Cosumnes River College Culturally Responsive Practices Resource Manual

Sabbatical Report Gale 1

Type B Sabbatical Report, Spring 2011

Completed by Lesley Gale

Respectfully Submitted to

Professional Standards Committee

Cosumnes River College

October 24, 2011 Sabbatical Report Gale 2

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to assemble, collect, create, and compile a resource manual for faculty and staff at Cosumnes River College. The materials collected in the manual were created or acquired for resources to be used in culturally responsive teaching discussion groups which were held in CASSL the semesters before, during, and after the sabbatical. Some of the materials were generated for more formal workshops for the CASSL Colloquium or flex activities. The articles included were researched and provided as supporting documents for the discussions. The resulting products are a large binder of documents to be kept in CASSL and digital files of those same documents to be accessible from the CASSL website. These are permanent resources for all faculty, staff, and administrators interested in learning more about culturally responsive practices and using them in their roles on campus. The hope is that more resources will continue to be added as the discussion groups and workshops related to culturally responsive teaching continue in the future. Sabbatical Report Gale 3

Background

Following my type B Sabbatical for fall 2009 titled “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Basic Skills Initiative,” I was asked to lead a workshop on culturally responsive teaching for the CASSL Colloquium. This was a seventy-five minute workshop during which I attempted to discuss the principles of culturally responsive teaching and demonstrate some of them with the participants. Seventy-five minutes was not nearly enough time to cover the aspects of culturally responsive teaching, and when the time was up, many of the participants asked to be able to have follow-up discussions. With the support of CASSL, I held two workshops a month during the fall

2010 and spring 2011 semesters. There was a small core of faculty, staff, and administrators who attended each workshop with a variety of others who attended at different times. Each time I sent out an email notice for a workshop, people across the campus community would respond that they were interested but could not attend. Recognizing there was much to be learned and very little time in which to do it, I asked for a twenty percent sabbatical leave in order to speak to as many faculty members as I could and collect materials that would help them to incorporate culturally responsive practices into their roles on campus. I was particularly interested in speaking with instructors who taught in content areas that are not easily adaptable to culturally responsive teaching.

Purpose

The purpose of this type B sabbatical was to prepare a resource guide that would assist instructors across all disciplines in implementing culturally responsive practices into their work with students. Sabbatical Report Gale 4

Activities to Address Sabbatical Purpose

I began to assemble the materials I had already created or acquired both in hard copies and digitally. As I continued to lead the culturally responsive discussion groups, I continued to create materials that would help the group members achieve the purposes of the group. For example, at the first meeting of the spring 2011 semester, the group decided that we should focus on one principle of culturally responsive teaching each month. As a result, I assembled articles and created handouts related that principle, such as connections to students, content relevance, or critical reflection. Additionally, as I learned more about various aspects of culturally responsive teaching through my own research, I would bring in articles or create shorter handouts with key information about these new ideas. The materials related to cultural data sets were acquired in this way.

Over the course of the 2010-2011 academic year, twenty-three different people from the campus community attended the workshops, representing many different roles and academic areas. Because some administrators and classified staff members attended the groups, I changed the title of the sabbatical and resulting manual to “Culturally Responsive Practices Resources

Manual” instead of teaching because the same principles may be applied to other types of work with students besides teaching. Instructors who attended represented a variety of academic disciplines, including math, ESL, English reading, English writing, art, philosophy, speech communications, media, accounting, and history. Some instructors were adjunct faculty, and some taught mostly online. When the groups met, I made a point of asking participants from the various areas how they would apply the principles of culturally responsive teaching to their discipline. I also had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with several of the instructors and asked them the same question as well as solicited any representative assignments or materials. Sabbatical Report Gale 5

A key discovery that resulted from these interactions was that the materials donated by faculty particular to a specific discipline didn’t necessarily reflect culturally responsive teaching; instead, the attitude and intent of the instructor and the instructional strategies used, which largely go undocumented when looking for concrete evidence of culturally responsive teaching, were where the cultural responsiveness occurred. For this reason, I didn’t end up with a large number of resources that were particular to a specific academic area. What I found was that instructors from all areas who attended the discussion groups were themselves able to make the connections between their content and the culturally responsive teaching principles.

Nevertheless, when I was able to find a document through research related to culturally responsive teaching in a particular subject area, I included it in the resources. For example, there is a short case study of a math instructor who successfully made her subject more relevant for her college students, a write-up of how role playing can engage and connect students in history classes, and a study that showed how culturally responsive teaching may be applied in online classes.

After collecting the materials, I organized them into digital folders and separate tabs in the binder. This was a challenge because I had some digital files on my office computer and some on my home computer as well as hard copies in a variety of places at home and in my office. I honestly had forgotten about some of the materials I had used, so it was rewarding to have them assembled in one place and surprising to see how much I had. For the binder, I used plastic sheet protectors to hold several copies of the handouts so people may take them as needed. I also decided to include the PowerPoint presentations I had given at different events because they included some information that was not available in any other form. The Sabbatical Report Gale 6 organization of the binder and digital files may be best represented in the following tables of

contents:

Culturally Responsive Practices Professional Development

Basics of Culturally Responsive Teaching: Articles

 Document: “Culturally Responsive Teaching Defined” by various authors

 Article: “Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching” by Geneva Gay

 Article: “Seven Principles for Training A Culturally Responsive Faculty” by Christine Johnson McPhail and Kelley L. Costner

 Article: “Culture, Style, and Cognition: Expanding the Boundaries of the Learning Paradigm for African-American Learners in the Community College” by Irving Pressley McPhail, Christine Johnson McPhail and Rita Smilkstein

 Article: “Literacy, Cultural Diversity, and Instruction” by Carol D. Lee

 Article: “Literacy and Culture: Cultural Conflicts in Classroom Practices, Culturally Responsive Teaching as Zones of Proximal Development” by Carol D. Lee

 Article: “Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Online Learning: Implications for the Globalized Community College” by Daniel R. Smith and David Ayers

 Article: “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Ingredients for Critical Teacher Reflection” by Tyron C. Howard

 Article: “Using the Lens of Critically Reflective Teaching in the Community College Classroom” by Stephen D. Brookfield Sabbatical Report Gale 7

 On Course Newsletter: “Educators and Diversity”

 Article: “Researching Race in Mathematics Education” by Danny Bernard Martin

Basics of Culturally Responsive Teaching: Workshop Materials

 Culturally Responsive Teaching Survey

 Culturally Responsive Teaching Goals

 Cultural Data Sets (PowerPoint Printout)

 Culturally Responsive Teaching Classroom Observation Tool

 Basics of Culturally Responsive Practices and Cultural Data Sets

 Does Culturally Responsive Teaching Apply to Me? and Starter Bibliography

 Comparison of Conventional Teaching and Culturally Responsive Teaching

 Establishing Inclusion Checklist

 Community College Critical Reflection Notes

 Culturally Responsive Teaching Follow-Up Discussions: Reflective Practice and Social Group Membership Profile Activity

 Culturally Responsive Teaching CASSL Colloquium Workshop PowerPoint

 Exploring Beyond Familiar Territory Flex Presentation PowerPoint

 Language Acquisition and Standard Written English PowerPoint Sabbatical Report Gale 8

 “Race, Culture, and Equity,” Selected Readings from National Writing Project Urban Sites Project

Culturally Responsive Practices Working with Students

Connections to Students and Ice Breakers:

 Venn Diagram: Similarities and Differences in Groups of Three

 Early Socialization and College Experiences Survey

 Student Introduction and Goal Survey

 Student Focus Group Topics (first in pairs; then share out)

Culturally Responsive Content Activities Sabbatical Report Gale 9

 Role Playing in History Class; Ideas for Making Math Relevant

 Contrastive Analysis for Academic Language

 Personal Thesaurus for Academic Vocabulary

Connecting through Storytelling

 Story Board

 Storytelling is a Powerful Instructional Tool

 Storytelling Resources

 Math Stories

 Article: “Why Stories Matter: The Art and Craft of Social Change” by Marshall Ganz

Critique of the Leave

Overall, I am pleased with the results of the leave. However, I found that there was a dearth of materials for specific disciplines in community colleges related to culturally responsive teaching. This is why I began asking the content instructors themselves for potential materials.

At first I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to collect many items specific to academic disciplines, but the resulting discovery that faculty committed to cultural responsiveness find ways to use the principles in their classes is enlightening. I have recruited several of these instructors (including math and art) to participate in a CASSL panel discussion November 21st in which they will share the ways they use culturally responsive approaches in their subject areas. Sabbatical Report Gale 10

The task now will be to encourage more instructors of various disciplines to participate in the discussions. Now that I can see the variety of resources I have collected, I am excited to continue adding to them, and when people reply to my email invitations saying they are interested in the groups but are unable to attend, I will direct them to the resource manual. I believe this has potential to assist the campus community in promoting student engagement and success.

Because of my lack of skill in manipulating websites, I was not able to post the digital documents to the CASSL website, but I have organized them into folders on a USB drive, and the CASSL administrative assistant has agreed to upload them for me. The former and current

CASSL Coordinators have been very supportive of my discussion groups as well as this project in agreeing to house the resources in CASSL.

Method of Sharing

I will give a brief orientation of the materials to the people who attend the groups in

CASSL. In the next two months, there will be special panels related to culturally responsive teaching, one on culturally responsive teaching in a variety of subject areas on November 21st and another on the topic of educating African American males (the panel will include professors, administrators, and students) on December 6th. I will be sure to mention the materials at these events. I will also take the opportunity to inform the campus community at large through one of the newsletters or forums that regularly circulates through emails.

I would like to thank the Professional Standards Committee for their generosity in allowing me this chance to make a permanent contribution to Cosumnes River College through this collection of culturally responsive practices resources. Sabbatical Report Gale 11