February is Black History Month, a designation that prompts many schools to put on plays, fill bulletin boards with pictures of prominent African Americans, and take a moment to talk about race and culture. It's good that this happens at all during the school year, but shouldn't the conversations teachers have this February happen all the time?

Our world is getting smaller every day and the need has never been greater for people to reach out and build genuine communities rooted in shared understanding. So as teachers it is perhaps just as much our responsibility to practice culturally responsive teaching as it is to teach our students reading and math.  

Where to begin? Here are some core strategies to consider:

• "Acknowledge the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups as content to be taught in the formal curriculum.
• Bridge home and school experiences
• Find meaningful connections between academic abstractions and lived sociocultural realities
• Use a variety of instructional strategies aligned with student learning styles; and
• Incorporate multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools."

Send your own ideas or examples of culturally responsive teaching to jenna@inspiredteaching.org.

If you're going to start talking about complicated topics like race and culture with your students, you're going to need to set the stage for respectful discussions. 

Saturday, February 28, 2009: American University