Cultivating Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Exploring Teachers' Pedagogical Gardens

• In Event: Poster Session 5
  In Poster Session: The English Learners in the Mainstream (ELM) Project: A Comprehensive Teacher Training Model

Abstract

This qualitative study explores the utilization of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP; Ladson-Billings, 1995) as an analytic tool to understand and describe the practices and expressed beliefs of teachers in a tuition-free, middle-grades independent school. The study finds that CRP proved to be a useful theoretical tool for analyzing both interview and classroom observational data in order to develop a better understanding of the research context. A Pedagogical Garden Framework emerged from the analysis as a valuable organization schema for understanding each teachers’ practices and expressed beliefs relative to the major constructs of CRP. This application of the theory serves to extend its development as an analytic tool for the investigation of individual and contextual capacity for CRP.

Author

• Kelly Johnson Barber-Lester, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill