Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Customer Service Principles at Their Finest

After complaining in my last blog about the application of business principles to higher education (one last cynical observation: How ironic it is that campuses are now realizing the urgent need to teach ethics to business college students!), I thought I would offer a more positive spin here. The question becomes how do we incorporate the best of the business world into teaching and learning processes? A business model, when approached from a different angle, offers a blueprint for targeting student-customer specific needs and finds its fullest expression in a culturally responsive and transformational learning-based pedagogy. Higher education has been making an effort to acknowledge new demands of globalization and diversity and this has in turn led to a move away from a Western approach to education and towards one that is more inclusive and flexible. I believe the use of culturally responsive teaching pedagogies provides a high level of individualized service.

There has long been awareness that students must feel motivated and engaged in their studies in order to succeed educationally, yet in recent years this has shifted into a more student-centered practice. In a YouTube interview nationally recognized author and professor Laura Rendón talks about her efforts to help colleges embrace pedagogies that focus on wholeness and are rooted in social justice principles. Education is at heart a relationship between student and teacher and she encourages us through examples and research findings to come back to this essence. This is not a ‘touchy-feely’ regression but a bold move forward into the multicultural and multiple learning-styles world we live in. What could be more customer oriented in higher education than to offer a wide range of learning opportunities, from the formation of small groups that bring dialogue and safe expression into the classroom, to the use of the arts to stimulate other ways of perceiving and understanding material, to power point presentations, to incorporating contemplative exercises that facilitate deeper integration of knowledge, to online discourse? Our students come from every socio-economic, cultural, and religious background, possess divergent sexual preferences, and have individual learning strengths and weaknesses. They learn in a variety of ways and the traditional Western image of professor as a distant and authoritative figure no longer serves them.

This student centered approach to education has its roots in Mezirow’s theories yet goes beyond his focus on adult learning. Benefits to the model (see Ginsberg & Wlodkowski’s 2009 phenomenal text Diversity & Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching in College) include greater student involvement and an increase in motivation to complete courses of study. Respect, integrity, diversity of perspectives, communication, collaboration, and freedom to explore are brought to the forefront of the learning process. Other outcomes as noted by intime.com include “clear and insightful thinking; more caring, concerned, and humane interpersonal skills; better understanding of interconnections among individual, local, national, ethnic, global, and human identities; and acceptance of knowledge as something to be continuously shared, critiqued, revised, and renewed”.

Drawbacks to adopting a student centered style of learning involve professorial and institutional requirements. Professors may be hesitant to view students as customers yet competition and global networking is making this a requirement in the classroom. A teacher has to be willing to take extra time to mold a syllabus to the needs of each classroom and develop an enhanced self-awareness of their own habitual thoughts and reactions to students. A professor may need to ask herself if she is capable of teaching in this way: How much experience do I have as an educator? Can I articulate my strengths? How much time does it take to plan a traditional lecture-style class? How much time would it take to plan a culturally responsive class? How structured is my teaching style? Should grading should be based on a curve or there should be no grades? How much support will I receive from my department head? These questions, when faced head on, can transform how a teacher teaches and deeply affect students’ lives. They require honest self-appraisal and a willingness to change yet offer a more dynamic and interactive teaching experience for those suited to it.

In turn, an institution must make resources available that support this approach to teaching and learning. This may necessitate giving gifted teachers leeway to do what they are best at and loosen ‘publish or perish’ obligations. How are issues like staff accomplishments, student learning objectives, and financial viability to be addressed? These rather business-model like issues can be balanced by statistics of, for example, enrollment in two different classes: “although slightly more than 12 percent of white students are enrolled in calculus, only 6.6 percent of African Americans and 6.2 percent of Latinos and Native Americans are enrolled. In the case of physics, the numbers are 30.7 percent for whites, 21.4 percent for African Americans, 18.9 percent for Hispanics, and 16.2 percent for Native Americans”. These numbers prove the need for a culturally responsive and multi-dimensional paradigm of teaching to more fully include students of non-White cultures in traditionally White dominated subjects.

In my previous blog I tried to warn of dangers inherent in employing business concepts in the realm of higher education. The core business value of customer satisfaction, however, does support tailoring classroom teaching techniques to specific student needs. When thoughtfully implemented culturally responsive teaching paradigms allow classrooms to reflect the diverse and interconnected world we live in. Applying basic customer service principles in this way has advantages for both students and teachers. It also raises complex issues pertaining to institutional support and strategies for enrollment, retention, and marketing. I believe the benefits far outweigh the potential pitfalls and by adopting this paradigm a campus enters firmly into 21st century educational needs and ideals.


Sources:
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20100119/LOVELAND03/100119002

www.informaworld.com/index/908496998.pdf

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/14783360802622805

Rendón, L. I. (2009). Sentipensante Pedagogy. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Ginsberg, M. B., & Wlodkowski, R. J. (2009). Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive
Teaching in College, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

http://aeq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/1/3

http://www.intime.uni.edu/multiculture/curriculum/Culture/Teaching.htm

http://vanpelt.sonoma.edu/users/p/pollack/edu420/Profoundly%20Multicultural%20Questions.pdf