Culturally Relevant Teaching - Characteristics of Culturally Relevant Teaching

Characteristics of Culturally Relevant Teaching

A number of authors, including Gay and Lipman have identified characteristics of culturally relevant teaching. These characteristics are:

  1. Validating and Affirming: Culturally relevant teaching is validating and affirming because it acknowledges the strengths of students’ diverse heritages
  2. Comprehensive: Culturally relevant teaching is comprehensive because it uses "cultural resources to teach knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes."
  3. Multidimensional: Culturally relevant teaching encompasses many areas and applies multicultural theory to the classroom environment, teaching methods, and evaluation.
  4. Liberating: Culturally relevant teachers liberate students.
  5. Empowering: Culturally relevant teaching empower students, giving them opportunities to excel in the classroom and beyond. "Empowerment translates into academic competence, personal confidence, courage, and the will to act."
  6. Transformative: Culturally relevant teaching is transformative because educators and their students must often defy educational traditions and the status quo.

In the context of British University Business Schools, Jabbar and Hardaker (2012) have proposed a five pillar framework that is designed to support academics in understanding the pertinent aspects of developing pedagogy for students from culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds in UK Higher Education

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