Overview of Culturally Responsive Practices

2. Definitions

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list:

• BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color
• Cognitively-Demanding Instruction:  “High cognitive demand tasks involve making connections, analyzing information, and drawing conclusions.” (Smith & Stein, 1998).
• Culturally Responsive Teaching: An educator's ability to recognize students' cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing. 
• Cultural Sensitivity: Understanding the needs and emotions of your own culture and the culture of others.
  
• Cultural Humility: is a life long process of self-reflection and self-critique. Cultural humility does not require mastery of lists of “different” or peculiar beliefs and behaviors supposedly pertaining to different cultures, rather it encourages to develop a respectful attitude toward diverse points of view.
  
• Equity: Freedom from bias or favoritism. the quality of being fair or impartial.
• Fixed Mindset: In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort.
• Growth Mindset: In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. It is the belief that individuals can learn more or become smarter if they work hard and persevere—may learn more, learn it more quickly, and view challenges and failures as opportunities to improve their learning and skills.
• Implicit bias: Unconscious attribution of particular qualities by an individual to a member of some social group. An "implicit bias" can also be referred to an "unconscious bias".
  
• Instructional equity: Reducing the predictability of who succeeds and who fails, interrupting reproductive practices that negatively impact students, and cultivating the gifts and talents of every student.
• Latinx: a gender-neutral neologism, sometimes used instead of Latino or Latina to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States.
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL): A framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.

Reflections on Practice

1. What is one term or definition above that is new for you?
2. When you reflect on that new term/definition what thoughts or questions does it stir in you?
3. Is there a term/definition that makes pushes you a bit outside of your comfort zone?
4. How do these new terms intersect with health education topics?