Culturally Responsive Teaching & ELA

Honestly, up until this point, "culturally responsive teaching" has been a vague and somewhat elusive term that I've heard, and it never had a concrete meaning for me. I will admit to thinking about the "fruits" of culture instead of the "roots" (Hammond 24-25). After reading these two chapters of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, I feel like I have a better understanding of what CRT actually should be. 

Hammond specifically talks about different "roots" of culture that students have and how that informs their worldviews and how they interact with the world around them. Thinking in terms of ELA, this tells me that students may react differently to different text that we read based on their worldview. When reading The Grapes of Wrath, for example, students may react very differently to the different character choices throughout the novel based on their worldview about collectivism or individualism. We've spoken about how students will react differently to texts based on their experiences, and this is the first time where I've heard it explicitly in the context of culturally responsive teaching.

Thinking about how we "do" ELA, CRT has many implications that disrupt the "usual" way of doing ELA. When considering this prompt, I started thinking about the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century and how those kinds of readings can still happen in the classroom, which means that students look at the text all on its own with little to no consideration for context or historicization. (Aesthetic Confusion: The Legacy of New Criticism is another worthwhile read if you have the time!) CRT completely challenges this because context matters. Students are bringing different cultural contexts into the classroom, and we need to be aware of them when engaging with a text. Students will (or will not) derive meaning from text based on their understanding of how the world works (or should work). Instead of looking at a text as an isolated piece to be picked apart on its own, CRT invites students to take context and apply it to their understanding of the text. 

In the most basic way, CRT helps students to connect to and understand a text. CRT allows students an entry point into a text, if that makes sense, so they can engage with it and make meaning from it. As an ELA teacher, I need to be aware and alert about how I am approaching teaching texts in the classroom. In the first article that I linked above, the author talks about reading a poem with students and asking them to visualize what the poet describes, and students come up with many different images because how they envision and interpret the poem varies--to me, this is the biggest takeaway from CRT. I can't assume that because I picture a poem one way or interpret the action of a character one way that my students, who have different contextual understandings than I do, see it the same way. 

I do worry about what a scripted/"canned" curriculum looks like and how that could impact bringing CRT into my classroom. I haven't seen one yet, but I do worry that it focuses more on the text itself instead of contextualizing it and connecting it to students' understandings. I'm not sure what other people have seen or experienced, so if you have any insights, please do share!