Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Culturally relevant pedagogy, also called culturally responsive teaching, treats a student's own culture as a strength to build instruction on rather than expecting the student to assimilate into an unfamiliar school culture. Education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings popularized the term and its framework in the early 1990s from observational research on teachers whose African-American students were recognized by parents and peers as both academically successful and confident in their own identity. The approach is built on validating and affirming a student's cultural heritage, using it comprehensively as a teaching resource across the classroom's methods and environment, and pursuing a liberating, transformative practice meant to empower students to question, rather than simply accept, the educational status quo.