This capstone project was part of a group project completed by five school and district administrators in Hillsborough County, Florida. The project began because of our passion for teachers who are able to establish a culture of care in their classrooms that support students academically but transform their learning through experiences that enable them to be more highly engaged and productive students, regardless of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, perceived academic abilities, and backgrounds. Our school district has spent significant resources attempting to address the deficiencies that exist within its lower performing schools. A variety of curriculum specialists have addressed challenges these largely Title 1 schools are facing, with little to moderate improvement shown over the course of several years. Selected literature over the past ten years was reviewed to gain insight into developments and discussions that have materialized around the notions of culturally relevant (curricular/pedagogical) leadership in schools. My component of this project was guided by the question: How is cultural diversity addressed in curriculum so as to be relevant to the success of traditionally marginalized students (students of color and/or those from communities of low socio economic status)? Insights from the literature reviewed suggest that Appreciative Inquiry as a more holistic approach to cultural relevancy creates greater opportunity for deliberate and intentional building of relationships of respect and responsibility, giving rise to social consciousness and not just improved test performance.

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) has become increasingly used within academe. There has not been much research, however, into how much CRP is being used within the public school system. I am particularly interested in the area of professional development. This report seeks to answer the questions, how have issues of diversity influenced professional development in the past, and how is the theoretical framework of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) used within professional development today? I begin with the reasoning behind my exploration of these questions and the problems that we are facing today within the educational system. I then provide an in-depth description of what I understand to be culturally relevant pedagogy. A historical survey of culturally-centered professional development is then presented, followed by a look at current research and writing on culturally relevant professional development. / text

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Application of the culturally responsive teaching (CRT) initiative to practice may be challenging because each school community is unique. The individualized nature of CRT renders that research on successful CRT practices is only mildly, if at all, applicable to practicing teachers. As a result of these barriers, little is known about the process of becoming culturally responsive. The purpose of this study was to document my process in seeking to become a culturally responsive music educator. Critical Race Theory shaped this study. The emphasis on white culture in public high school choir curricula does not reflect the diverse populations in music classrooms today. Many of these classrooms are led by white teachers like myself, requiring that we interrogate our race and how often it affects the learning environment in our classrooms. Autoethnographic methods were used in this study. Three sources of data were gathered: my journal, lesson plans, and other teaching artifacts including student work. The data were then condensed into three stories: a) the story of me; b) the story of my teaching; c) the story of my students. Self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-analysis took place through questioning which included: a) “How does my whiteness affect my teaching?” b) “How often were suggestions from scholarship used?” c) “How did my attempts at culturally responsive teaching affect my students?” Through this work, I found that developing awareness of my whiteness, my biases, and assumptions, and how they influence my instructional choices was the most important step towards CRT. I often observed myself in a self-imposed binary: either I was ‘successful’ or ‘a failure’ at being culturally responsive. My disposition about CRT has changed because now I understand that teaching responsively is not a binary but a continuum. Each day I may exist in a different place on the continuum. Therefore, I will always be becoming culturally responsive. An individual’s process of becoming culturally responsive can only be learned through autoethnographic techniques. Additional autoethnographies conducted by teachers who are attempting to become culturally responsive may assist in finding trends.

This hermeneutic phenomenological study emerged from concerns about the ways teachers’ pedagogical practices are affected by growing diversity in their classrooms and continuous education reform. Drawing on the perspectives of critical pedagogy and postcolonial literary theory, this study also explored the tension that exists between what students ought to learn in schools and what they actually learn. Data was gathered through two interviews and a classroom observation with each of eight high school language arts teachers in South Florida to gain an understanding of how they use their pedagogical practices to navigate changes that occur in the practice field and create spaces to utilize culturally responsive pedagogy in their implementation of the current secondary school English/Language Arts curriculum. Teachers’ reflections on their experiences, descriptions of the climate of their practice and how teachers create spaces for culturally responsive pedagogy were analyzed to consider how their pedagogical practices conform to or challenge the structural and normative assumptions of the practice field. Findings revealed that despite the constraints imposed on their pedagogy by education reform, including standardization of their practice, all teachers used culturally responsive pedagogy in their classrooms to achieve state mandated goals, albeit at a foundational level. While teachers unencumbered by standardized testing expressed higher levels of freedom to make pedagogical choices in their classrooms, all participants suggested that prescribed curriculum and resources could do more to represent students’ needs and growing diversity in schools rather than standardized assessments. Furthermore in their implementations of culturally responsive pedagogy, teachers continue to use students’ voices to represent standardized curriculum and universal literary themes rather than establishing them as curriculum in their own right. As such, this study’s findings extend discussions by educational and postcolonial literary theorists regarding whose knowledge has legitimacy as a part of curriculum especially in a practice field that emphasizes student performance at state mandated levels above all else. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

As a practicing in-service teacher, I designed this qualitative study to explore of the use of culturally relevant curriculum in my junior high art classroom. I used participatory action research to complete this research over the span of two school years. This research allowed me to identify the elements necessary to teach a culturally relevant curriculum, such as teacher background, student-centered teaching and school support. This data is combined with stories of my experiences growing up and stories from the field. I detailed and analyzed community performance art, mask-making and installation art projects for effectiveness and student engagement. Focus groups were a major component of my data collection; I used this data to gain further information from students about their thoughts on what makes an engaging classroom and lesson. Through this study I found a high level of engagement by students. I matched my students engagement with a reciprocal level of emotional input. This study concludes with a call for more research of this kind to be completed by practicing teachers using action research in their classrooms.