Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Generally speaking, non-Indigenous people, especially white people, tend to underestimate just how deeply colonial patterns are embedded in their minds, bodies, relationships, and institutions; they also tend to overestimate their capacity to interrupt and undo these patterns, assuming that good intentions will be sufficient. This gap between where we actually are in our decolonizing work and where we would like to be sets us up for disappointment or frustration when things don’t go as expected, or when complexities, contradictions, and failures emerge. This workbook invites people to be more honest about where we are really at, the learning and unlearning that still needs to be done, and the range of foreseeable and unforeseeable challenges that we will face in this process. [From Author]

Instructors can hold assumptions about students’ learning behaviors and their capability for academic success which are tied to students’ identities and/or backgrounds, and these assumptions can impede student growth (Staats, et. al, 2017). Instructors can consider a variety of strategies and benefits for revealing and addressing implicit bias, both in themselves and their students. [From Website]

Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color. [From Author]

Imagine everyone in the room as single deck buses full of passengers of different ages. In each bus, there is a driver, passengers gathered at the front, in the middle and at the back. On your own bus, there are passengers you know and passengers you don’t know. There are passengers who are drawing your attention, others who want to hide from you. In this space, any encounter between individuals will be an encounter of “buses”. The point of this first exercise is to learn to observe and sit with the people on your bus, without judgement. In order to create the conditions for this to happen, you will be shown a bus-response-inducing stimulus and be asked to draw your bus focusing on three passengers within it that call your attention: one at the front, one in the middle and one at the back. [From Website]