responsive teaching. One of the things that it tells us is that it’s really a great mitigating factor for acculturated stress. And what acculturated stress is, is stress that is created when a cultural shift happens in an environment. And a lot of people think that it’s just ethnic culture.
So for instance, maybe you’re teaching international students and you fly to move and you live in China and you’re teaching Chinese students, but maybe you’re not from China. But it can also be just the change in actual environmental culture. So for instance, maybe a student of any ethnicity that was raised in a rural area and then moves to an urban area to go to school. That is a cultural shift that could create acculturated stress.
And so what we know is, is when we use a culture, a culturally responsive teaching to teach our students, it can mitigate that and bring that down and so they’re able to learn more effectively. Additionally, there’s some things that are missing from the research as well. When we look at the bigger theories that we’ve been using for a very long time, especially theories from the early 1900s, we know that ethnicity wasn’t a big factor in those theories, but yet we’re still using them.
And so really just looking at the theories and not necessarily throwing them out altogether, but saying, hey, if we’re looking at this theory in a different cultural context, this may be very, very beneficial for a lot of our students.
Much of the research on culturally responsive teaching has emerged from consideration of acculturative stress, i.e., a reduction in health status as a result of acculturation. Examples include, but is not limited to, African American or African/Latino students in the UK who attend predominantly white institutions, Rural White Students making a shift from farm culture to academic culture, or students attending international students in various countries around the world.
The key findings in the research are:
- Acculturative stress via racism, acculturation, oppression, prejudice negatively impacts social and learning outcomes.
- Culturally responsive teaching is an effective tool for decreasing feelings of isolation, depression, and acculturative stress.
- Current methods of cultural responsiveness are generalised and do not “prescriptively” meet the level of effectiveness when working with students as whole groups, small groups, or individuals.
Click here to view the video transcript
In 1932, there was an experiment by the US government, and they went into rural Alabama and they told African-American men that they were doing a study on bad blood, when in fact they were studying syphilis and in some cases they were injecting people with syphilis. In some cases, people died. And about 15 years later in Guatemala, the US government did the same thing. And so there are definitely cultural implications for both of those studies, and just bringing that to the forefront is an example of cultural responsiveness.
Discussions
What examples of cultural responsiveness have you come across?
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