The R.E.A.D: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond Part II

In this post, I start to put the pieces of the Ready for Rigor Framework together, starting with Practice Area I, Awareness

Hammond structures the text around a concept she calls the ready for rigor framework. This framework stands on four practice areas; awareness, learning partnerships, processing and building intellective capacity, and community building: creating a culturally responsive community for learning. The foundation of the Ready for Rigor Framework is awareness; that is what this section of the R.E.A.D. will focus on. 

In the practice of awareness, Hammond first asks us to place instruction within its larger sociopolitical context. We must first understand that we live in a radicalized society that gives unearned privilege to some and unearned disadvantages to others based on race, gender, class, or language. Throughout the text, Hammond reminds educators what it takes to be a culturally responsive teacher, the mindsets necessary, the values held, and the actions required. 

A culturally responsive teacher (C.R.T.) is "aware of the role that schools play in both perpetuating and challenging those inequities. They are also aware of the impact of their own cultural lens on interpreting and evaluating students, individual or collective behavior that might lead to low expectations or undervaluing knowledge and skills they bring to school." (Hammond, 2018) Most teacher preparation programs do not address these points, and rarely do teachers receive professional development on them either. As a result, white teachers ignore the impact that race has on their scholars of color's ability to learning in the classroom, and teachers of color struggle to implement culturally responsive teaching practices in sustainable and effective ways. 

What's Culture Got To Do With It? 

To understand what it takes to be a culturally responsive teacher, he/she has to understand the answer to this question. Hammond argues that building background knowledge begins with becoming knowledgeable about the dimensions of culture and knowledgeable about the larger socio-political and economic conditions that create inequitable educational outcomes. Not taking these factors into account is equivalent to one saying that they are colorblind, denying the socio-political impact of race on people of color. 

Hammond describes that culture has three levels that impact people in different ways. Surface culture, shallow culture, and deep culture. Surface culture is made up of tangible and observable parts of culture, such as food, dress, music, and holidays. This level does not usually cause much anxiety in a scholar when it changes. It comes with a low emotional charge. Shallow culture is the unspoken and spoken rules of interactions between people. "It's at this level of culture that we put into action our deep cultural values…this level has a strong emotional charge…social violation of norms at this level can cause mistrust, distress, or social friction." (Hammond, 2018) Finally, deep culture is exactly what it sounds like, its deep! This culture level is how we interpret the world, good or bad, how we relate to one another, and most relevant to educators, how we learn. Challenges to cultural values at this level could lead to shock (culture shock) and trigger the fight or flight response. Because of deep culture, two people could look at the same situation and come out with two completely different interpretations. For example, in eastern culture, the color red is seen as a sign of good luck, whereas in western cultures, the color red is a danger sign. "We call these mental models schema." (Hammond, 2018) 

Most people see these three descriptions of culture and think of an iceberg analogy where the surface level and shallow level of culture are at the very top. The small tip of the iceberg that is most visible to us. However, Hammond presents a more poignant analogy. It is better to think of culture as a tree. An iceberg, for the most part, is stagnant, whereas a tree is ever-evolving. A tree is impacted by the area around it, the seasons, the climate, etc. The branches and trunk serving as the surface and shallow culture, and the roots serve as the bedrock of one's cultural identity, the deep culture. 

Schema helps create background knowledge. It is activated without us even needing to do anything. It's programming run by our brain when an external force triggers it. After reading this text, I now think of schema as an if-then computer program. "If this teacher mispronounces my name, question their intellect and or determine if they are mocking me."

Reading this text put a lot of situations in perspective for me. I could picture myself sitting in a classroom as a student taking in the setting and feeling a little uneasy. However, with the context from this book, I am floating above my childhood self and observing both the teacher and myself. I can better understand why the sudden feeling of anxiety comes over me when the teacher asks me to explain why something happened in a story. I don't know the answer, not because I'm an idiot, but because I don't know what lacrosse is. I am Haitian, and my parents speak French, so imagine it has something to do with Jesus or the cross. That is the answer that I give the teacher. She assumes that I am trying to be funny and was not paying attention, so she takes away my recess. 

I can see how all of this information might seem daunting to a teacher to have to master and keep in mind as they teach scholars of color. It can seem like your classroom has turned into a landmine after becoming aware of the impact of culture on your scholars' success. However, Hammond offers an answer to this problem as well. One does not have to learn the nuances of every culture. Instead, they should understand the cultural archetypes or the similarities that lie across cultures. They can avoid the land mines in the classroom by focusing on the roots, the deep culture pieces that will have the most significant impact across cultures rather than playing cultural whack a mole. 

There are two key cultural archetypes to be aware of as a culturally responsive teacher. Collectivism and individualism. Collectivist cultures value community, interpersonal relationships. It turns out, our brains are wired for this archetype from hundreds of thousands of years of community living and building. It is how we survived in the early stages of civilization. Eighty percent of the world values a collectivist culture. Common among them are Latin American cultures, Asian cultures, African, Middle Eastern, and Slavic cultures. Individualistic cultures value independence and individual achievement—twenty percent of the world share this culture. Most European cultures were rooted in individualistic mindsets. 

Along with the collectivist and individualistic archetypes, Hammond recommends two more archetypes for educators to keep in mind. Oral traditions and written traditions. Oral cultures foster and value relationships more because they require the word to be passed down from person to person, generation to generation. Whereas the written word does not require much human to human interaction because the written word technically does not need another human to pass itself along. Oral based cultures use "the brains memory systems by using alliteration, movement and emotion as strong cognitive anchors." (Hammond, 2018)

With a strong understanding of the dominant cultures and cultural archetypes, educators can better grasp the dynamics at play within their classrooms. Hammond uses this explanation in the text to set up why children of color, most likely from collectivist cultures, behave in certain ways. She prescribes strategies that teachers can use to stay mindful of scholars' needs while also supporting them in their learning. 

But awareness for a culturally responsive teacher does not stop at awareness of the cultural archetypes in the room, but the teacher must also be aware of the two key components of the sociopolitical contexts at play. Those are implicit bias and structural radicalization. That will be the subject of the next post of this R.E.A.D!

The Review, Evaluate, Activate, and Disseminate series is a process that I use to review texts and a process that I hope will make the text actionable for the reader. Throughout the process, I review the text- I try to state what is good about the text, what biases the writer might have, and where I wish the author gave more to the reader. The evaluation provides a careful investigation of the structure and content of the text. At this stage, I attempt to break down the text's content in an engaging and meaningful way to the reader. Activation means making meaning of the text beyond a simple read. In this stage, I present professional development ideas, propose further questions for discussion, and describe ways to put the text into action. Finally, I disseminate the information to you, the reader!

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Next week, implicit bias and structural radicalization! Thank you for reading!