Culturally Relevant Pedagogy – A Diffusion Model for District-Wide Change to Address Systemic Racism

Abstract

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) has been implemented in classrooms and schools across Canada and the United States to address the inequity that has caused an academic achievement gap between Black and Indigenous students and those students who self-identify as White. The purpose of this paper, which draws upon a larger instrumental case study that investigated CRP as a district-wide change, is to demonstrate an effective model for sustainable, deep-level educational change to address systemic racism through CRP. The primary research question from the larger study was: How do people with different roles throughout the hierarchy of the school district make sense of CRP? In this paper, I highlight two of the key findings from the larger study. First, in order for CRP as a district-wide reform mandate to be implemented effectively, the steps of the reform must be diffused throughout the district rather than decreed from the top of the hierarchal chain of a typical public school system. Second, in order for change that impacts an entire school system to occur, there must be a mechanism for deep learning prior to and during the implementation stage for members of the district.
 Keywords: culturally relevant pedagogy, second-order change, decolonizing, sensemaking, university-school partnerships

Anti-Indigenous Deficit Racism and Cultural Essentialism in K–12 Education: We Want You to Recognize there’s a Problem

“…In Australia and New Zealand, research has found correlations between teachers' deficit thinking and Indigenous student academic achievement (Hynds, et al, 2017;Riley & Pidgeon, 2019;Sarra et al, 2018;Vass, 2013). A need to challenge deficit thinking has also been theorized by Canadian scholars who have conceptualized how Eurocentrism leads to deficit thinking and the trivialization and exclusion of Indigenous students', Black students', and students of colour's cultural knowledge and epistemologies in the K-12 system (e.g., Crooks, 2019;Kearns, 2020;Mackey, 2021;Stelmach et al, 2017). In general, this scholarship has stressed a need to decolonize deficit thinking with culturally responsive pedagogy.…”