Curiosity, as I shared in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, stimulates neurotransmitters like dopamine that can entice students and pull them into learning rather than having us cajoling students to engage or making our interactions punitive. We then began to talk about how we can spark their intellectual curiosity instead of demanding cameras on. “I want to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing-otherwise, they will fall behind.” “Why is that important to you?” I asked in the spirit of inquiry, trying to get to the real concern behind the question. One day during a Zoom Q&A session, a teacher asked the question for the 100th time: “How do I get my students to turn on their cameras?” We asked the bold question: How do we support historically marginalized students-particularly Black, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous students-to be truly independent learners, not just compliant ones? Yet, try as we might, our conversations kept going back to remote learning issues, such as: Should students be able to have cameras off during instruction? Our primary goal has been to use collaborative inquiry to deepen the effective implementation and impact of culturally responsive practice directly on student learning. Now, this body of knowledge is at the core of the CRE by Design Online PLC. When I left the classroom to support equity efforts, I shared this knowledge as a coach and curriculum designer. It was an outcome I went on to replicate over and over again as a writing teacher. 4 Over time, with more responsive structures, processes, and routines in place, my writing students slowly became the leaders of their own learning. I read Linda Christensen, a teacher-scholar with the Oregon Writing Project who went on to author Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, to help me reimagine what a writing class could look like for students of color that centered their language experiences and ways of learning rooted in collectivist cultural principles.
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2 I wanted to understand how to use the funds of knowledge 3 my underprepared students brought with them as an asset to accelerate their growth as writers. I leaned into Lisa Delpit’s seminal essay, “The Silenced Dialogue,” which addressed equity and literacy issues for historically marginalized students. I stopped using my red pen to correct papers, and I began my own inquiry as teacher-researcher. There was no amount of red ink on their papers that easily changed that reality. Many came into my class with skill and knowledge gaps that made critical reading and effective academic writing hard. In my early days as an educator, as passionate as I was about helping students become powerful writers, I struggled to help my lowest-performing students of color improve their writing. Because of Jim Crow segregation, they never got the opportunity to learn to read. Why? My maternal grandparents who fled the Deep South in 1940 to California were illiterate. Literacy was (and still is) personal to me.
In my credential program, I focused only on writing instruction and reading development. All of my classroom teaching career was devoted to expository writing. This is something I learned firsthand when teaching writing to high school students and college freshmen. 1 I wanted to share how the principles of cultural responsiveness, when coupled with the science of learning, can be leveraged for liberatory education-which means positioning students to be the leaders of their own learning by helping them increase their ability to actively improve their cognition. I started playing with the idea in 2017, two years after I published Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. The CRE by Design virtual platform was a few years in the making, long before the pandemic. Then, in January 2021, we welcomed another 600 teachers, instructional coaches, and site leaders who wanted to participate. This nine-month deep dive into redesigning instruction through a culturally responsive lens went beyond gimmicks and one-off activities.
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In August 2020, I welcomed 400 educators into my Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) by Design Online Professional Learning Community (PLC).
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