Overview of Articles and Annotated Bibliography

Cassidy Hines
ENG 302
Michigan State University

Overview: This annotated bibliography and summative paper is composed of literature

regarding culturally relevant pedagogy in education. I picked this topic because urban education
is of high interest to me, but I have always wondered how I, as a white, female educator, can use
culturally relevant pedagogical practices to create a positive environment for all students in my
classroom. Therefore, I decided to complete this assignment with the research question of, In
what ways can I use a culturally relevant pedagogy in an urban, elementary classroom to create a
sense of security and belonging in my classroom?.
This research question is rooted in the article, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed
Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice by Django Paris. This article emphasizes the need
to make education relevant, responsive, and enjoyable to students of all different backgrounds. I
have compiled eight articles that support the belief of Paris while answering my research
question.

Overview of Theory:
In the articles that I selected to examine, the theoretical framework was extremely similar
in each article. Since I selected culturally relevant pedagogy as my focus of research, the articles
focused on groups of students who are seen to be at an academic disadvantage in the American
educational system, most notably African American and Latina/o students. These articles
subscribed to the same theoretical positions. Each article pointed out that there is a need to
educate all students in a slightly different way, and that teachers may need to spend more time
with their students of marginalized groups or backgrounds to bring them to the same level as
their majority group counterparts (Brown, 2002, pp. 127). This is due to historical context in the
fact that marginalized groups were legally not given the same opportunities as whites
educationally (among many other categories) in the history of the United States. This has created
a historical deficit in the education of minority groups, and today effects the educational system
via the needs for culturally relevant pedagogy and social justice pedagogy. Teachers cannot teach
a one size fits all curriculum and must discuss historical differences among cultures and races
with their students, as they are capable of noticing and identifying these problems in both
historical and current society as early as the first grade (Silva and Langhout, 2015). Overall,
these studies share the same basic theoretical position of the need to address these problems in
education as a microcosm of larger society (Esposito and Swain, 2009, pp. 39).
Authors of these studies tended to draw from similar, if not identical, sources of theory.
The most abundant commonly cited source among the articles was Ladson-Billings. LadsonBillings published many articles that were used throughout my review of literature, and this
author in particular sheds light on the Eurocentric focus in education and the methods that
teachers have begun to use to create a more inclusive environment in classrooms. However, the

articles that I examined tended to take this information as a starting point, and develop more
complex research questions based on these concepts. For example, the 2014 article by Cholewa
et al. takes the findings of culturally relevant pedagogy having a positive effect on academic
achievement and addresses how these practices are benefiting students of color psychologically.
The two main theoretical frames used throughout the articles are culturally relevant
pedagogy and social justice pedagogy. Culturally relevant pedagogy is essentially the pedagogy
that a teacher develops that showcases cultural competence, or the skill of teaching students of
multiple cultural backgrounds and enabling the actual class content to be connected to the
cultural background and contexts of each individual student (Esposito and Swain, 2009, pp. 39).
Within this framework, the studies based their research questions on the findings of previous
research. For example, Morrison, Robbins, and Rose (2008) used the framework laid out by
Ladson-Billings 1995 article to assess 45 articles that they found and drew conclusions based on
this framework.
Along with culturally relevant pedagogy, social justice pedagogy was another starting
theoretical frame for many authors. Social justice pedagogy is essentially teaching students with
the end goal of students being able to identify and create change in the socially unjust constructs
of society (Esposito and Swain, 2009, pp. 39). In the Hyland article, it is noted that a teachers
belief in social justice is a starting point for her decisions regarding her students and her
communication regarding those decisions (Hyland, 2009, pp. 104). This frame is important
because ultimately, in education the end goal is to create a better student academically,
emotionally, physically, etc. A student should be a better person when he or she steps out of your
class than when he or she stepped into it at the beginning of the year. A social justice pedagogy
is necessary because students need to know that the world is not a fair, just place. There are

many things wrong with our society, and students need to learn about these problems and
strategies to combat them in the real world.

Overview of Methods:
Methodology of these articles was incredibly similar. The dominant methodological
orientation used was qualitative data. Questions tended to be open ended and did not necessarily
have a right or wrong answer. There was also a lot to do with feelings and actions of students and
educators, which are not variables that can necessarily be measured quantitatively. These studies
used interviews, classroom observations, questionnaires, and focus group sessions to retrieve
data from participants. The different tactics proved useful for generating different types of
information. For example, interviews were extremely important in the Jim Crow study because it
is impossible to observe the methods of these teachers since most of them were at least 60 years
old and because schools are no longer segregated by Jim Crow laws (Kelly, 2010, pp. 334).
Meanwhile, in the study on a culturally relevant first grade teacher, the classroom observations
proved to be a key factor in seeing culturally relevant pedagogy in action (Silva and Langhout,
2015, pp. 15-16). The researchers were able to see how the teacher responded to students
identifying examples and sources of social injustice in the classroom, which would not have been
nearly as informative or powerful in other contexts (Silva and Langhout, 2015, pp. 15-16).
The Morrison study differed from the others in the fact that it was a compilation of
studies done throughout a 13 year period. These researchers actually used online data bases with
key words of culturally responsive and culturally relevant to uncover research projects to
read and analyze. However, data obtained from all studies were coded for common themes

among the research and were later analyzed for patterns and meaning. Methodologically
speaking, all eight studies were very similar.
The studies differed quite a bit when it came to the size of the population being observed.
The articles of studies by Borijan and Padilla (2009), Esposito and Swain (2009), Kelly (2009),
and Morrison et al. (2008) utilized data generated by multiple educators in their studies to create
a well-rounded representation of the areas and fields that they were studying. By comparing
multiple individuals in each study, the researchers were able to pick up specific themes that the
educators shared. This means that the validity of these studies may be higher because outliers
and common trends can be identified when there is a greater and more diverse amount of data
going into a study.
Unlike the previous group of researchers, Brown, Cholewa et al., Hyland, and Silvia and
Langhout utilized the more individualized approach of examining only a single research
participant. This method means that data obtained may not be able to be generalized to a greater
field of professionals, but since the research focuses on only a single person this makes it easier
for researchers to get as many details as possible and dig deeply into cause and effect
relationships. This individualized method also makes it possible to identify situational variables
within the experiment. For example, since time is being focused solely on a single teacher and
classroom it is possible to get to know the history of not only the teacher, but also the children in
the classroom. What students have gone through in their lives is likely to shape how they learn,
and many times a teacher creates certain parts of a curriculum based on his or her students pasts.
Therefore, a smaller participant study is beneficial due to the numerous amount of situational
factors in educational contexts.

Overview of Findings:
Generally speaking, the studies at hand all differed slightly in their findings but
ultimately related to each other. The shared themes of the studies related to positive techniques
that teachers can use in the classroom to promote learning of all students, but students of color in
particular. A few of these included teachers taking it upon themselves to hold themselves
personally responsible for the learning and well-being of each individual child, creativity with
resources and lesson planning, creating an empowering social setting, meaningful roles, and
shared leadership in the classroom (Kelly, 2010, pp. 346 and Silva and Langhout, 2015, pp. 3-4).
These tactics are important for all students, but they are especially important for students of color
and poor students because these students tend to come from historical backgrounds of being seen
as subordinate to others (Silva and Langhout, 2015, pp. 22). By empowering these students,
educators are showing them that they are capable of just as much in the world as anyone else.
However, through discussions of race, history, and privilege that come up in the classroom
students will also learn that there is an unfortunate difference between the effort that they and
their white, affluent counterparts may need to put in to achieve the same goals. Borjian and
Padilla support the same findings as the other authors, but they also add that students who speak
other languages need to be reminded that they are competent language learners, and that their
native languages and cultures matter (Borjian and Padilla, 2009, pp. 325). This is extremely
important because part of immigrant students succeeding in American schools is highly
dependent on how teachers, classmates, and society as a whole view immigrants and their native
cultures and languages (Borjian and Padilla, 2009, pp. 325).
As similar as the above articles were, there was one article that stood out. The Hyland
article focused on the reasons as to why it was hard for a white, female teacher, Andrea Quinn, to

enact a culturally relevant pedagogy in her classroom. The article also visited the approaches to
teaching that aided her in developing this pedagogy. Much like the educators in the other articles,
Andrea found that developing the belief that all children are capable of academic excellence,
combined with a high sense of self-efficacy and responsibility for student outcomes,
constructivist teaching practices combined with a conviction that knowledge is constructed and
should be viewed critically were quite practical for her in creating an inclusive environment in
(Hyland, 2009, pp. 108). This study found that the main source of struggle for Andrea was the
lack of connections that she had originally and made to the black community. She became very
skilled in the classroom throughout the study, yet she and her students had different views of life
because of their backgrounds and historical differences. Andrea found it hard to connect to her
students because of these differences in how she and her students saw the world.
After conducting a review of the literature, I have found an area that I believe further
research should be done on. As educators, we talk about culturally relevant pedagogy all the
time. However, there is not much research out there to back up how these practices make
students feel, and how we can mold the practices to better fit the needs of the students. Cholewa
and colleagues begin to do this in their study of the effects of culturally relevant practices on the
psychological well-being of students of color, but overall there is not much information out there
to suggest if students appreciate and notice these practices. I suggest this because even though
we know that these practices are beneficial from an educators perspective, students may have
recommendations for how teachers could be a better help to them individually which could be
expanded to help all students in general.

Annotated Bibliography
Borjian, A., & Padilla, A. (2009). Voices from Mexico: How American Teachers can Meet the
Needs of Mexican Immigrant Students. The Urban Review, 42(4), 316-328.
doi:10.1007/s11256-009-0135-0
Due to the large amount of emigration from Mexico to the United States, Borjian and Padilla
designed this study in reply to the inadequate education received by Mexican immigrants in the
United States. Borjian and Padilla stress that in order for teachers to understand how to teach
their immigrant students, the teachers must first understand where the students come from, what
they want to know about, and what motivates them. Therefore, this study was designed to obtain
the knowledge of 18 English language teachers from Mexico and receive their suggestions as to
how to best teach these immigrant children. The methods of this study included participant
recommendation by faculty of a public university in Guanajuato, Mexico and data was collected
via questionnaires based off of the results of another study by Borjian in 2008. The results of this
study found that there were three main categories that Mexican teachers thought would be
helpful guidelines for their American counterparts in the classroom: multicultural understanding
and encouragement of sustaining students original culture, a good learning environment where
students feel safe and respected, and the knowledge of both English and Spanish in order to
clarify discrepancies between the languages that students may come across in their work.
Brown, E. L. (2002). Mrs. Boyds fifth-grade inclusive classroom: A study of multicultural
teaching strategies. Urban Education, 37(1), 126141.
Brown addressed the juxtaposition of a homogeneous teaching population with a heterogeneous
student population through this study that focused on a fifth grade teacher who was known for
her fostering of an environment of academic excellence and inclusivity. The methods of this
study include both classroom observations and informal interviews of the teacher with over 25
years of experience. Findings of this study suggest that factors such as physical environment of
the classroom, classroom discipline, instructional strategies, and teacher/parent interaction all
can be skewed in an inclusive, multicultural way in an effort to aid both the academic and social
engagement of all students in a classroom. This study could be potentially limiting because it
only focused on one teacher in one classroom, so data collected may not be as dependable as if
the study had looked at multiple teachers in multiple districts, in multiple states, etc.
Cholewa, B., Goodman, R. D., West-Olatunji, C., & Amatea, E. (2014). A qualitative
examination of the impact of culturally responsive educational practices on the
psychological well-being of students of color. Urban Review, 46, 574596.
The authors of this paper conducted the study at hand in response to the positive academic
outcomes of teachers invoking culturally responsive educational practices in their classrooms.
This article takes the educational outcomes that are studied in many journals and takes them a
step further to analyze the psychological effects of these practices on students. Methodology of
this study included a videotaping and coding of a culturally responsive teacher in the beginning
of the school year in 2006.The recordings were analyzed for verbal and nonverbal actions and
students responses to each of these. Findings included a multitude of qualitative evidence

suggesting that interventions such as building experiences on existing knowledge, integrating

music and dance into the classroom, utilizing familiar communication styles, and many more had
a positive psychological effect on the students in the class, most notably on the students of color.
This study may be limiting in the fact that it only used data from one teacher. While this teacher
had 29 years of experience at the time and was very competent in her field, greater results may
have been received from the study if more teachers were included.
Esposito, J., & Swain, A. (2009). Pathways to Social Justice: Urban Teachers' Uses of Culturally
Relevant Pedagogy as a Conduit for Teaching for Social Justice. Perspectives on Urban
Education, 6(1), 38-48.
Esposito and Swain developed this study to explore the challenges facing urban teachers as they
implement culturally relevant pedagogy and to demonstrate the inextricable link between
culturally relevant and social justice pedagogies (38). The methods for this study were
composed of qualitative data in the form of in-depth interviews and a focus group session that
included seven African American teachers who taught in a southeastern, urban city. These
teachers came from different backgrounds and had different views on culturally relevant
pedagogy. The data that these teachers provided was coded as it was transcribed and utilized the
constant comparison method (40). The authors found that there were multiple themes present
throughout their data. These included the fact that teaching with the end goal of social justice
requires a large amount of risk, time, and self-reflection, that teaching for social justice included
teaching critical thinking skills, empowering students, positive academic skills that lead to
academic achievement, and aiding students in the process of comparing themselves to others. I
believe that this study could be seen as limiting in the fact that both of the authors consider
themselves feminist, social justice researchers [who identify as] Latina and African American
females and admit that these identities may have facilitated the development of a positive
rapport with [their] informants (40).
Hyland. N. (2009) One White Teacher's Struggle for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: The
Problem of the Community, The New Educator, 5:2, 95-112,
DOI:10.1080/1547688X.2009.10399567
As a white educator, it can be hard to engage in culturally relevant pedagogy for a multitude of
reasons. Hylands study of a white, female teacher who worked in a predominately black and
overall urban school focuses on the struggles that this teacher, Andrea Quinn, endured in her
time there. I was particularly drawn to this article because of the fact that I am a white, female
teacher who is interested in teaching in an urban setting, so I may have similar experiences to
these in my lifetime. The methods of this study include classroom observations, interview
sessions, informal conversations, journal entries, email messages, and professional development
experiences. The findings of this study included both hardships and successes. Her hindrances
mainly stemmed from the cultural differences between the teacher and the local black
community. Concepts that helped her along the way included the development of the belief that
all students are capable of academic excellence a high sense of self-efficacy and responsibility
for student outcomes, constructivist teaching practices combined with a conviction that
knowledge is constructed and should be viewed critically aided her abilities and outcomes as an

educator (15). Like many of the other articles, this one is limiting in the fact that it only studies
one teacher.
Kelly, H. (2009). What Jim Crows Teachers Could Do: Educational Capital and Teachers
Work in Under-resourced Schools. The Urban Review, 329-350.
doi:10.1007/s11256-009-0132-3
Kelly designed this study to obtain the memories of teachers from the Jim Crow era. Her
research questions focused on what the educators remembered about teaching before integration,
how they perceived the quality of education that their students received from these schools, and
their best and worst memories of teaching during the era. It was Kellys hope that the findings of
this study could be informative to how we educate students of color in modern day urban
schools. The methods of this study were formal interviews of 44 educators that taught in K-12
African American schools before integration. The findings of this experiment dealt with the
themes that were found during these interviews. Jim Crow teachers utilized their lack of
resources by becoming creative with the second hand resources that they had. Some teachers
taught outside, some brought in outside resources, and others virtually rewrote textbooks for
their students. Jim Crow teachers tended to mold their curriculum around where their students
came from. These educators were focused on growth, taught concrete skills, and considered
themselves personally responsible for students learning material. Finally, Jim Crow teachers
used the mobilization of human resources to make up for the lack of physical resources. Support
for education was reliant upon people parents, other teachers, principals, etc. to make
education work.
Morrison, K., Robbins, H. & Gregory Rose, D. (2008) Operationalizing Culturally Relevant
Pedagogy: A Synthesis of Classroom-Based Research, Equity & Excellence in Education,
41:4, 433-452, DOI: 10.1080/10665680802400006
Morrison et al. analyzed 45 different classroom based research studies beginning in the year
1995 to report how teachers are operationalizing culturally relevant pedagogy [in an attempt to]
assist teacher candidates and practicing teachers as they seek to enact culturally relevant
Approaches [in their classrooms] (434). Methods of this study included the use of 6 online
database searches for peer reviewed journals with the key terms of culturally responsive and
culturally relevant (434). These journals were then coded and resulted in the identification of a
multitude of categories of pedagogies including but not limited to high academic expectations,
modeling, scaffolding, and clarification of challenging curriculums, taking personal
responsibility for students success, and many more. This study concluded that enacting cultural
pedagogies like these are difficult and complicated, but can break barriers and lead to student
success. This study admits that its contents may do more good for classrooms of a greater
homogeneous than heterogeneous population, and that future research should be done to see how
the findings here match up with the findings of studies like it in more multicultural classrooms.

Silva, J., & Langhout, R. (2015). Moving Toward An Empowering Setting in a First Grade
Classroom Serving Primarily Working Class and Working Poor Latina/o Children: An
Exploratory Analysis. The Urban Review. doi:10.1007/s11256-015-0349-2
This study observed a first grade teacher who established an empowering social setting for her
students. An empowering setting is important in schools because elementary students in
particular are commonly told that they are not old enough to do things that create change in the
world, so making school an empowering setting aids children in developing the skills that they
will need in later life to be agents of societal change. Methods for this study included fieldnotes
from the researcher, student interviews, teacher interviews, and the coding of those transcripts.
Findings included that classroom management tactics such as having a community chest,
meaningful roles in the classroom, peer-based support, and shared leadership (via a class mayor)
facilitated empowerment in the classroom and positively affected students individually and the
class as a whole.

Other Resources:
Blaisdell, B. (2015). Schools as racial spaces: Understanding and resisting structural racism.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Advance online publication.
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tqse20#.Vds-K7d43t8
Davis, A. (2015). How we are complicit: Challenging the school discourse of adolescent reading.
Journal of Educational Controversy, 9(1), 17.
Epstein, T., & Gist, C. (2015). Teaching racial literacy in secondary humanities classrooms:
Challenging adolescents of color concepts of race and racism. Race Ethnicity and
Education, 18, 4060
Espinoza, M. L., & Vossoughi, S. (2014). Perceiving learning anew: Social interaction, dignity,
and educational rights. Harvard Educational Review, 84, 285313.
Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching. New York: Teachers College Press
Glass, C. S. (2014). Perception of misbehaviour: Understanding the process of labeling and the
role of cultural capital in the disciplinary process. Urban Review, 46, 372394.
Glass, R. D., & Newman, A. (2015). Ethical and epistemic dilemmas in knowledge production:
Addressing their intersection in collaborative, community-based research. Theory and
Research in Education, 13(1), 2337.
Gutirrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires
of practice .Educational Researcher, 32, 1925
Iyengar, M. M. (2014). Not mere abstractions: Language policies and language ideologies in US
settler colonialism. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(2), 3359.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American

Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2004). New directions in multicultural education: Complexities, boundaries,
and critical race theory. In J. A. Banks & C. McGee Banks (Eds.), Handbook of Research
on Multicultural Education (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lee, E. (2015). Doing culture, doing race: Everyday discourses of culture and cultural
difference in the English as a second language classroom. Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development, 36, 8093.
Lee, S. J., & Walsh, D. (2015). Teaching in(justice): One teachers work with immigrant
language learners. Urban Review, 47, 4556.
Leonard, J., Moore, C., & Brooks, W. (2013). Multicultural Childrens Literature as a Context
for Teaching Mathematics for Cultural Relevance in Urban Schools. The Urban Review,
325-348.
Malsbary, C. (2014). Will this hell never end? Substantiating and resisting race-language
policies in a multilingual high school. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 45, 373
390.
Mason, A. M. (2015). Disciplining Dalmar: A demand to uncover racism and racialization in
pursuit of culturally relevant pedagogy. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in
Education. Advance online publication.
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tqse20#.Vds-K7d43t8
Matias, C. E., & Liou, D. D. (2014). Tending to the heart of communities of color: Toward
critical race teacher activism. Urban Education, 50, 601625.
Peguero, A. A., & Bondy, J. M. (2015). Schools, justice, and immigrant students: Segmented
assimilation, race, ethnicity, gender, and perceptions of fairness and order. Teachers
College Record, 117(7), 142.
Seglem, R., & Garcia, A. (2015). So we have to teach them or what?: Introducing preservice
teachers to the figured worlds of urban youth through digital conversation. Teachers
College Record, 117(3), 134.
Slocum, A. (2014). Look what they said about us: Social positioning work of adolescent
Appalachians in English class. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 13(3), 191209.
Sung, K. K. (2015). Hella ghetto! (Dis)locating race and class consciousness in youth
discourses of ghetto spaces, subjects and schools. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18, 363
395.

Turner, E. O. (2015). Districts responses to demographic change: Making sense of race, class,
and immigration in political and organizational context. American Educational Research
Journal, 52(1), 439.
Wu, Y. (2015). Teachers Dual Responsibilities for Academic Achievement and Character
Development. In Education as Cultivation in Chinese Culture (Vol. 26, pp. 223-239).
Springer-Verlag.
Zembylas, M. (2014). Theorizing difficult knowledge in the aftermath of the affective turn:
Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations.
Curriculum Inquiry, 44, 390412.
Zimmerman, M. A. (2000). Empowerment theory: Psychological, organizational and community
levels of analysis. In J. Rappaport & E. Seidman (Eds.), Handbook of community
psychology (pp. 4363). New York & London: Plenum Press.
Zion, S., Allen, C., & Jean, C. (2015). Enacting a Critical Pedagogy, Influencing Teachers
Sociopolitical Development. The Urban Review, 47, 914-933.