C132 (Book Club): Becoming a Culturally Responsive Educator (pg 52-60)

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Welcome to another deep dive into the fabulous book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond.  This week will be full of insights about ourselves.  Are you ready to go deep into your practice?  To be honest, this chapter left me with a feeling of being exposed, but that is the process of recognizing how our beliefs and behaviors shape cultural responsiveness or not.  Yikes, we went there already, but this is all part of our growth into becoming more aware educators while honoring the things we are doing well. 

​Hammond begins this chapter by stating, “The true power of culturally responsive teaching comes from being comfortable in your own skin because you are not a neutral party in the process.  You can never take yourself out of the equation.”  This is sometimes difficult to talk about when society can be polarizing.  If you express your views, you may be canceled or dropped from a friendship circle or school.  If you don’t say anything, you allow uncomfortable behavior to persist, which will impact the next generation of young people. 

A reminder that the lizard brain, which is composed of the amygdala and reticular activating system (RAS) have been created to protect us.  When we deal with uncomfortable situations, it “sounds an alarm designed to remind us of the dangers that exist outside.”  This can come in many forms, but in this case, it’s about talking through uncomfortable topics not normally shared in polite society.  

Let’s be clear, this book is not about placing blame.  It’s about our self-awareness about our actions.  That’s it. We all can be better, so it’s time to reframe this conversation by beginning with intention.  What do you want to learn more by going through this book study?  What do you want to learn about yourself?  This intention will put you on the right course. 

How does our cultural identity shape the way we operate our classrooms?  It all stems from prior work of surface, shallow and deep culture.  Hammond asks some profound questions to guide this work. 

Here are some ones that resonated with me. 

Surface cultural beliefs

• How did your family identify ethnically or racially? 
• Where did you live - urban, suburban, or rural community?
• What is the story of your family in your country?
• Were you the first person to attend college?
• Who were the heroes celebrated in your family and/or community?

As I reflect on these questions, I think about my own racial identity.  I grew up in rural and suburban areas as a young child within a tight familial network in South Korea, the land of my mother.  When my father was transferred back to California when I was 41/2 years old, many things changed for me.  The identity that I knew ceased to exist and I was quickly taught that I must lean into my American heritage to survive.  

The stories that I was told about my mother growing up was that she was emotionally unstable.  She divorced my father to live a party lifestyle and failed at a remarriage.  Yet, as I unravel my own issues with being bi-racial, I can only imagine how much a shock it would have been to lose your cultural identity by coming to a new culture. 

We have evolved somewhat from this narrative, but there are still attitudes within my own culture that create this polarity.  I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve heard people say, “You are in America now, so you have to speak English.”  Having lived in non-English places, I can clearly state that this is not always easy.  You may have a strong desire to learn an additional language, but your brain has difficulty processing the grammar structure


​Shallow cultural beliefs

• What family stories are regularly told and referenced? What message do they communicate about core values? 
• How were you trained to respond to different emotional displays?
• What physical, social, or cultural attributes were praised in your community?  Which ones were you taught to avoid? 

As a young child, I remember that I was told to remain quiet at all costs from my mother, grandmother, and teachers.  I followed their lead to a fault where I eventually became a selective mute.  I never spoke.  Largely it was due to my Korean language.  I had no space to speak my language once my mother moved out of our home.  My means of expression died with the divorce. 

While traveling through my educational journey, I discovered a false narrative that all Asian children are smart.  When I did not perform up to the expectations of teachers, I was questioned about my level of Asianess.  I was continually asked, “Are you sure you are Asian, because every Asian kid I’ve known was really smart.”  This implied that because I did not have the skills to express myself orally or academically that I was not smart.  I carried this with me for decades. 


Deep cultural beliefs

• How did you come to believe this?
• What messages did you get about why other ethnic groups succeeded or not?
• What did your culture teach you about intelligence?  
• Did you grow up believing some groups were smarter than others? 

As I grew into a young adult, I did a lot of reflective practice about the harm of the cultural narrative.  By the time I was ten years old, my father married outside of my race.  My new mother was caucasian and had different stories to tell about her childhood in Utah.  During her childhood, it was a growing state with many possibilities and people with similar points of view. 

Through my experiences with my new mother, my viewpoint towards the world became even whiter.  I began to change the narrative in my mind from I have to be smart at everything to let’s try everything, because in white culture this is the narrative that is shared. 

When people challenged my level of whiteness, I stood up representing 50% caucasian and 50% korean.  Neither were less than the other, but I recognized that I needed to lean into my whiteness to survive and thrive in 1990’s America.  

​Unpacking our Interpretation

As I reflect on my own experiences as a child in the public school system, I connect to Hammond’s “cultural frames of reference”.  She refers to a story where a teacher gives a directive to a child through a question, which is opposite to how the child operates in his home culture.  The teacher took offense to the lack of compliance and the child was sent to the principal’s office.  When you peel back the layers, we discover that the teacher had a different cultural frame of reference of gaining student compliance. It wasn’t the child’s fault for not reading the signs. 

This leads us to a conversation about misinterpretation.  As educators, we are not in the role of fixing our learners based on their socio-economic situation or linguistic challenges.  Instead, we are here to try to understand learning from their lens, so we can provide scaffolds for success. 

Hammond refers to a simple protocol created by Gudykunst and Kim (2003) for widening our interpretive aperture to see what is truly going on. 

Description:  Describe what you see.  Leave out any judgment or interpretation of a situation.  Your own implicit bias will want to make assumptions, but you must not allow them to enter the conversation. 

Interpretation:  Interpret what is going on.  Write down all of your interpretations of a situation.  What pattern do you see in your observations?  Are some of them driven by your own cultural view of the world? 

Evaluation:  Review your interpretations.  What do they say about our own views?  How do they impact how we see our learners? What judgments have been made? 

This simple tool will help you to identify some patterns in your practice.  In the next episode, we will continue discussing our roles as culturally responsive educators and what we can do to spot our implicit bias.