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Culturally ResponsiveInstruction: Application toMultiethnic ClassroomsKathryn H. Au aa University of HawaiiPublished online: 05 Dec 2007.
To cite this article: Kathryn H. Au (2007) Culturally Responsive Instruction:Application to Multiethnic Classrooms, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2:1,1-18, DOI: 10.1080/15544800701343562
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PEDAGOGIES: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, 2(1), 1–18Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Culturally Responsive Instruction:Application to Multiethnic Classrooms
Kathryn H. AuUniversity of Hawaii
Standards for literacy in developed nations have rapidly risen, fuelled by economiccompetition and globalisation. A danger in this rapid rise is the possibility ofa further widening of the gap that exists between the literacy achievement ofstudents of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and their mainstream peers.Culturally responsive instruction, or teaching that builds on the values and experi-ences students bring from the home, is a possible solution to eliminating theliteracy achievement gap. A new formulation of culturally responsive instructionis proposed—one that is centered on hybridity and a diverse worldview rather thana duplication of home settings.
To set the context for this discussion of culturally responsive instruction, I beginby considering the state of literacy in developed countries such as Singapore andthe United States. These countries have experienced rising standards for literacy,with an acceleration in this trend over the past 100 years. Historical researchin the United States (Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, Tinsley, & Trollinger,1991) demonstrates this dramatic rise.
RISING STANDARDS FOR LITERACY
In colonial America, individuals were considered literate if they could signtheir names. However, today, signature literacy is considered an unacceptablylow level of literacy even for 5-year-olds. In the second half of the 1800s,a literate American was one who could declaim with expression a familiarpassage that had been read many times before. Today we regard such oralreading with expression as an inadequate demonstration of literacy because
Correspondence should be sent to Kathryn H. Au, 1668 Kanalui Street, Honolulu, HI 96816,USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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it ignores the reader’s comprehension of the text. In 1900, at a time ofmassive immigration to the United States from southern and eastern Europe,the average American had a Grade-3 education—a level of literacy roughlyequivalent to that of an 8-year-old today. In 1940, on the eve of WorldWar II, the average American had a Grade-8 education. Standards for literacyrapidly rose in the second half of the 20th century; presently, the expectedlevel of literacy in the United States is considered to be at Grade 12. At thislevel, students are expected to comprehend informational texts, such as primaryand secondary historical texts, and to synthesise ideas from these differentsources.
Note that standards for literacy have only moved in one direction—up.I believe it is reasonable to assume that standards for literacy will continueto rise and that students in schools now will be expected to meet even higherstandards of literacy than in the past. An indication of this continued rise in theUnited States is the increased emphasis in large-scale reading assessments onconstructed responses in which students must demonstrate their comprehensionof a text by presenting an interpretation and justifying it with evidence from thetext (e.g., Hawaii State Department of Education, 2004). Another indication isfound in arguments that the definition of literacy should be expanded beyondprint to encompass visual literacy, including the strategies needed to interpretmultimedia presentations such as movies and Web sites (e.g., National Councilof Teachers, 1996).
Why are standards rising? According to political observers such as Friedman(2000), the answer is globalisation. Just as the agrarian economy gave way to theindustrial economy, the industrial economy is losing ground to the knowledgeand service economy. Friedman predicted that, in the world of the future,93% of workers will be employed in knowledge and service fields such aseducation, financial services, and tourism. Only 5% of workers will be employedin manufacturing, and only 2% in agriculture. As business leaders in the UnitedStates and Singapore realised over 1 decade ago, a nation that wants to maintain avibrant economy in the era of globalisation must educate its workers to out-thinkworkers in other parts of the world.
I am not suggesting that the only purpose for literacy education and schoolingis to produce workers for the global economy. In my opinion, literacy forthe purposes of citizenship and personal fulfilment are equally, if not more,important. However, as educators we must recognise that rising literacy standardsattributable to globalisation are part of macroeconomic trends that are highlyunlikely to change in the foreseeable future. We must be aware of the importanceof preparing the students in our classrooms today for the world of the futureand the likelihood that they will need to be skilled at using advanced forms ofliteracy, such as higher level thinking with text, to find success in the knowledgeand service economy.
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CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION 3
To provide a concrete illustration of just how rapidly standards for literacyhave risen, I present an overview of literacy across four generations of womenin my own family. My maternal grandmother, Shinn Ngun Moi, was born in theHakka village of Nam Wai in the New Territories, across the bay from HongKong, in 1883. My grandmother told me that there was a school in the village,but only boys could attend it. The year my grandmother was born, her fatherimmigrated to the Sandalwood Mountain, the name the Chinese gave to theHawaiian Islands. Thirteen years passed before he was able to send for his wifeand daughter. Once reunited, the family lived in the mountainside communityof Kula on the island of Maui, where my grandmother’s siblings—two brothersand a sister—were born. I asked my grandmother why she had never attendedschool in Kula. She replied that the Chinese families of that time did not believethat girls should be educated, and her help was needed at home. When truantofficers appeared, she told me, the families simply hid their daughters.
My grandmother married Hew Sing Cha, my grandfather, and moved to thesugar plantation community of Paia, Maui, where she raised a family of eight.My grandmother never had the chance to become literate either in Chinese orEnglish, a fact that she regretted all of her life. Because my grandparents rana store and restaurant, she learned to speak some English, Hawaiian, Japanese,and Ilokano to communicate with customers. She told me she could recognisenumbers and read labels if she saw the words repeatedly.
My grandmother had a strong belief in education and made sure that all ofher children—her daughters as well as sons—had the chance to go to school.Born in 1924, my mother, Mun Kyau Hew Au, is her youngest child. My motherwas in her senior year at Maui High School when Pearl Harbour was bombedby the Japanese on December 7, 1941. My mother went on to the Universityof Hawaii the following year and graduated 4 years later with a degree inmedical sciences. My parents met when they were both students at the university.My siblings and I all had the opportunity to receive university degrees. Mysister, Susan Au Doyle, born in 1951, earned a master’s degree in businessadministration.
The literacy of my niece, Kaitlyn Doyle, born in 1989, provides a strikingcontrast to that of my grandmother. To give just one example, Kaitlyn writes fora Web site called fanfiction.net, (www.fanfiction.net). She is a fan of an animeseries called Gundam Wing. Fans of this and other series can publish originalstories featuring their favourite characters on this Web site, and they can receivemessages from those who read their stories. One day, Kaitlyn was reading storieson fanfiction.net when she came across a passage that seemed strangely familiar.As she read on, she discovered that several paragraphs from one of her storieshad been plagiarised by another writer. Kaitlyn e-mailed the Webmaster aboutthe problem, and when she checked back the next day, the offending story hadbeen removed.
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As you can see, Kaitlyn’s opportunities to become literate and the world inwhich she lives are strikingly different from those of my grandmother’s. Kaitlynand her peers are adept at forms of literacy entirely unknown to previous gener-ations. Clearly, Kaitlyn and her contemporaries must be educated as thinkersso that they will be able to find their way in the high-tech world that alreadyplays a major role in their lives. Students must be able to engage in higher levelsthinking with text not only on the printed page but in the multimedia world ofcomputers and the Internet.
Along with many educators, I welcome the interest in higher level thinkingwith text motivated by rising standards for literacy. After more than 1 decade ofbeing eclipsed by debates about phonics, comprehension has finally returned toprominence in discussions of reading in the United States. Educators are onceagain seeking information about the teaching of comprehension strategies suchas determining important information, monitoring comprehension, and question–answer relations (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Raphael & Au, inpress). In my work with teachers, I currently emphasise two aspects of compre-hension and higher level thinking with text: critical evaluation, including teachingstudents to judge the reliability of sources and soundness of reasoning; andsynthesising, or integrating ideas and information from a variety of sources.
STUDENTS OF DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS AND THELITERACY ACHIEVEMENT GAP
This background of rising standards for literacy forms the context for consideringissues of equity affecting students of diverse backgrounds. By students of diversebackgrounds, I mean students who differ from the mainstream in terms ofethnicity, social class, and primary language (Gollnick & Chinn, 2002). Forexample, in the United States, students of diverse backgrounds are often AfricanAmerican, Latino, or Native American in ethnicity. These students come frompoor or working-class families, and they speak a primary language other thanstandard American English. Specifically, these students speak either anotherlanguage such as Spanish or Vietnamese, or a non-mainstream variety of Englishsuch as African American Vernacular English or Hawaii Creole English.
What conclusions can be drawn about schools’ success in helping studentsof diverse backgrounds to meet higher standards for literacy? To address thisquestion, I turn to results of the reading assessment of the U.S. NationalAssessment of Education Progress (NAEP), popularly known as the Nation’sReport Card. NAEP is the only large-scale, federally funded, testing programmein the United States. The NAEP reading assessment reflects the rising standardsfor literacy I have described, with over 40% of points given to items requiring
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CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION 5
higher level thinking with text—specifically, making reader–text connectionsand examining content and structure (U.S. Department of Education, 2003).
Figure 1 presents the 2002 NAEP reading test results for students in Grade12, or 18-year-olds (Jerry & Lutkus, 2003). Moving from left to right, the setsof bars show the achievement of students who are Black, Hispanic, White, andAsian/Pacific American (APA) in ethnicity. As shown in Figure 1, a lowerproportion of Black and Hispanic students, as compared to White and APAstudents, obtained scores at the proficient and advanced levels. The results showa mean scale score of 273 for Hispanic students at Grade 12, which is only1 point above the mean score of 272 obtained by White students at Grade 8.Similarly, the mean scale score for Black students at Grade 12 is 267, whichis the same as the mean score for APA students at Grade 8. In short, NAEPresults suggest that, by Grade 12, students of diverse backgrounds as a grouphave fallen about 4 years behind their peers in reading achievement.
The difference in achievement levels I have just described is known as theliteracy achievement gap. Rising standards in educational attainment confrontus with the real danger that students of diverse backgrounds may be left fartherbehind their peers than ever before. In the United States, recent NAEP resultsshow that the literacy achievement gap has either remained the same or slightlynarrowed (Jerry & Lutkus, 2003). Nevertheless, the gap remains unacceptablylarge.
Obviously, results obtained from tests such as the NAEP reflect only one kindof literacy variously termed autonomous, essayist, or mainstream literacy (e.g.,
FIGURE 1 2002 National Assessment of Education Progress reading: Grade-12 results.
Note. APA=Asian/Pacific American.
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Street, 1995). To foster the literacy of students of diverse backgrounds, educatorsmust embrace the broader concept of literacy that Street termed as multipleliteracies, to include community uses of literacy associated with nondominantlanguages and non-mainstream cultural practices. Tse (2001) and other propo-nents of bilingual and multilingual education in the United States persuasivelyargued that the real issue is not the failure of immigrants to learn English. To thecontrary, the evidence suggests that immigrants are motivated to learn Englishand tend to do so quite quickly. Instead, the real issue in the United States ispreservation of students’ many heritage languages and cultures.
Language loss can be swift and irreversible, and it can occur in a singlegeneration. I illustrate this point by drawing again on my own family history.My parents both spoke Chinese dialects as their first language—my father,Cantonese; my mother, Hakka. They gradually switched to speaking moreEnglish after entering school, and English became the dominant language forboth of them. My father’s first business was a grocery store in Honolulu’sChinatown, so he continued to speak “market Chinese” as an adult; I recall asa youngster hearing my mother speak Hakka to my grandparents and to hersiblings. However, my brothers, my sister, and I grew up speaking English andnever learned to speak Chinese, for a number of reasons. In the aftermath ofWorld War II, many Asian parents in Hawaii believed it was best to emphasiseAmerican ways when raising their children. Also, because Cantonese and Hakkaare not mutually intelligible dialects of Chinese, my parents’ common languagewas English. Finally, there was no need to learn Chinese to communicate withthe older generation because my grandparents could all speak English. In myextended family, no one of my generation can speak Chinese. In the push towardAmericanisation, an important part of our heritage culture was lost.
In my judgment, educators will want to have two goals when working withstudents of diverse backgrounds. The first goal is to help students acquire theknowledge, strategies, and skills that will enable them to meet higher standardsfor literacy and to successfully compete for rewarding jobs in the global economy.The second goal is to allow students to reach higher standards through culturallyresponsive instruction or ways of teaching and learning consistent with the valuesof their heritage cultures.
REASONS FOR THE LITERACY ACHIEVEMENT GAP
In building the case for culturally responsive instruction, I want first to explorereasons for the literacy achievement gap. Obviously, the gap is complexly deter-mined and may be attributed to the interaction of different factors (Au, 1998),including those that are difficult for educators to change, such as poverty. Here Iaddress two particular explanations for the gap that educators can work to correct.
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CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION 7
The first explanation is that the gap is, in part, attributable to the fact that studentsof diverse backgrounds have much fewer opportunities than mainstream studentsto develop higher level thinking with text. Research suggests that students ofdiverse backgrounds tend to receive a great deal of instruction emphasising lowerlevel skills as opposed to higher level thinking (Au, 2005; Darling-Hammond,1995; Fitzgerald, 1995). The question educators must address is how we can giveall students, and especially students of diverse backgrounds, access to instructionfocused on higher level thinking with text (Raphael & Au, in press). Suchinstruction is clearly of vital importance in the era of globalisation when thechallenge for educators is to bring all students to higher levels of literacy thanever before. Elsewhere I have argued that the emphasis on lower level skills androte learning so often seen in classrooms with students of diverse backgroundsis a consequence of low expectations of their academic achievement (Au, 2005).
The second explanation has to do with cultural incongruence, and this is theexplanation I discuss in detail. The idea is that there is a disparity between theway we usually “do school” and the literacy-learning needs, preferences, andinterests of students of diverse backgrounds. This disparity makes it difficult forstudents of diverse backgrounds to successfully participate in school literacy-learning activities and, therefore, to attain high levels of literacy achievement inschool.
Typical schooling, or the way we usually do school, fails to connect withthe literacy-learning needs and interests of students of diverse backgrounds intwo ways. First, typical schooling is centred on content oriented to mainstreamstudents and their perspectives. Many examples of the mainstream bias incurriculum content have been identified by researchers. In Hawaii, for example,it is only in recent years that students have been taught about the Polynesianmigration and the skills of the navigators who brought the ancestors of modern-day Native Hawaiians to the islands around 500 to 700 A.D. Previously, studentsin Hawaii’s schools were taught that the Hawaiian Islands were “discovered” bythe British explorer, James Cook, in 1783.
Second, typical schooling is based on social processes oriented to mainstreamstudents. These include an emphasis on whole-class (as opposed to small-group)teaching and use of the teacher-initiation, student-response, teacher-evaluation,or Ixxxxxxx Rxxxxxx Exxxxxx (IRE) pattern for structuring interaction (Mehan,1979). In studies that began 3 decades ago, researchers have demonstrated thatuse of the IRE pattern tends to pose a barrier to the successful participation inlessons of students of diverse backgrounds, including Native Americans (Philips,1983) and Native Hawaiians (Au, 1980). The difficulty is that the IRE requiresstudents to demonstrate that they know the answer to the teacher’s question byvolunteering and speaking as individuals. The IRE reflects the value attached bythe mainstream to competition and individual achievement, and these values areantithetical to those taught to many students of diverse backgrounds in the home.
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Native Hawaiian students, for example, are often raised to place a greater valueon cooperation and working for the good of the extended family (Gallimore,Boggs, & Jordan, 1974).
CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION
Culturally responsive instruction is proposed as a solution to these disparities.Different labels have been used for this concept including culturally relevantpedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Osborne, 1996), culturally responsive teaching(Gay, 2000), and culturally congruent instruction (Au & Kawakami, 1994).Rather than dwell on the nuances of differences among these terms, I highlight theassumptions shared by researchers who conduct studies in this area. One sharedassumption is that the goal of culturally responsive instruction is to increasethe school success of students of diverse backgrounds. Another assumption isthat school success is to be achieved by building bridges between students’experiences at home and at school. The idea is to foster (or at the very least,to maintain) students’ competence in the heritage culture and language. Finally,these researchers share the goal of promoting social justice through a focus onequality of educational outcomes and a celebration of diversity.
Culturally responsive instruction represents one of two theoretical paths forimproving the literacy achievement of students of diverse backgrounds, as shownin Figure 2. Advocates of the first path, which I call the direct or assimilationistapproach, believe that the school should immerse students of diverse backgroundsin mainstream content and interactional processes right from the outset. Thisis the dominant view of how education for students of diverse backgroundsshould proceed. The second path shown in Figure 2 is what I call the indirector pluralist approach; this is the path recommended by advocates of culturallyresponsive instruction. In the indirect path, schools first affirm and reinforce thecultural identity of students of diverse backgrounds. Working from this basis ofcultural identity, educators then give students access to mainstream content andinteractional processes.
The notion of culturally responsive instruction becomes complex because theconcepts of culture and instruction are both complicated and subject to varying
FIGURE 2 Two paths for educating students of diverse backgrounds.
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CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION 9
interpretations. Let me briefly deconstruct each of these concepts to clarify whatI mean by culturally responsive instruction.
What makes culture such a slippery concept is that it has two differentand seemingly conflicting dimensions. One dimension of culture centres on itsstability and the other centres on its dynamism. Culture is simultaneously bothstable and dynamic, and both dimensions must be addressed in efforts to improvethe literacy achievement of students of diverse backgrounds (Au, 2005). Thestable dimension refers to the fact that groups maintain cultural values acrossgenerations. For example, my grandmother grew up valuing education, althoughher family did not believe in sending girls to school; and this value was passedon to her while she was growing up in her home village in the New Territories.The dynamic dimension of culture refers to the fact that cultures may changeas groups enter new settings and face new circumstances. In this case, mygrandmother carried forward the value of education but extended it to includeher daughters as well as her sons, because in Hawaii girls had the opportunityto go to school.
Instruction, too, is a complex concept. From a constructivist perspective,I have interpreted instruction to comprise two parts (Au, 1993). First, the teachermust ensure that students become interested and involved in the learning activity.Second, once the students are engaged, the teacher must provide them withthe support needed so that they can successfully complete the activity. A clearexample of the application of this view of instruction is seen in the writers’workshop (Calkins, 1994). The teacher gets students engaged in writing fromthe heart by allowing them to choose topics important in their lives. Then theteacher provides students with mini-lessons on strategies and skills that enablethem to succeed in the task of writing their personal narratives or memoirs. Mini-lessons may focus on strategies for planning, drafting, and revising; aspects of theauthor’s craft such as an interesting lead, voice, or repeated phrase as shown inexamples from children’s literature; and skills such as spelling and punctuation.
In short, successful use of culturally responsive instruction requires somedepth of understanding of both the concepts of culture and instruction. Often, anabsence of this depth of understanding has led to its misinterpretation. A commonmisinterpretation has been to treat culturally responsive instruction as if itrequired an exact matching or duplication of home environments in school (inother words, an overemphasis on the stable vs. dynamic nature of culture). Thismisinterpretation was fostered, in part, by the nature of early studies of culturallyresponsive instruction that were conducted in classrooms in which most studentswere from the same ethnic or cultural group. This early research centred ondifferences in the patterning of face-to-face interaction, as exemplified in studiesby Philips (1983).
In studies of the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, Philips (1983) observedthat Native American students preferred to avoid the spotlight and did not
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volunteer to answer questions during classroom recitation. Philips connectedthe students’ reluctance to the value placed on individual autonomy in thiscommunity. Students perceived classroom recitation to infringe on this valuebecause the teacher, not the students, decided who should speak and at whatmoment. In this community, Philips noted, students decided for themselveswhen they had received adequate practice and were ready to begin partic-ipating in ceremonial events. Others did not impose this decision on them.Similar examples of cultural disparities and their correction through culturallyresponsive instruction were identified by Au (1980) in work with NativeHawaiian students; Piestrup (1973), Hollins (1982), and Foster (1989) in workwith African American students; and McCollum (1989) in work with PuertoRican students.
APPLICATION TO MULTIETHNIC CLASSROOMS
Although this work served to provide a firm empirical foundation for theconcept of culturally responsive instruction, it also contributed to a misunder-standing on the part of some educators. These educators tended to assume thatculturally responsive instruction required a duplication of home settings in schooland an exact match between classroom interactional processes and students’backgrounds. This line of thinking led to the erroneous conclusion that culturallyresponsive instruction, although conceptually appealing, could only be used inclassrooms in which students are homogeneous with respect to ethnicity andculture. As a result, it was mistakenly believed that the concept of culturallyresponsive instruction could not be applied to classrooms with students from avariety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds—a common situation especiallyin urban settings.
I conduct many classes and workshops with teachers, and this mistakenimpression is reflected in one of the questions I am most frequently asked:
I teach in an urban school and my students come from a dozen or moredifferent cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Can teachers in a multiethnicsetting like mine still use culturally responsive instruction?
The question of how the concept of culturally responsive instruction can beapplied to multiethnic, multilingual classrooms is a vitally important one becauseclassrooms in large cities of the United States and other developed nationsoften include students from a dozen or more ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.Many teachers in urban settings doubt that they can use culturally responsiveinstruction because they assume that a matching of home environments isrequired. These teachers believe that they would have to gain an in-depth
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CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION 11
knowledge of their students’ many different cultures to achieve a satisfactorydegree of matching, and they doubt that they will have the time and oppor-tunity to do so. Although I think it is important for teachers to understand theirstudents’ cultural backgrounds, I agree that gaining an in-depth knowledge ofall the different cultures represented by students in an urban classroom can be adaunting and unrealistic task.
The approach I advocate avoids these difficulties. To address the situation ofmultiethnic classrooms, I recommend adopting a new perspective on culturallyresponsive instruction (Au, 2005). Instead of viewing culturally responsiveinstruction in terms of matching, this approach is based on consideringcontrasting worldviews—a Western or mainstream perspective versus a diverseor non-mainstream perspective. This approach is based on the seminal researchof Spindler and Spindler (1990) on the American cultural dialogue and its trans-mission. Spindler and Spindler identified a mainstream American worldview thatsharply contrasted with the worldview of the Menominee, a Native Americantribe.
Figure 3 shows my interpretation of these contrasting worldviews. I arguethat many, although certainly not all, groups of students of diverse backgroundscome to school with these or similar diverse values. It is not a matter of providingstudents of diverse backgrounds with classroom contexts exclusively based onone or the other of these worldviews. Rather, the approach is to incorporateboth worldviews in the classroom. The mainstream perspective is valuable inpreparing students to take advantage of opportunities offered by the larger society
FIGURE 3 Contrasting worldviews (adapted from Spindler & Spindler, 1990).
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in the era of globalisation. The diverse perspective is valuable in promotinglearning by bridging the gap between home and school and by letting studentswork in ways valuable in settings outside of school (e.g., workplace settingstypically require high levels of cooperation).
To understand the application of culturally responsive instruction to multi-ethnic classrooms, we must think of hybridity, not duplication, as foundationalto the approach. An example of hybridity is seen in my research on talk story-like participation in reading lessons taught to Native Hawaiian students (Au &Mason, 1981). A close analysis of these lessons shows that teachers shift amongparticipation structures, sometimes following rules similar to those in communityspeech events and sometimes following rules similar to those in conventionalclassroom recitation. The key community speech event in this case is talk story(Watson, 1975) in which speakers engage in conarration and often overlap oneanother’s utterances. At times, teachers allowed several students to speak atonce; at other times, they called on students to speak one at a time. In otherwords, these reading lessons did not duplicate talk story but were hybrid eventsin which teachers and students creatively combined elements of home and schoolculture.
I want to point out that such hybrid classroom events as talk story-like readinglessons, occurring in the context of culturally responsive instruction, have theintent of promoting academic achievement and not just of making studentsfeel comfortable in school. These events serve to foster academic learning sothat students of diverse backgrounds can achieve as well in school as theirmainstream peers. In my studies of talk story-like reading lessons, I assessedthe effectiveness of lessons using proximal indexes of academic achievement,including the number of text ideas discussed and the number of logical inferencesstudents made (Au & Mason, 1981). With Native Hawaiian students, theseproximal indexes were three to four times higher in talk story-like readinglessons than in conventional lessons. Over time, it is reasonable to assume thatthe greater learning opportunities offered by these lessons would contribute tosignificant improvements in achievement.
Also, culturally responsive instruction prevents students of diversebackgrounds from having to make the dreadful choice of leaving behind theirhome and peer culture to be successful in school (Fordham, 1991). Fordhamfound that African American high school students from low-income backgroundsbelieved that they needed to “act White” and to separate themselves from homeand peer influences to achieve success in school. Asking students of diversebackgrounds to make a choice between being true to their cultural identities andbeing successful in school puts them in an impossibly difficult situation.
I do not think that students of diverse backgrounds should be confronted withsuch an “either–or” dilemma. Through culturally responsive instruction, I believethat educators can allow students to remain true to their cultural identities while
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attaining high levels of academic achievement. Culturally responsive instructionallows students to attain academic success through classroom activities structuredin ways that students find comfortable and understandable and that do not violatecultural values brought from the home.
DEFINING GOOD TEACHING
Another question I am frequently asked is the following: Isn’t culturallyresponsive instruction just good teaching, and shouldn’t good teaching be thesame in every setting? Gay (2000) addressed this point when she wrote aboutthe widespread misconception that good teaching is universal and has nothingto do with the class, race, gender, ethnicity, or culture of students and teachers.This misconception is captured in the saying, “Good teachers anywhere are goodteachers everywhere” (p. 22). Gay pointed out the logical flaw in this idea, whichis that standards of goodness in teaching and learning are culturally determinedand are not the same for all groups. For example, in some cultural groups a goodteacher is considered to be one who gives instructions in a firm and direct mannerand asks known-answer questions. In other cultural groups a good teacher isone who makes requests in an indirect manner and invites students to offer theiropinions to open-ended questions.
Does this mean that it is impossible to define good teaching? Not at all.The way out of this conundrum is to define good teaching in terms of generalprinciples whose instantiation may differ across settings. For example, a generalprinciple of good teaching is that teachers should establish positive relationshipswith students. In mainstream classrooms, this principle can be instantiated whenthe teacher praises individual students. In classrooms where students of diversebackgrounds may want to avoid being singled-out by the teacher, this principlecan be instantiated when the teacher gives positive feedback to a small grouprather than to an individual (e.g., “The students at Table 3 did good thinking byidentifying the important information in the first paragraph”).
Note that culturally responsive instruction does not limit students to partici-pation structures they already use at home and within their communities. Limitingstudents’ school experiences in this way would have the drawback of leavingthem unprepared to successfully interact in school or other mainstream situa-tions. For this reason, teachers must promote students’ acculturation to unfamiliaror uncomfortable participation structures, such as the IRE, important to schoolsuccess. This acculturation to mainstream school participation structures can bepromoted when the teacher establishes classroom routines and teaches studentshow to appropriately interact within these structures. The presence of consistentroutines gives students the opportunity to learn the language and social skillsexpected of them. The advantage of routines is that students do not have to devote
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information-processing capacity to figuring out how to appropriately behaveand can instead direct available cognitive capacity to higher level thinking andcreative responses to text.
USING A VARIETY OF GROUPINGS
An important consideration in multiethnic classrooms is how teachers can incor-porate both worldviews, the mainstream and diverse, especially to promote higherlevel thinking with text. I believe that the starting point for incorporating bothworldviews in the classroom is for the teacher to vary the form of grouping usedduring the school day. The goal of using a variety of groupings is to create aclassroom in which every student can comfortably participate at least part of thetime (Au, 2005). This goal cannot be achieved if all instruction is provided inonly one type of grouping, such as lessons taught to the whole class. In additionto whole-class lessons, groupings should include the following:
• Teacher-led small groups.• Student-led small groups.• Pair work, such as partner reading and peer tutoring.• Individual or independent work.
The writers’ workshop (developed to teach the process approach to writing)and the readers’ workshop (developed to provide literature-based instruction)are examples of approaches that incorporate a full range of groupings topromote students’ higher level thinking with text. The writers’ workshop usuallystarts with a whole-class mini-lesson. The bulk of the workshop is devotedto writing time, which can include teacher-led small-group lessons, teacherand peer conferences, and individual writing. The writers’ workshop oftenconcludes with the Author’s Chair (Graves & Hansen, 1983), a time for thewhole class to come together to hear and respond to students’ drafts or publishedpieces.
Book Club Plus, developed by Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael, Florio-Ruane, & George, 2001) is a particular form of the readers’ workshop. Teacherswho use this approach begin with a whole-class mini-lesson followed byindividual or partner reading of novels. Students work individually to preparewritten responses to the literature and then meet in book clubs (small groupsof 4–6 students). In their book clubs, students share their written responses andguide their own discussions of novels, although the teacher monitors their conver-sations and may occasionally join a group. Another feature of Book Club Plusis teacher-led, small group-guided reading lessons focussing on text at students’instructional levels. Each session concludes with Community Share, a time when
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the teacher draws the whole class together for reflection and evaluation. Inshort, the writers’ and readers’ workshops follow routines that incorporate avariety of different groupings—ranging from whole class, to small group, toindividual—and involve different participation structures.
Teachers will want to be aware of making explicit for students the rules forparticipation associated with each type of grouping. For example, teachers maywant students to raise their hands before speaking during whole-class lessons, butturn control of turn taking over to students during small-group discussions. Thepurpose of having different rules for participation at different times of the schoolday should be explained so that they make sense for students. For example, theteacher might say the following:
Now we’re going to start Community Share. The rules for this time arethat you must raise your hand if you want to say something. This is not atime when it’s all right to call out an idea. I’m asking you to raise yourhand first because there are 27 children in this room and we won’t be ableto have a good class discussion if everyone starts talking at once.
The rules for appropriate participation need to be made explicit because studentsof diverse backgrounds may be learning to interact in ways previously unfamiliarto them. Teachers should set aside time at the end of the lesson or workshop forstudents to evaluate their own performance, both in terms of meeting academicdemands and meeting expectations for participating appropriately.
The following question is another I am frequently asked: Wouldn’t everythingthat you have recommended here also be beneficial for mainstream students? Theanswer is “yes.” The reason I emphasise the value of these practices for studentsof diverse backgrounds has been pointed out by Ladson-Billings (1994): Thesepractices are rarely seen in classrooms with students of diverse backgrounds. Itis essential to put new patterns in place for these students if we are ever to closethe literacy achievement gap.
A final frequently asked question is the following: Can mainstream teacherswho are outsiders to their students’ cultures still implement culturally responsiveinstruction? Research findings consistently show that the answer to this questionis “yes.” For example, in my research on talk story-like reading lessons (Au& Mason, 1981), I found that teachers unfamiliar with Hawaiian culture couldlearn to teach lessons in this manner. Similarly, three of the eight successfulteachers of African American students studied by Ladson-Billings (1994) wereEuropean Americans.
In the United States and other developed countries, many students of diversebackgrounds are taught by teachers who come from mainstream backgrounds,and this situation is not likely to change in the near future. In the United States,for example, the proportion of teachers from culturally diverse backgrounds has
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actually decreased in recent years, even as the proportion of students of diversebackgrounds has increased (Au & Raphael, 2000). I believe it is importantto make culturally responsive instruction a central part of teacher education,both during initial preparation and during ongoing professional development.Teachers need time to reflect on their own practices in terms of the twothemes I have emphasised: culturally responsive instruction and higher levelthinking. I believe that the most effective programmes of initial preparationand professional development are constructivist in nature and characterised byan essential parallel. In these programmes, teachers engage in higher levelthinking and reflection so that they can better enable their students to do thesame.
Through culturally responsive instruction and workshop approaches, we seekto transform classrooms into communities of learners. Similarly, through long-term, systemic change, we must seek to affect the culture of the school and totransform schools into professional learning communities (Au, in press). Higherstandards for literacy achievement do not merely entail raising the bar higher.Instead, higher standards should motivate us as educators to form professionallearning communities with a shared vision about outcomes while understandingthat these outcomes may be reached by different paths.
CONCLUSION
Today’s educators face rising standards for literacy as a consequence of theintense competition for economic standing fostered by globalisation. Risingstandards for literacy lead to concerns about equity and whether educationalsystems are enabling all students to meet higher standards. The fact that wehave not yet been successful in addressing issues of equity in education isshown by the existence of the literacy achievement gap. The question thenarises as to what educators can do to narrow or eliminate the gap, and I haverecommended culturally responsive instruction as a possible solution. Culturallyresponsive instruction captures the best of both worlds: It allows students toadvance academically while participating in learning environments that do notrequire them to reject values—such as cooperation and working for the good ofthe group—brought from the home.
I have proposed a new formulation of culturally responsive instruction thatmoves away from a static notion of matching or duplicating home settings inschool, to a fluid notion based on hybridity and incorporating elements of adiverse worldview in classrooms. In the era of globalisation, the strength ofa society depends on its ability to bring all of its citizens to higher levels ofthinking, and culturally responsive instruction offers educators a powerful meansof reaching this goal. Let us strive to bring all of our students to high levels of
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literacy by means that allow them to remain connected to their heritage cultureswhile stepping firmly into the future.
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