Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: How the DREAM Project Puts Theory into Practice
The idea was radical, but it made so much sense. Education could be transformed, repackaged in a way that was culturally relevant to students. In doing so, students’ backgrounds and diverse ways of being and speaking would be affirmed, incorporated, and respected. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, or CRP, was a welcome and liberating framework, but, when COVID-19 hit, this transformative work was in peril. Mass migration to digital learning threatened to replicate and exacerbate educational disparities. It seemed the digital divide, carved out by inequality and racism, was poised to swallow up progress and achievement forged in the classroom. However, the educators at the DREAM Project didn’t let that happen.
While the DREAM team didn’t practice CRP as an educational framework deliberately, they had already integrated the framework’s most important principles. How? Well, CRP calls for recognition and incorporation of students’ cultural and linguistic background into the curriculum. This can happen with greater facility when academic staff reflect the student body, and that’s a central tenet in the DREAM Project ethos – hire and train educators from the very same neighborhoods students live in. In this way, culture, language, empathy, and care come more naturally to educators at DREAM.
But how did the DREAM Project educators tend to the digital divide when COVID-19 forced school and program closures?
Let’s take the #DREAMenCASA program as an example. Essentially, the team acknowledged that the digital divide meant many of their students did not have access to technological resources like laptops and tablets, but many of the students, parents, and guardians had cell phones, so, they got to work developing an educational program that launched over YouTube and WhatsApp. In CRP, democratizing education by enlarging access is key.
The suite of videos initiated with a virtual induction of students, parents, and guardians into the program. They detailed how interactivity and dialogue would be engaged, and they offered participants the opportunity to share videos of at-home learning experiences. This way, participants felt like they were all in this together. Bridging community and classroom is another principle in CRP, and the DREAM team made it happen.
CRP also calls for educational materials that are representative of students’ backgrounds. When one episode featured the children’s book Soñadores, it was clear that DREAM educators wanted to reflect their students’ complex experiences of Latinidad, migration, and transformation.
It’s no secret that the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) tend to be discriminatory, with Black and Latinos woefully underrepresented. How is that relevant to CRP and DREAM? Well, bridging the divide between culture and STEM can inspire students to pursue studies in these fields, and #DREAMenCASA found a creative connection between the two in the math episode where dominos, a game that’s culturally relevant to their students, were used to teach addition. This small educational gesture, a nod to students that says, “I see you and your culture is valued,” can have positive lifelong impacts.
Since the start of the pandemic, the DREAM Project has found a myriad of ways to keep students intellectually stimulated and inspired through cultural recognition and community engagement. From converting the library to operate via contactless check-out, including a WhatsApp number to check out books via delivery, to Facebook read-alouds, the DREAM team has built a bridge over the digital chasm. It is our hope that the CRP paradigm and its digital praxis at DREAM serve as a model for new bridges to be replicated wherever the educational divide exists.
About the Author: Maria V. Luna-Thomas
Maria V. Luna-Thomas is an instructional designer who advances digital learning solutions for global entities. She has researched and practiced inclusive pedagogy in three countries and across grade levels. Her chapter, co-written with Dr. Enilda Romero-Hall, “La Clave: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Digital Praxis” in the collection Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education: Broadening Horizons, Bridging Theory and Practice is due out this fall.