Culturally Relevant Materials

Closing the Achievement Gap for Diverse Learners

By Tom Barlow and Sharon Camblin

Designing and implementing curriculum materials that enable all students to engage with challenging academic content and meet high performance goals is a focus of the Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) movement. However, the materials used to teach linguistically or culturally diverse students often contain less challenging content and materials outside the mainline curriculum. The disconnect between CSR objectives and curriculum materials for linguistically or culturally diverse students exists where schools use a deficit model that assumes that these students will not be able to meet high standards. One step toward creating equity and closing this gap is the use of culturally relevant curriculum materials.

Linguistically and culturally diverse students can achieve academic success when the materials used in their classrooms directly link students’ cultural experiences to the learning and when local
values and traditions are reflected in the classroom environment. Culturally
relevant materials are to be thought of as formal curriculum materials, informal classroom materials, and classroom interactions. They promote success by making connections with the home
culture that contextualize the learning; by building on students’ experiences and learning styles; and by developing cultural capital that allows the student to feel valued in the school environment. Strategies include the following.

• Infusing the classrom with multicultural experiences so that students’ languages, cultures, and experiences become instructional tools and frameworks.
  
• Using examples, illustrations, vignettes, scenarios, and anecdotes familiar to the students to build bridges between abstract concepts and real-life experiences.
  
• Selecting materials that students are familiar with to help them make connections to larger instructional concepts. Complement factual information with culturally diverse literature, art, and aesthetics.
  
• Using communication and learning strategies that honor linguistic and cultural differences. The materials used to assess student learning should provide expanded opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery.

Through these strategies, the contributions and learning styles of students from different ethnic, cultural, racial, and social backgrounds merge with the intent to provide a challenging curriculum.

Developing culturally relevant materials is no longer an isolated issue for some schools. Multilingual and multicultural classrooms exist in every community. How educators think about linguistically and culturally diverse students and act on those beliefs is integral to the school reform effort. The use of culturally relevant materials must be part of a larger systematic approach that focuses on student achievement.

There are many implications for teachers, schools, and school districts. Teachers will need to acquire knowledge about the cultures of minority students and the impact of culture on the development of self-concept and social acceptance. It will be critical for teachers to understand how students’ self-concepts, willingness to participate, and freedom to learn are constrained or supported to the extent that they feel alienated from their peers, their communities, and their cultural understandings.

Teachers will need to develop effective classroom strategies that are transferable. The array of “what works” will need to be expanded and deepened. New strategies must be explored that combine what we know about effective instruction with new understandings of cultural and ethnic diversity.

Lastly, school districts must look at professional development from a different perspective. Such activities have rarely tackled issues such as inequity or prejudice even though they impact instruction, curriculum, and school relationships. Professional development programs and school reform efforts must focus both on developing new expertise for teachers and addressing inequalities.

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