At this week’s Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Dr. Adeyemi Stembridge, author of “Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy” and a giftededucational consultant and thought partner specializing in equity-focused school improvement. We talked about Yemi’s lifelong love affair with teaching– and with equity– sparked by his own experiences in high school at City-As-School, which forged his vision of what education can and should be. As Yemi put it, “There are few situations in which he feels more alive than investigating a worthy idea from multiple perspectives.” We feel the same! Yemi shared his feelings about teaching being the most profoundly human activity there is, doing some of the most important work there is. He wants to help as many teachers as possible be able to teach better and Culturally Responsive Education–along with thinking about who we are being culturally responsive to– is a key way to do so. Cultural identity is the composite of our cultural selves. Well beyond food and fashion and holidays, culture is information that lives in your brain and affects your deepest values. A culturally responsive learning environment is one where students get to build an understanding around a worthy idea by drawing down from their cultural background. In fact, Yemi asserts that learning can’t be truly rigorous unless students pull from the full range of their background to show what they’re coming to understand. As he notes “When you draw on fluencies of what it means to be human, the classroom becomes electric.” It sure does. Yemi has honed in on six key CRE themes–cultural identity, relationships, vulnerability, assets, rigor, and engagement–and he works with teachers through week-long residencies focused on how to operationalize these themes in our classrooms. Yemi underscored–wait for it—that the standardized testing regime we have in the US is a bigger challenge to equity than racism. That’s right. Test scores do not measure the effects of good teaching and the biggest influence on how students perform on tests is zip code so what’s the point? He’s not opposed to testing; he’s opposed to the models we have now and thinks that canceling the tests in 2020 and 2021 was an implicit admission of guilt. If the tests were deemed “not good for kids” in a pandemic, why would they be good for kids at any other time?
Yemi is working on a new book coming out this fall focused on his key insight: teaching that’s effective for closing the equity gap is much more artful than it is algorithmic. You won’t want to miss it. Thank you for listening!
