I think that people don’t actually read the work. How do you think the interpretation of your work has changed?
And for me, that’s an all-or-nothing proposition - you can’t do one or two and say, “Oh, I’m being culturally relevant.” You’ve got to do all three things. That approach requires a focus on students’ learning, an attempt to develop their cultural competence, and to increase their sociopolitical or critical consciousness. But I defined it as a threefold approach to ensuring that all children are successful. What’s changed is the way people have interpreted it. The 74: After all these years, how do you define culturally relevant teaching?
The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Ladson-Billings talked to The 74 about how her work is misinterpreted, the role of educators in Trump’s America and why she prefers the phrase “education debt” to “achievement gap.” It means giving students space to talk about an event like the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and letting students choose to investigate problems that affect them rather than teachers setting their own social justice agendas in the classroom.īased at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Ladson-Billings was elected president of the National Academy of Education in 2016 and has earned numerous awards for her research on teaching and the intersection of education and Critical Race Theory. She has defined three pillars of culturally relevant teaching - academic success, cultural competence and sociopolitical consciousness - which are more relevant than ever as educators and advocates decry declining civics education and persistent achievement gaps. Now, Ladson-Billings studies what it takes to be a successful teacher of African-American children and has written extensively about culturally relevant teaching since the 1990s.Ĭulturally relevant education is more than celebrating Black History Month or offering an ethnic studies class, she said. She was amazed to learn that a black person had graduated from Harvard University, she remembers at the time it seemed impossible. Ladson-Billings speaks often about her fifth-grade teacher, Ethel Benn, who first taught her about W.E.B. The black teachers could speak to students honestly about what it means to be African-American in a way their white counterparts never could, she remembered.
Gloria Ladson-Billings remembers that there was a difference between the black and white teachers she had growing up in Philadelphia.Īfrican-American teachers could give the students “the talk,” she recalls, referring to a 2017 Procter & Gamble television advertisement that showed black parents talking to their kids about racism.
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