Making It Relevant: Creating Caring and Culturally Responsive Classrooms for African American Boys Using Multiple Intelligence Theory

• In Event: Validating Culturally Diverse Student Identities and Experiences: Transformative Approaches and Innovative Methods

Abstract

Culturally responsive teaching is essential for overcoming disparate academic outcomes often encountered by African American boys. This strength-based approach does not engage African American boys from a deficit perspective, but rather seeks to learn about the strengths, gifts, and talents of African American boys, and the best practices to leverage these strengths and assets toward school success. Culturally sensitive caring whereby teachers care so much about ethnically diverse students and their achievement that they accept nothing less than high-level success from them and work diligently to accomplish it undergirds CRT. This paper offers differentiated instruction coupled with Howard Gardner’s theories of multiple intelligences as a roadmap for creating cultural responsive practices for improving academic achievement among African American boys.

Author

• JaDora Sailes, Indiana State University