How can we effectively insert education into culture? How have traditional school systems neglected students of color by prioritizing a historically white, Eurocentric narrative? And how can curriculum be shaped by students’ lived experiences? These questions were asked more than 20 years ago by Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as she began developing what would eventually become known as Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP). CRP is a teaching method in which educators privilege students’ experiences and culture as a basis for learning, focusing on academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. This approach to teaching becomes increasingly relevant in our own community as reports continue to show a widening achievement gap in Minnesota schools.1 With a predominantly white teacher population and an increasingly diverse student body,2 CRP may hold the key to success.
Staff at the University of Minnesota have been researching new and innovative ways of furthering culturally relevant curriculum and addressing systematic opportunity gaps in schools. Betsy Maloney Leaf, PhD, MFA, a Lecturer in the Curriculum and Instruction Department, recently spoke with Morgan Lee, Education Programs Coordinator, about the importance of CRP and informal learning environments (i.e. museums, zoos, community centers, libraries) as a crucial space for youth learning. Maloney Leaf is a trained dancer and has additional teaching experience in K-12 dance and theater education. She was also a research associate with Dr. Bic Ngo on the Innovating Culturally Relevant Pedagogy project.
In the following conversation, she gives readers an overview of this pedagogical approach and discusses how museums and community-based organizations can successfully build CRP into their programming.
MORGAN LEE (ML)
Why is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) an important methodology? And what impact can it have on youth?
BETSY MALONEY LEAF (BML)
Because the aims of CRP include engaging all learners while redressing systemic inequality in education disproportionately impacting marginalized communities, it’s a vital theoretical framework for educators to use when designing and implementing learning experiences. Educators who practice CRP can form deeper pedagogical relationships with their students, cultivate their leadership skills, and can promote significant connections to youth communities—all of which positively impacts youth.
ML
So, how widely practiced is CRP? Is it something that all teachers know about and receive training in?
BML
CRP was developed by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings in the early 1990s. Her work has inspired a lot of other educational researchers to really take a look at how marginalized communities of students are invisibilized or erased in formal school settings, and how systems of oppression and racism contribute to systemic and personal harm to students. It’s been around for a while. Here at the university, it’s very prevalent. It’s part of all the training that I’m doing with our students.
There are other theoretical approaches that draw from similar ideas. There’s Culturally Responsive Teaching, and there is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. They each have distinct contributions to this conversation but they are informed by this idea that schooling can be very problematic and that students are coming to schools with this incredible depth of knowledge and what we call “assets,” and that teachers and school systems do not always harvest those assets but perhaps focus on “perceived deficits,”
I don’t think it’s something you can just learn during a daylong professional development training. It’s really a journey over time. It requires a lot of reflective practice around your own teacher identity and markers of culture, such as your race, your gender identification, and your position in society. That reflection has to happen in order to even understand what CRP looks like or how it might be utilized in a school setting.
ML
Why are you interested in informal learning environments as sites for CRP?
BML
One of the things that my colleague Dr. Bic Ngo’s research has really highlighted is the ways that informal learning spaces—what we often term community-based spaces—can really engage youth in ways that formal spaces like a K-12 school may struggle with.
I think that informal learning spaces, while often overlooked as sites of possibility by schools and K-12 teachers, actually have a lot that they can do in tandem with or alongside formal schools in terms of arts education, just by the very nature of how they can support and sustain the pedagogical relationships between teaching artists and youth. Especially when we’re talking about over time. You think about a traditional K-12 school, students maybe are working with a single teacher within a year, or a half a year, or if you’re in a high school setting, maybe one semester. But in community-based spaces, sometimes programming is longitudinal over years, so that teaching artists can really develop and get to know the participants over time. That makes a difference. That helps teaching artists understand what the student is bringing to the learning experience that they can really leverage or amplify as part of the programming.
ML
How can community organizations or informal learning environments successfully engage in CRP?
BML
One of the basic tenets of CRP is fostering a sociopolitical consciousness in students. Meaning, kids are learning to read and critique the world around them and [understand] how the systems operate. Informal learning environments can give students space and time to actually think through, analyze, and voice what those things are through projects that ask students to explore their world and think: “What’s happening? Why is it happening? And what could be done to better draw on the strengths of particular communities or lived experiences?”
Investigating those questions through art-making experiences is in keeping with CRP and allows the youth to be co-collaborators. Rather than telling kids, “This is the way it is, I happen to be the adult or the perceived expert so I’m going to tell you what it is and you’re just going to take what I know,” educators can instead walk into it and say, “What are your goals? How can we walk through this program experience and create something together?” and allow the youth to lead.
ML
What do you think CRP should look like in a museum setting, specifically in an art museum?
BML
Well, I get a little stuck on the word should…
ML
Or could!
BML
I think museum spaces that are wanting to investigate this really need to start by asking youth participants what types of programming they want and letting youth voices and interests be part of whatever programming comes up. I work in a setting where we prepackage things to help us know that we’re going to be able to contain, control, and know the intended outcome and evaluate it. So I understand that saying to students who are arriving for a program experience, “I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen… Here’s what I’m thinking, what are you thinking?” and “How do we create something that will be meaningful that will get us toward our outcome?” can be very scary. But it’s also very powerful for the kids because they feel like they have presence.
Asking programming staff to reflect on and understand how systems both inside and outside of the museum are operating, and their own position in those systems, is key. It’s one thing to have this dream to include CRP in your programming experiences and to think about the kids when they come into the museum spaces, but if you as the program leader haven’t stopped to think about “What problematic things do I contribute to because I haven’t had to stop and think about it?,” then you’re not really helping the cause.
Staff need to think about the things that they’re doing and ask themselves: “Do we really want to be doing this? Are students centered in this experience? Are there other ways that we might be able to reach students and engage them multimodally that will allow them to be visible and aware in the space?”
I would say another thing that museum spaces could think about is getting to know the community even more. What resources are already there? What organizations can they partner with? And how can these potential partnerships or community resources really become part of the program experience, even if they exist outside of the museum setting?
ML
What kind of feedback have you heard from teachers or students that gives some insight into the impact of CRP?
BML
As a practicing teacher, whenever I encountered new information or a new theory, I was already tired of everything that I had to do. To have to encounter a new way of thinking about my teaching could feel really overwhelming. But as I got into CRP, and I realized how it could really change everything that I thought I knew about schooling and make my dance classroom a place truly where students could all be there, I realized that it made my job easier.
Some teachers have referenced, “Well it’s really hard in my field because the expectation is that this art form looks like this and teaches like this and feels like this, and I may have to upend all of that to really meet the students where they are and to harvest what they already know.” Yes, I feel that, but also the rewards are amazing. The students are there, they’re engaged, and they can grow.
Notes
1 “Overview,” Minnesota Compass, accessed October 2, 2019.
2 Faiza Mahamud and MaryJo Webster, “Minnesota schools struggle with widening racial gap between students and teachers,” Star Tribune, December 3, 2018.
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