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Culturally Responsive Teaching Article Review
Summary of Article One
The article, “’All children matter’: A preservice teacher’s understanding and practice of
culturally responsive teaching in a third-grade mathematics classroom” talks about how public
schools are becoming more and more diverse, but the teachers are not (Mburu, 2022). There are
not as many diverse teachers as there are students in public schools. Because of this, students of
color and low-income students are not performing as high in mathematics as the other students.
This is due to these students not having the same environment at school as they do at home. The
environment at their school is different than their home, so they are not interested in learning
when they are at school. Mathematics is the subject that is being underperformed the most with
these students because there is no culture or diversity embedded into the subject compared to
other subjects. It is the teachers’ jobs to embed culture into mathematics, but it is not occurring
as much as it should because it is important for the students. Mburu (2022) states, “Culturally
responsive mathematics is vital because it allows students to make personal connections,
important for developing a meaningful and robust understanding of mathematics content” (p. 28-
29). It is important for the students to receive culturally responsive teaching in all subjects.
The study that was conducted in this article was towards a preservice teacher who
understood culturally responsive teaching and implemented it into her student teaching. The
author conducted this study by finding out how the teacher understood culturally responsive
teaching and how she implemented it during her student teaching. The results showed that the
teacher did not provide details on why a teacher should be culturally responsive. Also, she did
not end up implementing different culture and diversity into her mathematics lessons and instead
she taught straight from the textbook. Even though the study did not provide the results the
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author was looking for, “the study provides recommendations to teacher educators” (Mburu,
2022, p. 41). Overall, current teachers need to continue working on providing preservice teachers
with good culturally responsive teaching, especially for mathematics.
Summary of Article Two
The article. “Teachers’ expectations and challenges in using culturally responsive
teaching (CRT) strategies in the ESL classroom”, discusses two ESL teachers and what the
challenges and strategies are within the classroom. The purpose of the study is to determine what
the expectations are that these teachers have and what challenges could occur when teaching
English to students in a secondary school. Along with determining what the challenges are, “the
study aims to discover teachers’ strategies to accommodate all students in the classroom
regardless of their cultural differences” (Idrus & Sohid, 2023, p. 630). During the study, the
researchers took data on the lesson plans and interviews of the teachers. Afterwards, they
analyzed all the data to get a better understanding of them. Also, they used codes to help them
determine what the themes of the data were.
The researchers broke the data up into six different sections, teachers’ perceptions,
teachers’ expectations and challenges, teaching strategies to promote unity, knowing the
students, social and emotional engagement, and promoting collaboration and providing support.
Idrus and Sohid (2023) state, “One of the most important conclusions from this study is that both
participants demonstrate awareness of the cultural variety in their classroom and have favorable
attitudes regarding it” (p. 634). These teachers were shown to be enthusiastic when it came to
teaching these students. Also, they made sure to create positive relationships with their students
and had the students make positive relationships with the other students. The teachers did this by
making sure everyone was respecting each other. Throughout each lesson, the teachers
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demonstrated various cultures to make sure that the students were exposed to all their
backgrounds.
Comparison and Contrast
Between the two articles, there were a few comparisons and a lot of contrasts. Both
articles were adamant about how important culturally responsive teaching is to students. Without
it, there can be students who do not feel included and a part of the class. The two articles also
went into a lot of detail on what culturally responsive teaching is and the importance behind it.
They both listed and discussed credible literature at the beginning of the articles.
There were quite a few contrasts between the two articles. The first one being the
different age levels of the students. The first article was a study done with third grade students.
Meanwhile, the second article was with secondary or high school students. That is a huge age
gap between the two articles, and it can show the maturity levels between the students as well.
Another contrast between the articles is that the first article had only one teacher within the
study. Meanwhile, there were two teachers in the second article’s study. The more people
involved in a study helps with accuracy and it could lead to better results. Lastly, the big
difference between the two articles is their conclusions. The first article’s conclusion proved to
be negative as the teacher did not end up being culturally responsive within her lessons.
Meanwhile, the second article’s conclusion was very positive. The two teachers proved to be
very culturally responsive with their students when they taught their lessons.
Justification and Importance
Even though there were a lot of contrasts between the two articles, both are important
when it comes to learning about culturally responsive teaching. Both articles explain why
culturally responsive teaching is important and how it can be implemented in classrooms. The
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studies that were conducted within each article gave vastly different scenarios of what could
happen within a classroom. The first article showed a scenario where the teacher was not
culturally responsive within her lessons. The author later went on to explain why that would not
help the students in that class and different strategies on how to better implement it into the
lessons. The second article showed a scenario where the teachers were culturally responsive
within their lessons and how the students benefitted from that. The author went on to discuss the
strategies that were used within the lessons to help implement it and why they are important. A
big strategy that the teachers used was positive relationships. It is important for all teachers to
know just how important positive relationships can be within the classroom. Positive
relationships can help build culturally responsive teaching.
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References
Idrus, F., & Sohid, M. (2023a). Teachers’ expectations and challenges in using culturally
responsive teaching (CRT) strategies in the ESL classroom. Journal of Language Teaching
and Research, 14(3), 629–635. https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1403.10.
Mburu, J. (2022). “All children matter”: A preservice teacher’s understanding and practice of
culturally responsive teaching in a third-grade mathematics classroom. International
Journal of Multicultural Education, 24(1), 27–46.
https://doi.org/10.18251/ijme.v24i1.2623.
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