Looking at these pictures above, what do they convey to you?
Nowadays, classrooms are more diverse than ever before. They are becoming increasingly multicultural, and that presents new challenges for teachers. They need to know how diverse students perceive the world and how they process and organize information.
When we teach in a multicultural classroom, are we really thinking about how we teach our students?
Before focusing on that, we must reflect on DIVERSITY.
Have you ever taken the time to think about the following questions?
-Who are my students?
-What are their backgrounds? Are they similar to mine?
-How might my students’ traditions, values, beliefs, perceptions, and situations differ from my own?
-How do I identify this diversity? Is it visible?
If you have never answered these questions before, it means you need to attend our course!
CRT is the answer! It stands for CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING
… have you ever heard of it?
Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is a pedagogy that acknowledges and embraces students’ cultures, languages, and experiences – and connects them to classroom learning.
According to Geneva Gay is “…a process of using cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them”.
Jump Academy trainers help our trainee teachers understand how culture, and sometimes gender, can influence the way they teach students. Through various activities, they learn how to improve the concept of “culture” by engaging with cultures around the world; how to develop skills and competencies that teachers and students must have, such as the most important: communication.
We provide a general framework for how Linguistics can help understand how language works, the importance of cross-cultural communication, and its invisible process in different conversational styles.
We explain how to become a culturally responsible teacher, which is not just a definition or a role, but something or better said, someone who must feel deeply their passion for teaching and especially respect for someone else who does not have the same traditions or may have a different background or a different skin color than you.
From a general introduction of the theoretical part during the first session to the implementation of many practical activities in an outdoor context, all teachers will definitely be aware of what Culturally Responsive Teaching is and how powerful their role is in the world, not only as teachers but also as people.
Author: Roberta Muratore – JUMP Trainer