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Text: The fabric of cultural communities

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Text: The fabric of cultural communities

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There is no community without text. Text, understood as the sum of culturally embedded information across visual, auditory and tactile formats, is the fabric of identity. A classroom environment is composed of a profusion of texts, each of which encodes layers of information, meaning and values.

In cultivating a radically inclusive classroom community, each text needs to be considered as a repository of cultural information, and carefully vetted. When not only the teacher, but students, families and community members collaborate to curate classroom texts as positive vehicles of cultural knowledge, a classroom community emerges in which students and families are empowered as partners in a dynamic learning process.

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Cultivating a literacy-rich learning environment involves so much more than a well-stocked library. A crucial element of the richly literary classroom is integrating texts (in diverse formats), reading, and writing across content areas.

Too often, “libraries” are compartmentalized, actively used during select ELA periods. To instill literacy as a cross-disciplinary skill, the acts of selecting, consulting, and drawing from diverse texts needs to be consistent and actively modeled. And the diverse piece is essential--information encoded in audio, visual, tactile and other mediums need to be taught as specific types of text, and specifically taught as unique subsets of overall literacy.

Teachers can model processes of research and discovery by actively drawing from classroom texts while giving lessons across content areas. As students gain increasing agency in the process, lessons might be enriched by students consulting a range of literary resources as a lessons unfolds.

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Creating a positive classroom community is deeply intertwined with the richness of the literary environment. Carefully selected texts function as “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (Rudine Sims Bishop).  Students need to feel “safe and seen” before they confront the uncertainties inherent in exploring other perspectives. Engaging students with stories and topics that reflect their identity is a priority that spans all textual representations. Posters, works of art, music and spoken word, maps, and numerical representations may all be incorporated as features of the culturally responsive literary environment.

For example, the Peters Projection map—also known as the equal area projection, shows the the landmasses in true proportion to one another. Africa blossoms to it’s “true” size relative to North America and Europe, and may center on the Eastern or Southern Hemispheres.

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Representing diverse cultures through curated texts

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Representing diverse cultures through curated texts

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A truly rich literary environment will respectfully and joyfully represent diverse cultures across a range of texts. To encourage student agency and curiosity, libraries and other textual sources should include selections that carefully reflect students’ backgrounds, abilities and interests. Rotating titles according to current events, global holidays, and heritage months also help to retain and refresh student interest.

Lessons in any given content area are opportunities to present texts as multiple, overlapping, and culturally rich. During math, teachers can highlight non-Western numerical representations, and Muslim and Indian contributions to modern math. Guest speakers can share diverse ways of knowing to enrich lessons, and art projects can be inspired by particular cultural heritages.

How a classroom is “decorated” also matters greatly—art and posters are texts whose layers of meaning students absorb day after day. Posters featuring multicultural heroes are visual emblems of diversity, and are themselves specific types of texts which students can learn to read, analyze and respond to. Multilingual books, posters and audio content can be incorporated across content areas, challenging monolingual students to feel into the complexity of unknown languages.

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A Peters Projection (an equal area projection) world map

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Connecting values across cultures

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Art projects rooted in diverse traditions

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Historical and cultural context of numbers

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Posters as focal points for heritage months

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Posters represent cultural diverse leaders

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Guest speakers present many ways of knowing

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Display map of native America to highlight shared and hidden histories

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Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching Lab Classroom