Commentary: Culturally responsive teaching, learning standards are step in right direction

As a Latina educator teaching high school English to Black students, I have long been at the intersection of my own and my students’ cultural identities. A year ago, when our school was looking for ways to diversify our English curriculum, we were encouraged to keep Shakespeare’s Othello. While the play focuses on a protagonist of color, it also perpetuates stereotypical Black tropes. Depicted as dark, loud, and angry, Othello suffers unspeakable trauma in this play that my Black students live through each day. Another option, Fences by August Wilson, may have been a more fitting choice, because it humanizes the Black experience by delving deep into familial tensions and the mending of those relationships and lays to rest the past while rebuilding toward the future.

When we teach about racial and cultural identities, we need to amplify the voices from within these communities, rather than solely their white perspectives. Teaching Othello’s tragic portrayal of Black identity invalidates students’ needs to see themselves as people worthy of being depicted as valuable, capable, and fully human. But how do teachers, especially new teachers in the field, know how to choose texts that best serve their students of color?

The new Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning Standards are a step in the right direction. The standards will help to prepare new teachers to become culturally responsive by intentionally embracing individual student identities and making representation a priority within the curriculum. Students like mine and many others across Illinois are yearning to see themselves within the texts and materials in their learning spaces. When their identities are celebrated, my students have the space to develop a range of viewpoints and perspectives that encompass everyone. Schools then become both the mirrors that reflect students’ own lived experience and identities, and the windows that provide my students with the understanding of the many diverse life experiences and identities in our society. 

In The Great Gatsby, a novel on every school’s reading list, the concept of the American Dream and what that looks like is told through a lens of a white male. But whose American Dream are we engaging with? When educators focus only on what is in the text, rather than challenging what and who is left out, the novel is problematic. In my own practice, I ask students to question whose voices are at the center and whose are missing from the broader cultural conversation, thus engaging them in a deeper relationship with the text.

I choose to pair a text like The Great Gatsby with authors that give voices to marginalized identities, such as “The New Negro” by Alain Locke and “I, Too, Sing America” by Langston Hughes. These pieces offer differing views of the American Dream from those whose experience with it was in stark contrast to that displayed in Gatsby. Using multiple perspectives that give a more complete view of history is an important piece of culturally responsive teaching because it validates all lived experiences and gives a fuller understanding of our collective humanity.

The new standards will encourage students to make connections with and between differing viewpoints on critical issues. With this focus, educators will be more prepared to deliver an equitable education that empowers our students to think deeply about world issues and the role our identities play in these. Choosing not to select the curriculum that utilizes both mirrors and windows is a limiting and inaccurate interpretation of what education should look like. 

Adopting the standards will ensure that our students can engage in a meaningful dialogue about their lived experiences in a global context and can develop positive ethnic and cultural identities. I call on the Illinois legislature to approve the standards so all teachers can become culturally responsive educators. 

Briana Morales teaches 11th and 12th grade English at Wyvetter Younge Alternative Center in East St. Louis, Illinois. She is a 2020-2021 Illinois Teaching Policy Fellow