Integration of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Reading Intervention
As the achievement gap persists in Minnesota between white students and students of color, many districts utilize specialists or interventionists to accelerate achievement for students performing below grade-level expectations. Reading specialists diagnose and develop instructional plans to accelerate reading achievement. To accelerate reading achievement, teachers and reading interventionists must support culturally and linguistically diverse students through culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP). CSP asks teachers to build an understanding of students’ cultural assets to inform instructional decisions which consequently reduces stress for students in the classroom allowing increased academic achievement. Partnering with culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students, teachers set goals with students to increase student efficacy. To support reading achievement, teachers make informed decisions by selecting effective reading strategies based on reading content knowledge and CSP. This project connected the diverse student population at my school site to supplement Pathways to Reading Excellence at School Sites (PRESS; Minnesota Center for Reading Research, 2017) reading interventions with CSP strategies. Developing a variety of instructional options to support CLD students addresses the lack of CSP strategies missing from PRESS reading interventions.
To equitably share resources and information for culturally sustaining pedagogy in reading intervention, I created a website. The website answers the question: How can culturally sustaining pedagogy integrate with a specific reading intervention framework to accelerate reading achievement for elementary students? The components reflect a collection of original and sourced materials to supplement the provided materials from PRESS. Project components have been compiled on this website and organized into three components: “Know”, “Teach”, and “Learn”. A fourth section, “Virtual” was added to share ways to integrate teaching and culturally responsive pedagogy during modified learning contexts of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Culturally responsive pedagogy fittingly responds and shifts based on student needs, including transitioning between distance learning, modified in-person learning, and shifting family needs.