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Preface: Culturally Responsive Unit

Students enter the classroom with an integrated pattern of knowledge, attitudes, values,

goals, strengths, and weaknesses—their community’s, their family’s, and their own. The purpose

of culturally responsive instruction is to use all these qualities to the learners’ advantage. In the

classroom, these cultural references extend beyond ethnicity. The language, history, and

geography of a group of people are important. The interests, needs, and learning styles are

likewise. In the creation of my culturally responsive unit, the goal was to see the children. Rather

than do so explicitly by creating a multicultural unit of study, I infused culturally responsive

strategies within the topic of the ocean biome (a seemingly un-cultural choice). I used their

primary language, interests, and learning styles to build the lessons.

The physical geography and language of my group of students was taken into

consideration. First, the ocean is local. Its close proximity makes it a topic of choice when one

visits the beach over the weekend. One Monday morning, Brain entered the classroom eager to

tell me about the sandcastle he made. He did not have all the vocabulary in English, so much of

the conversation was in Spanish. This dialogue informed my unit topic. Providing content

vocabulary to this end was advantageous for Brian as well as the other students. The children

have content knowledge, but do not have the high level English-language skills to communicate.

For this reason, the structure of the lessons encourage them to communicate in Spanish. I expect

them to. Kathleen relies solely on English in the classroom because she acquired enough English

to do so. When she does not know how to respond in English (for formal and informal purposes),

she does not respond at all. Brian and Alvaro, on the other hand, use Spanish in informal settings.

The use and validation of their primary language within the lessons offers opportunities for all
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students. Kathleen is encouraged to use her mother tongue. The boys use their home language for

academic purposes.

The unit references the children’s learning styles and interests. Much of the instruction

time is spent doing paper/pencil work (or in this case, whiteboard/marker work). On several

occasions, the teacher let me loose in the classroom to create mathematics lessons for groups of

struggling students. For a lesson on addition, we worked with unit blocks. The concept of adding

to the existing tower was well-received by the students. For a lesson on subtraction, we worked

with cookies. The concept of “taking away” was attained by eating the cookies—one, two, and

three at a time. Simply put, the students came alive when given the opportunity to work with

manipulatives and realia. This directly informed the first two lessons: (1) hands-on science, and

(2) use of manipulatives to model mathematics problems. Furthermore, the students’ interest in

animals of all kinds lent itself to the unit topic. During family reading time, I often read with the

group of students (including Kathleen) whose parents could not be present. Of the dozens of

books to choose from, the students most often chose those pertaining to animals. One book

entitled Fins was a popular choice. Each page reading, “_____ have fins” (i.e., “Dolphins have

fins.”). The students would recognize the sentence structure, take clues from the picture, and

“read” the sentence. During read alouds, books in which animals were personified were the most

popular (i.e., The Berenstain Bears by Stan and Jan Berenstain). The children related to the

characters, making the reading more accessible. The third lesson, collaborative story writing,

references these interests by encouraging students to personify the characters, using a problem

and solution of which they are personally familiar.

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The unit is interdisciplinary, integrated, and student-centered. Students benefit from

interdisciplinary curriculum because their strengths in one content area support new learning in

another. The content is scaffolded, within each lesson and the unit as a whole—each lesson

builds upon the next, even though they are in separate content areas. For example, the

characteristics of the ocean gleaned from the first lesson (science) are utilized to provide a

detailed description of the setting in the third lesson (language arts). The collaborative story

writing is student guided. The assumption is that the students have acquired the knowledge in the

first two lessons. Thus, the teacher provides the facilitation as the students use it to inform the

writing process. Most importantly, the lessons set high expectations for the students. The content

and language objectives are challenging, yet attainable because of the culturally responsive

instructional strategies used therein.