Blog #7: What to Look for in a Classroom by Kohn and Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (video)

 

Alfie Kohn criticizes traditional classrooms that emphasize control, rewards, and competition, advocating instead for environments rich in choice, collaboration, and in-depth exploration. He proposes a vision of authentic learning. In his essay excerpted from "What to Look For in a Classroom," he encourages observers to look for signs of genuine engagement: students debating passionately, teachers facilitating learning rather than lecturing, and assessments contributing to student progress rather than ranking them. This is not about sophisticated technology or repetitive, tedious tasks; it's about fostering caring communities where curiosity fuels learning, free from the traps of grades, homework overload, or extrinsic motivators like pizza for reading.

Kohn's ideals resonate deeply because they humanize education, reminding us that when classrooms resemble factories—with uniforms, rigid discipline, and "character education" reduced to mere moral checklists—they stifle the very creativity we claim to value. A true classroom pulsates with the energy of student-led projects, where mistakes inspire exploration, not punishment. This method focuses not on grades but on the knowledge produced or acquired. This seems to echo a culture-centered pedagogy, which is the culturally relevant pedagogy.

Gloria Ladson-Billings defined culturally relevant pedagogy as an approach that aims to achieve three things: produce students capable of academic success, cultivate students who demonstrate cultural competence, and develop students capable of both understanding and criticizing the existing social order. Culturally relevant pedagogy poses a fundamental question within the new pedagogy: "What place does culture occupy in our teaching?" To answer this question, its primary objectives are to value students' cultural identities by integrating their experiences, languages, and references into the curriculum, while maintaining high expectations. This fosters a sense of belonging, enhances engagement, and counters deficit approaches. Teachers thus become facilitators who empower students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically.

Intercultural pedagogy is not limited to complementary strategies but involves a complete reorientation of teaching around students' cultures, identities, and lived experiences. It considers students' family and community cultures as assets to be developed, not obstacles to be overcome, and asserts that ignoring them is never "neutral": it amounts to privileging a dominant culture and marginalizing others.

This video emphasizes a crucial concept: "culture" is not a mere embellishment in pedagogy; it is its foundation. Culture is the network of worldviews, beliefs, values, and language through which students make sense of the world around them. When we ignore it, we are not "neutral"; we are asking students to leave their most human tools for constructing meaning behind. The second speaker, named Gay, states that culture, at its essence, is the filter that helps us as human beings make sense of the most ordinary things. Culture can be grouped into two different kinds of categories. We can talk about visible culture and invisible culture, or tangible and intangible culture.

From this perspective, teachers play the role of cultural mediators, connecting academic content to what students already know, value, and practice in their daily lives. This approach is based on three commitments: aiming for the academic success of all students, helping them develop their intercultural competence (by respecting their own culture while being open to others), and cultivating their critical thinking so that they can identify and respond to social inequalities.

This video is part of a larger body of work that identifies three essential components of culturally relevant pedagogy: academic success, cultural competence, and critical awareness. Academic success implies rejecting the false dilemma between "rigor" and relevance; we expect intellectual excellence from all students and design teaching that makes it possible. Cultural competence means that students learn to assert and navigate their own culture while gaining fluency in others, without being forced to deny their identity. Critical awareness goes further: it invites us to help students identify, analyze, and combat the inequalities inherent in our social systems, including within the school itself.

Intercultural pedagogy also redistributes power: the curriculum becomes a living dialogue, enriched by students' questions, experiences, and community knowledge, rather than a rigid model imposed from above. It rejects deficit narratives about marginalized students and instead envisions a synergy between school, family, and community cultures, were teachers and students co-construct knowledge. Ultimately, it conceives of quality education as education that draws upon students' cultures and uses them to affirm their identity and develop their capacity for intellectual, social, emotional, and political action.

Furthermore, in 2012, Django Paris introduced a new concept: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, which seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. It is based on the CRP (Cultural Relational Program) and culturally adapted teaching, affirming students' cultures and actively supporting and developing them in the face of assimilation pressures. It promotes linguistic and cultural pluralism, involving students as co-producers of evolving youth cultures, while guaranteeing them access to dominant norms necessary for success in society.

Thus, culturally relevant and culturally supportive pedagogies share a common vision: a pedagogy centered on students' strengths, which values ​​their learning paths, fosters their engagement, and supports educational equity. Both seek to integrate students lived experiences into the curriculum and to move beyond the deficit-based perspectives often associated with students from minority backgrounds. However, culturally supportive pedagogy builds upon the foundations of culturally relevant pedagogy while broadening its objectives to actively support linguistic and cultural diversity.