You Cant Teach What You Dont Know Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory

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You Can't Teach Us if Yous Don't Know The states and Care Near Us

Condign an Ubuntu, Responsive and Responsible Urban Instructor

Textbook XXVI, 240 Pages

Summary

This book addresses the needs of diverse urban students for a new kind of teacher, classroom learning context, curriculum, and education in order to finer learn, perform, and accomplish. Drawing on the African concept of Ubuntu every bit a key framework for enacting a humanizing pedagogy, the text invites teachers, students, and families to enter into an interdependent and interconnected relationship for education. This book is uniquely transformative as it elevates the centrality of pupil humanity and models the integration of emergent theories and practices, utilizing real-life stories to enlighten and illuminate. Emphasis is placed on Ubuntu didactics as a model to emulate, anchored on v ethical dimensions: humanism and Ubuntu competence, relationship and learning community, humanism in the curriculum, pedagogical and instructional excellence, and collaboration and partnership. Particularly valuable for teachers learning to cultivate the spirit of Ubuntu that undergirds their power to be humane, responsive, socially- just, efficacious, and resilient, this book is a cutting-edge resource for effectively addressing the persistent bookish achievement of various urban students.

Extract

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Nigh the Writer
• About the Volume
• This eBook tin can be cited
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Transforming Power of Education
• Part I: Toward an Ubuntu Education and Pedagogy for Urban Students
• Chapter one. Educating Urban Students for a Multicultural Commonwealth
• Chapter Overview
• Educating for Democratic Citizenship
• Demographics, Urban Students, and Accomplishment Realities
• Definitions
• Urban
• Urban Schools
• Urban Students
• Urban Students, Challenges, and Bookish Walk
• Societal Mental attitude
• Students' Domicile Background and Poverty
• Inadequate Teacher Preparation
• Hierarchy and Corruption
• Curriculum, Standardization, and High-Stakes Testing
• Inequitable Policies and Practices
• Micro (In-Class) Factors
• Instructor Disposition and Unresponsive Pedagogy
• Unresponsive Classroom Environs
• Lack of Sociopolitical Consciousness and Agency
• Urban Students Are Capable and Resilient
• What Urban Students Want and Need
• Ubuntu-Oriented Education
• Summary
• Self-Reflection and Activities
• Affiliate 2. Ethic of Humanism and Ubuntu Competency
• Affiliate Overview
• Teachers in Urban Schools
• European American (White) Teachers
• Teachers of Color
• Cultural Competence
• Ubuntu Competence
• Civilisation, Socialization, and Worldview
• Understanding Microcultural Educatee Groups' Worldviews
• African American Students and Families
• Arab American Students and Families
• Asian American Students and Families
• European/Anglo (White) Americans
• Latino American Students and Families
• Native Americans
• Summary
• Cocky-Reflection and Activities
• Part II: Enacting Ubuntu Pedagogy: Human relationship and Community
• Chapter 3. Ethic of Relationship and Learning Customs
• Chapter Overview
• Relationship Matters
• Understanding Relationships in Teaching and Learning
• Ubuntu and the Ethic of Care
• Ubuntu Classroom Community
• A Teacher'due south Dearest: Acceptance
• A Teacher's Love: Affirmation
• A Teacher'south Dearest: Authority
• A Instructor'due south Love: Accountability
• Enacting Ubuntu Relationships and Classroom Community
• Learn Noesis of Microcultural Groups
• Communicate Desire to Know Students
• Students Write Self-Narrative
• Inquire Others about Students
• Get into Students' Lives by Being a Detective
• Visit Students' in-and out of School Contexts
• Shadow a Culturally Different "Other"
• Share Personal Life Stories
• Recognize Students' Humanity
• Be Proactive with Students' Names
• Apprehensive Yourself to Be Taught
• Teachable Moment
• Recognize the Uniqueness of Students and Their Cultures
• Teacher Self-Examination and Reflection
• Teach Humane Values and the Common Adept
• Establish Class Meetings
• Discipline and Consequences
• Teach Effective and Healing Words
• Monitor the Learning Community
• Summary
• Cocky-Reflection and Activity
• Chapter iv. Ethic of Curriculum Humanization
• Chapter Overview
• Curriculum and Educational Inequality
• Agreement Curriculum in U.S. Schools
• Urban Students' Need for a Different Curriculum
• Humanizing Students through the Curriculum
• Cultural Relevance
• Social Justice
• Characteristics of a Humanizing Curriculum
• Student-Centeredness
• Draws on Students' Cultural Capital/Funds of Knowledge
• Inclusiveness
• Interdisciplinarity
• Pervasiveness and Permeability
• Rigor and Relevance
• Untracked and Accessible to All
• Uses a Multifariousness of Bias-Costless Resources and Materials
• Embeds Social Issues and Activism
• Fair and Equitable Assessment System
• Curriculum Humanization across Content Areas
• Humanizing Urban Students' Language Arts/Literacy Learning
• Humanizing Urban Students' Mathematics Learning
• Humanizing Urban Students' Science Learning
• Humanizing Urban Students' Social Studies and Learning
• Cess and Humanizing Practices
• Humanizing Assessment Practices
• Openness to Multiple Means of Knowing and Solving Problems
• Utilize a Diversity of Assessment Measures
• Suspension with Convention and Build Learning Success
• Monitor Pupil Learning
• Navigating and Negotiating Mandated Curriculum and High-Stakes Cess
• Summary
• Cocky-Reflection and Activities
• Chapter 5. Ethic of Instructional/Pedagogical Excellence
• Affiliate Overview
• Value of Theory
• Behaviorism
• Constructivism
• Socioculturalism
• Critical Theory
• Critical Race Theory
• Ethic of Pedagogical Excellence
• Culturally Responsive Pedagogy/Pedagogy
• Social Justice Teaching/Teaching
• Equity Pedagogy
• Ubuntu Pedagogy
• Academic Excellence
• The Learning Context
• Students and Ways of Learning/Styles
• Humanizing Instructional Practices and Strategies
• Straight Instruction
• Cooperative Learning
• High Expectation
• Scaffolding
• Activating Prior Noesis (APK)
• Strategic Teaching
• Nonlinguistic Representation
• Discussion/Dialogue
• Differentiated Instruction
• Urban Students and Motivation
• Working with English language Linguistic communication Learners (ELL) and Newcomer Immigrants
• Summary
• Cocky-Reflection and Activities
• Chapter 6. Ethic of Collaboration and Partnership
• Chapter Overview
• African Perspective on Teacher and Parent/Family Human relationship
• Understanding Urban Parents/Families
• Teachers' Concerns
• Perspectives on Parental/Family Involvement
• Barriers to Urban Parental Involvement
• Ethic of Ubuntu Partnership and Collaboration
• Relationship Matters
• Trust
• Activity
• Debunk Myths most Urban Parents/Families
• Be Proactive
• Utilize Alternative Advice
• Enact Homeside Activities/Projects
• Resolve Conflict Humanely
• Collaboration with Colleagues
• Collaboration with Community
• Summary
• Cocky-Reflection and Activities
• Chapter seven. Decision: On Existence an Ubuntu Urban Teacher
• Chapter Overview
• Final Thoughts
• Purpose-Driven Instruction
• Internalize the Larger Role of Teaching
• Exist a Compassionate Intellectual
• You Can't Exist Colorblind
• Exist a Customs Teacher
• Learn to Listen
• Final Words of Wisdom
• Don't Teach against Your Conscience
• Get out a Proud Legacy
• A Wish for Our Urban Students
• References
• Series alphabetize

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The moment I began working on the manuscript I quickly learned that writing a volume is not simply ane person's work—information technology is collaborative. Many people have made this volume possible, including many urban students, teachers, and teacher candidates who directly or indirectly provided the motivation for the book. In item, I am grateful to Jennifer Bingham-Gawin, my former student, for allowing me to be a part of her teaching journey, to come up into her urban classrooms, and, most importantly, for her professional collaboration.

My deepest gratitude as well goes to my "sheroes"—my mother (mama), grandmother (Uwhewhe), and my mother-in-law (Yeye)—who taught me about the values of Ubuntu and the dearest for one's work.

My deep appreciation also goes to Christine Sleeter and Kevin Kumashiro for their friendship and incredible support of this piece of work. My thanks also go to Erdem Demiroz, my graduate enquiry banana for his technical help and my long-fourth dimension friend and collaborator, Debra Doyle.

I am most grateful to my married man, Peter Ukpokodu, for his relentless moral support throughout the writing of the volume. I deeply appreciate his diligent reading, splendid editing, and guidance of the manuscript. Thanks to my chil ← xi | xii → dren, and especially my granddaughter, who take inspired me and contributed to the ideas that enriched the book.

Finally, thank you to Rochelle Brock, Peter Lang's Black Studies and Critical Thinking serial editor, for the opportunity to publish the volume. ← xii | xiii →

FOREWORD

Christine Sleeter

Ubuntu. A give-and-take, as Omiunota Ukpokodu teaches us, that centers the piece of work of urban teachers in the mutual humanity nosotros share with our students, expressed through relationships we build with them. As she explains in this first-class book, Ukpokodu grew up in Nigeria. It was at that place that she first experienced powerful and loving education; students excelled academically despite the paucity of resource. Ubuntu grounds how the best teachers approach the rest of their piece of work—the curriculum they teach, the instructional strategies they choose, their approach to discipline, how they appraise learning, how they chronicle to students' families. Urban educators in the U.S. tin benefit greatly from what this book teaches, considering its central concept—Ubuntu—puts urban teachers' piece of work into a counterbalanced and holistic framework that is supported by research.

As a novice urban teacher decades ago, I recollect grasping intuitively the importance of relationships, but I lacked the pedagogical guidance this book offers. My first experience with urban pedagogy took place in a working-class, racially diverse high school in Seattle. Having grown upwards in a pocket-size rural town, I was quite unprepared for urban schools, but open to learning. I probably experienced some degree of cultural daze, but do not remember. What I call up vividly was my desire to know the students, and their interest in ← thirteen | fourteen → being known. Over the eight months I spent in that school, my students and I engaged in many conversations, specially outside the classroom. Equally students got to know me, they would tell me stories virtually their lives, their hopes, their families. Sometimes these conversations prompted me to back up them in unexpected ways, such as when I volunteered to supervise boys playing basketball in the gym during the dejeuner hour (without a teacher there, the gym would exist airtight), fifty-fifty though I knew nothing about basketball game.

Considering of these relationships, I stayed in urban education despite the paucity of jobs at the time. Only my relationships with students initially did not lead me to rethink my own taken-for-granted low expectations of their academic learning; that would come up later. I had recognized the students equally culturally diverse, interesting human being beings, and I recognized gaps betwixt what they seemed to desire and what I saw teachers doing. But I did not know what to do differently that would be acceptable within schools as I knew and had experienced them. I had figured out simply part of the puzzle of teaching.

We often hear that urban kids practice non care about educational activity, and that they need to be motivated. Equally Ukpokodu makes articulate, notwithstanding, while urban students (like everyone else) tell united states of america what works for them and what does non, too frequently they are misread or only not heard. When students put their heads on their desks or reject to go to class, the bulletin is not that they do not want to learn, only rather that what their teachers are offering is painful, irrelevant, or insulting. When young urban children ask questions ("Can nosotros acquire about xyz?" "Teacher, are you racist?"), they want usa to take their questions seriously; they stop asking them when they learn that teachers do not desire them. Urban youth sometimes take to the streets demanding a relevant education, such as Chicago students protesting closures of their neighborhood schools, and Tucson students protesting closure of Mexican American Studies classes. Information technology is no accident that Luis Valdez'southward "In Lak'Ech: You Are My Other Me" became a powerful affirmation of humanity in Tucson's Mexican American Studies classes, and a telephone call to action in back up of a humanizing educational activity (Dos Vatos Productions, 2011).

Such actions by urban youth represent attempts to disrupt systems that offer too little. They represent loud messages that urban youth desire a meaningful educational activity, a conclusion validated by a recent survey of more than 1,700 black and Latino youth in five urban areas (Chiles, 2013). The very title of this book—"You Can't Teach Us If Y'all Don't Know Us and Intendance about Us"—came from the mouths of urban youth.

We often hear that teachers in urban schools tin practice little—that their work is constrained by bureaucracies, lack of resources, mandated testing, ad ← xiv | xv → ministrators, apathetic parents, neighborhood violence, and on and on. In a written report of teacher recruits into urban teaching, Castro (2012) found several he identified as opportunists—teachers who did not believe they could accomplish much but viewed instruction equally a relatively easy way to earn a paycheck. Conversely, we sometimes hear that teachers can "salvage" urban children. Some of the teachers Castro studied described themselves as saviors of students from dysfunctional abode environments or unsafe neighborhoods that would victimize young people unless someone (like themselves) intervened.

Ukpokodu deftly dismantles these perspectives. Using a blend of storytelling and comprehensive syntheses of research, she portrays what strong urban teaching looks like, and what novice urban teachers can practise. Her utilise of Ubuntu equally an organizing framework enables her to connect inquiry findings and theoretical underpinnings of powerful teaching. Each chapter offers tools beginning teachers can employ to get started, and reflection questions to guide thinking and discussion.

Every bit a former urban instructor, although my intuitions guided me fairly well up to a point, I was not able to offer my students the quality of didactics they deserved because there were too many holes in my own knowledge. Novice urban teachers today are in a much meliorate position. "You Can't Teach United states If You lot Don't Know Us and Care virtually Us" is an important volume that must be taken seriously. ← xv | 16 → ← xvi | xvii →

INTRODUCTION

The Transforming Ability of Didactics

Every bit I have always done in my works (run across Ukpokodu, 2010, 2012, & 2016), I begin this introduction with the story of my babyhood beginnings.

As a child growing up in Africa, I quickly learned nearly the hope of education every bit "the bully blaster" and the passport to upward social mobility. As I entered the earth of education, this conventionalities was reinforced by historical and political figures, such as Benjamin Franklin (1749), Horace Mann (1848), Carter Thousand. Woodson (1933), Lyndon B. Johnson (1966), Nelson Mandela (2003) and many others, who espoused that education was non only the "great equalizer" but a force of transformation and social change for individuals, families, nations and the world. As President Johnson (1966) wrote, "I know education is the only valid passport from poverty." I was privileged to accept a firsthand feel of didactics as a leveling and transforming force. I had a humble beginning. I grew up in Nigeria, where I lived in a compound with a large extended family—grandmother, eight uncles, five aunts, their individual families, numerous cousins, and two adopted families with their own individual families. In the compound, each private family unit had a room that was shared among their immediate family members—wife/wives and children. I lived in a 20- by xxx-foursquare-foot sleeping room with my female parent and four siblings. The room was where nosotros slept, kept our belongings, had the drinking water ← xvii | xviii → pot, kitchen utensils, and food. My siblings and I slept on a mat on the floor, which, depending on the season, was either too cold or too hot. I was stung twice by a scorpion while I slept at nighttime. Ants, especially during the rainy season, were constant visitors; they crawled on us while we slept. Mosquitoes were an e'er-nowadays menace that buzzed in our ears and sucked our blood, making united states of america susceptible to malaria. I suffered from malaria frequently and was very sickly. We had no running water. We always had to walk five miles each manner every day to become to the stream to fetch water for cooking and drinking, and before and later school each 24-hour interval. Nosotros had an outdoor kitchen. We cooked our food on open flames. As children, our chores included going into the wood and farm areas to fetch firewood to create the flame. Nosotros did not accept electricity. We used kerosene-lit lamps for studying or doing homework. This was my lived reality for the showtime 12 years of my life.

Like my home, the schools I attended (unproblematic and secondary schools) were underresourced, compared to schools in the U.S., including those in urban schools. In comparison to my schools and others in many African countries, schools in the U.Due south. that are often classified as poor will be considered rich and well-resourced. Nosotros had no textbooks and our classrooms were bare. All we had were our teachers. Despite these limited resources, we had a quality, foundational education that immune us to perform well on high-stakes matriculating examinations for earning the London General Certificate of Pedagogy and the West African Senior Schoolhouse Certificate. We were able to successfully compete in archway examinations for admission into higher teaching. I grew upward learning that schools were wonderful places and spaces where a child was exposed to countless possibilities of dreams, hopes, and success. This was what I remembered near growing up and schooling in my homeland, before I immigrated to the U.S., three decades ago. Schools and classrooms were heady places. Friday was always a distressing day because it meant the weekend was near and the schoolhouse would exist closed. But Sunday was a happy 24-hour interval as school would be the next day. For many Africans, formal, Western education was fondly revered. Its importance and rewards were hands observable to all, whether educated or uneducated. The late, eminent African novelist, and writer of Things Fall Autonomously, Chinua Achebe, put information technology so well when he said that "teaching was the white man's knowledge and was a commonage aspiration of the entire community" (2012, p. 16). Recently, I co-edited a book titled Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African Educators on African and American Pedagogy. Contributing authors wrote passionately almost hailing from underresourced homes and nonetheless were able to shell the odds of poverty and achieve ← xviii | 19 → academic success. At the 2013 American Education Research Association (AERA) conference, several of the book contributors participated in a symposium entitled "Education, Poverty and the African Paradox." The symposium addressed this question: Why do students in African countries who come from poor and underresourced families and communities defy the odds of poverty and thrive academically; and why does the U.Due south., arguably the wealthiest and well-resourced country in the world, struggle to adequately educate all its children, especially those in urban communities? In my recollection of growing upward and schooling in my homeland, every child who entered the schoolhouse had the same opportunity for educational success and social upward mobility. Amobi (2007) notes a like experience in which "education constituted a sort of equalizer for those born into wealth, those in the eye … and the children of poverty" (p. 347). [...]

Today, as a teacher-educator, and as I wait back, I accept come to realize why and how my African teachers were able to teach us well and transform our lives. In modern-day instruction language, they were humanizing educators who were intimately invested in our success and in our community; teachers who internalized teaching equally a community service. They believed and committed to collective responsibility toward educating the kid and held high expectations for students and self. In our secondary education, although nosotros read books by prominent African authors, such equally Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, to mention a few, our teachers as well exposed u.s.a. to Western literature that broadened our cognition and stimulated our imagination. We were exposed to classical books, such as William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and others; Charles Dickens's A Tale of Ii Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist; Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; Jane Austen'southward Pride and Prejudice; George Orwell's Animate being Farm, and many others. These books were transforming, stirred my imagination, and helped me dream of a globe beyond my fiddling African "village."

Equally a instructor educator in the U.Southward. academy, I have read and known about educators who, similar my homeland teachers, have been successful in transforming the lives of minoritized students in U.S. urban schools. The success story of Marva Collins, a renowned educator who successfully educated children from impoverished backgrounds, some of whom had been labeled as learning disabled and unteachable, is well documented. Films such as Stand and Evangelize, Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me, and Freedom Writers, among others, depict the stories of existent teachers in U.S. urban schools and their success in working with ← xix | xx → students. However, these teachers are the exception rather than the norm. Many students in urban schools feel impoverished and second-class instruction that in plow keeps them and their families and community inescapably poor. Urban students are "tired" of the second-grade education they experience, and they are crying out for an end to it.

Biographical notes

Omiunota Nelly Ukpokodu (Author)

Omiunota N. Ukpokodu received her PhD in Curriculum and Education from Kansas University and is a Professor of Instructor Education and Curriculum Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her teaching and research focus on multicultural teacher pedagogy, transformative/disinterestedness/social justice instruction, social studies, and immigrant education. She is the recipient of the 2011 NAME Equity and Social Justice Advancement Laurels and the Fulbright-Hays Scholar (S Africa) Laurels.

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Source: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1109648

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