Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Missed

The context of the school:

This K-4 urban elementary school is comprised of just over 600 students with these demographics: 81% African-American, 12% Hispanic, 4% White, and 3% Asian.

The story:

“Welcome to Fourth Grade. Today, we are going to learn how to properly correct sentence fragments. A sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence. Usually, fragments are pieces of sentences that have become disconnected from the main clause. One of the easiest ways to correct them is to remove the period between the fragment and the main clause. Other kinds of punctuation may be needed for the newly combined sentence.” Sounds pretty swell, right? We all need to know how to correct sentence fragments. 

Here’s fragment number 1 on the worksheet for these 9-year-old students to correct:

 “Jenny never finished high school. Despite the fact that her parents were supportive and allowed her to stay at home after her arrest.”
 

WHAT? Really? These kiddos are 9.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Missed

CRP “recognizes the diverse cultural characteristics of students from different ethnic backgrounds and adjusts teaching methods to account for this diversity. Culturally relevant teachers display cultural competence: skill at teaching in a cross-cultural or multicultural setting. They enable each student to relate course content to his or her cultural context.”

While I applaud this teacher for trying to connect her students’ culture to grammar exercises, these fragments fail miserably. One, it is inappropriate content for elementary children. Two, even if some of the parents, cousins, siblings, and/or friends of these fourth graders have been to jail, this is not the way to connect students and content to their culture. Maybe, we as teachers should highlight the good in the students and their families.