Attached.

ON POINT

Cultural Identity and Teaching

The mission of the National Institute for Urban School Improvement
is to partner with Regional Resource Centers to develop powerful networks
of urban local education agencies and schools that embrace and implement a
data-based, continuous improvement approach for inclusive practices.
Embedded within this approach is a commitment to evidence-based practice
in early intervention, universal design, literacy and positive behavior supports.
The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), of the U.S. Department of
Education, has funded NIUSI to facilitate the unification of current general and
special education reform efforts as these are implemented in the nation’s urban
school districts. NIUSI’s creation reflects OSEP’s long-standing commitment to
improving educational outcomes for all children, specifically those with
disabilities, in communities challenged and enriched by the urban experience.

Great Urban Schools: Learning Together Builds Strong Communities

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ON POINT SERIES

Cultural Identity and Teaching
Kim Kennedy White, Metropolitan State College
Shelley Zion, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center
Elizabeth Kozleski, Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, Arizona State University

October, 2005

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This On Point is the second in a series of three On
Points that explore issues around culture and
teaching. The first On Point operationalizes the
way in which NIUSI defines culture and how to
think about educational settings and scenarios
from the point of view of culture. While this On
Point focuses on teacher’s identity, the third On
Point in this series addresses how classrooms are
enriched by the funds of knowledge and assets
that children and their families bring with them
from their homes and communities.

when they are with others. Other teachers are
energetic and lively around their students, but
need down time to refuel and ground themselves.
Some teachers love routine and predictability,
while other teachers become particularly
excited when routines are interrupted and
they can act spontaneously. All of this is
shaped and reshaped by daily experiences in
the classroom. The longer teachers teach, the
more their beliefs and knowledge are
reorganized and sculpted by experience.

One thing becomes clear enough. Teaching
as the direct delivery of some preplanned
curriculum, teaching as the orderly and
scripted conveyance of information, teaching
as clerking, is simply a myth. Teaching is
much larger and much more alive than that; it
contains more pain and conflict, more joy and
intelligence, more uncertainty and ambiguity.
It requires more judgment and energy and
intensity than, on some days, seems humanly
possible. Teaching is spectacularly unlimited
(Ayres, 2001, p. 5).

Experience, culture, and personality are just part
of who teachers are, and they go wherever
teachers go—including their classrooms. For
teachers from dominant cultural backgrounds
(white, middle class teachers in the United
States), their own culture may not be something
they are immediately aware of because it fits
so seamlessly with prevailing opinions, beliefs,
values, and expectations about behavior,
education, and life choices. Yet, many choices
that teachers make are determined more from
their cultural background than from individual
beliefs. The expectations that teachers hold for
teaching and learning are grounded in cultural
beliefs that may be unfamiliar to students and
families from non-dominant cultures.

Culture matters
Teachers bring themselves—their life
experiences, histories, and cultures—into the
classroom. They bring their assumptions and
beliefs about what a good teacher is and does,
their knowledge of education theory, research,
and human development, and their love and
knowledge of content areas. They bring their
personalities and teaching styles that are
shaped by social and cultural interactions.
Some teachers are extroverted and come alive

Teachers continually express their culture; the
danger is being unaware of that expression.
Coming to an understanding of the ways in
which one’s beliefs, experiences, values, and
assumptions are linked to culture is an essential
feature of culturally responsive practice. As
Giroux (1992) says, “Teachers need to find ways
of creating a space for mutual engagement of
lived difference that does not require the

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silencing of a multiplicity of voices by a single
dominant discourse” (p. 201). Cultural
responsiveness requires teachers to acknowledge
and understand their own cultural values and
how this impacts their own teaching practice.
Cultural disconnect can occur when individuals
from different cultures interact. Schools in
which the cultural backgrounds of teachers
differ significantly from their students because
of ethnic, racial, linguistic, social, religious, or
economic reasons are especially vulnerable to
cultural disconnect. For example, consider a
situation in which both a teacher and the family
of one of her students value education and
family. The teacher’s beliefs include a principle
that children should always attend school
because of the learning and continuity that takes
place in the classroom. The family, however,
takes the student out of school for two weeks in
order to visit a grandmot...