Middle School Teachers and Undergraduate Mentors Collaborating for Culturally Relevant STEM Education

This qualitative multiple case study explores the collaborations between three STEM middle school teachers and three STEM undergraduate mentors of color in an urban school district. Drawing on sociocultural theories and literature on culturally relevant education, we used a comparative thematic approach to explore how mentors contributed to culturally relevant opportunities in STEM curriculum and pedagogy. We found that the partners’ STEM identities, how the teacher positioned the mentor in the learners’ experience, and the teachers’ philosophy of the purpose of engineering influenced the contribution undergraduate mentors could make to rigorous and equitable engineering instruction.

Building a Liberal Arts Tradition in India

Postcolonial nations often struggle with the legacy of higher education systems built by and for the benefit of former colonizers. In India, several visionaries have endeavored to design new approaches to higher education that are suitable to India’s unique context while taking inspiration from the US liberal arts college model. Interest in the liberal arts has grown - in an interconnected world, where a broader scope of understanding is required to craft solutions to societal challenges, young Indians are seeking an alternative to the specialized university model that has dominated the Indian higher education landscape since colonial times. This paper explores the practice of the liberal arts in India through three questions: How does the liberal arts approach fit within the Indian context? How have Indian universities built their own liberal arts tradition? What tensions do these universities navigate? I collected data through a document analysis and interviews with founders, faculty, students, and alumni at three new liberal arts universities in India. While communicating the practical value of the liberal arts to a largely unfamiliar population, the universities built their own liberal arts tradition to help students appreciate, analyze, and develop a commitment to improving the Indian context. At the same time, universities faced numerous tensions: responding to pressures to produce highly employable graduates while remaining true to their institutional ideals, balancing wisdom from both the western liberal arts model and indigenous Indian traditions, and fostering greater inclusion while maintaining financial sustainability. The study’s findings contribute to the field of higher education in India and other postcolonial countries seeking to create new culturally relevant education traditions.

Cultivating Positive Health, Learning, and Community: The Return of Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star…

For more than 3500 years, since Olmec times (1500–400 BC), the peoples of Mesoamerica have shared with one another a profound way of living involving a deep understanding of the human body and of land and cosmology. As it stands, healing ways of knowing that depend on medicinal plants, the Earth’s elements, and knowledge of the stars are still intact. The Indigenous Xicana/o/xs who belong to many of the mobile tribes of Mesoamerica share a long genealogical history of cultivating and sustaining their Native American rituals, which was weakened in Mexico and the United States during various periods of colonization. This special edition essay sheds light on the story of Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star as a familial place of Xicana/o/x belonging and practice. To do so, we rely on the archaeological interpretation of these two entities as one may get to know them through artifacts, monuments, and ethnographic accounts, of which some date to Mesoamerica’s Formative period (1500–400 BC). Throughout this paper, ancestral medicine ways are shown to help cultivate positive health, learning, and community. Such cosmic knowledge is poorly understood, yet it may further culturally relevant education and the treatment of the rampant health disparities in communities of Mesoamerican ancestry living in the United States. The values of and insights into Indigenous Xicana/o/x knowledge and identity conclude this essay.

Families, Resources, and Community: Illuminating the Structures of Culturally Relevant Education in an Urban Early Childhood Center

In this paper, we examine the enactment of culturally relevant education in an urban early childhood setting in the US. This descriptive case study used a sociocultural framework that emphasizes the relationship between structure and agency. The research question that guided the study was: How does an urban, non-profit early childhood educational center focused on the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students and families enact culturally relevant education? The findings indicated that both tacit and tangible structures supported the agency of all school stakeholders. Tacit structures included multilingual and multimodal communication, continuous, responsive reflection, and a schema of valuing family engagement, which permeated the institution’s culture. Tangible structures included the school’s faculty, administrators, and staff, the students and families who were served by the school, and the financial resources that were creatively leveraged by the staff and administration. The article concludes with implications and recommendations for stakeholders in a variety of schooling contexts who strive to enact authentic, sustained culturally relevant education.

Examining Teachers’ Culturally Relevant Education Self-Efficacy Perceptions in Turkey

We designed this study with the aim to examine teachers’ culturally relevant and sustaining education self-efficacy perceptions in Turkey. For this purpose, we developed a Culturally Relevant/Sustaining Education Self-Efficacy Scale. We obtained the data from 1302 teachers. Data analysis proceeded in three steps: First, we analyzed factor analysis. Second, we conducted a descriptive analysis of the items on the CRESE Scale. Finally, we compared teachers’ perceptions. The scale consists of a single factor and teachers’ scores on the CRESE Scale were highly reliable. The findings revealed that teachers were less efficacious in their ability to revise the teaching-learning materials in terms of cultural diversity, to give culturally relevant examples, to reflect the students’ cultural values in the classroom, and to increase in school parents’ and families’ participation in Turkey. Also, teachers’ self-efficacy perceptions differ significantly according to some variables. We discussed the implications for these findings for both further research and future teacher preparation.

Discussing culturally relevant education and its connection to cultural aspects of mathematics through ethnomathematics

Nesse artigo, discutimos a Educação Culturalmente Relevante, as Escolas Culturalmente Relevantes, a Pedagogia Culturalmente Relevante e os aspectos culturais da Matemática. A base teórica comum desses campos de conhecimento está inter-relacionada no tocante ao desenvolvimento da Etnomatemática. Nesse contexto, os educadores respeitam os alunos provenientes de diversas culturas, propiciando esforços contínuos e genuínos para entender as suas perspectivas sociais e culturais, a fim de acolher experiências inovadoras de aprendizado e ações pedagógicas, abordando alunos com atitudes e posturas flexíveis em relação aos entendimentos interculturais. Portanto, é imperativo utilizar políticas e práticas que valorizem os educadores, os professores e os alunos com o objetivo de possibilitar a sua interação efetiva em um ambiente culturalmente diverso.

Principles of Culturally Relevant Education in an Ethnomathematical Perspective

The implementation of culturally relevant education assists in the development of student intellectual, social, and political learning by using their cultural referents to develop mathematical knowledge. It uses prior experiences of students to make learning more relevant and effective in order to strengthen their connectedness with schooling. Culturally relevant schools contextualize teaching and instructional practices while maintaining academic rigor. In these schools, educators, teachers, school leaders, and staff members are able to recognize and build upon the strengths of the students by applying instructional strategies that are culturally relevant. Culturally relevant leadership is grounded in the conviction that students are able to excel in their academic endeavor. In this context, it is necessary to enable the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy into the curricula, designed to fit together school culture with students’ background in order to help them to conceptualize knowledge. Ethnomathematics and culturally relevant pedagogy-based approaches to mathematics curriculum are intended to make mathematical content more meaningful and relevant to students. Hence, the main objective of this article is to discuss the importance of principles of culturally relevant education in accordance to an ethnomathematics perspective.