From Eliminating the Gaps:


While the demographics of our student population are changing rapidly, our educators and other school staff do not reflect the diversity of the classrooms served.

Cultural competence provides a set of skills that professionals need in order to improve practice to serve all students and communicate effectively with their families. These skills enable the educator to build on the cultural and language qualities that young people bring to the classroom rather than viewing those qualities as deficits.

Cultural competence training asks educators to confront the stereotypes held both consciously and unconsciously about students. Bias affects the way that we perceive and teach students and has the potential to negatively affect student achievement.

Teachers who aspire to become more culturally competent can build relationships based on trust with students and their families, even though they experience the world in different ways. This is essential to closing academic achievement gaps and to fulfilling all students’ civil right to a quality education. .

• Knowing the community where the school is located
   
• Understanding all people have a unique world view
   
• Using curriculum that is respectful of and relevant to the cultures represented in its student body
   
• Being alert to the ways that culture affects who we are
   
• Placing the locus of responsibility on the professional and the institution
  
  
• Examining systems, structures, policies and practices for their impact on all students and families

From Oregon Public Broadcasting

An effective urban educator must be culturally competent to maintain a culturally responsive classroom. Cultural competence has very little to do with information found in history texts or articles on ethnic studies. It is skill in the art of reading people in their own context -- without translating their words and behaviors through a personal filter.

Good teachers, like good parents, want the best for their students. They want them to have dreams, set goals and develop the skills and confidence to achieve them. Good teachers want all their students to feel good about themselves and comfortable in their community.

Yet, as every teacher knows, not all students are the same. Children come from different backgrounds, different places and different cultures. They possess different abilities, speak different languages, and have different values and different dreams -- just like their teachers.Teachers too come from different backgrounds. They have different skills, different values and different levels of comfort with all the differences they face in their classrooms every day. Research shows that the way a teacher feels and teaches about differences can affect the atmosphere in a classroom, and for better or worse, impact student success and achievement.

To be truly effective, a teacher in today's classroom needs to teach from a multicultural perspective. To achieve this, the Department of Special Education at San Diego State University found that "educators must experience culture, explore their own culture and cultures different from their own, and examine how cultural perspectives collide and intertwine." In other words, if educators are to improve the quality of the classroom experience for all of their students, they need to become culturally competent.

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