Empowering Students Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Abstract

Pedagogy Schools are diverse institutions. It is a place of cohesion between different values, beliefs, and norms which entangle together. Educators are caught in a controversy regarding culture and their teachings, creating a lot of conflict and discord. Culture and pedagogy are two forces in constant opposition. Educators are more interested in changing the culture to suit their purposes without necessarily understanding culture and its implications. However, according to Ladson Billings (1995), there is a sentimental approach in education; culturally relevant pedagogy. This analogy creates an educational platform that takes into account all cultures providing a conducive environment. Other researchers also talk about this form of oppression. According to (Freire 2018) in his book, the oppressor's pedagogy criticizes the student-teacher relationship. Their relationship is built in that the teacher is a narrative character while the student is the patient. The teachers are perceived as the sources of knowledge, inspiration, professional authority, consultation, action, subjects of learning, and discipline instruments. Students are expected to comply despite the teachers not knowing everything. Paulo describes it as a banking model of education, the teachers are the depositors, and the students are the receptacles. The two authors, Ladson Billings and Paulo Freire, are in harmony, insisting on the necessity of pedagogy that creates a positive culture; a student-teacher relationship that is mutual, and free from one party's oppression. Supporting the two authors, pedagogy needs to be reinforced in that society and education need to coordinate to avoid conflict and provide peace and harmony. The world is full of thinkers that have cognitive abilities to yield something substantial. The teachers cannot think for the students. Some life realities entail perception, and everyone has a definition of their success, cultures, norms, beliefs, and traditions. According to (Freire 2018), Authentic thinking, entails reality,one needs not to go into isolation to make a decision for it is obtained in communication. This analogy proves students' subordination to teachers to be impossible (Freire). The banking model of education inhibits creativity and free thinkers hence oppression to the students, deeply rooted in our institutions. Inhibiting thinking is dehumanization it oppresses humans and a cause of despair and cynism in life due to human struggle. Students need to discover themselves and alienate themselves from pangs of subordination of their teachers. They have always been cheated, radicalized, stamped upon, unjustly dealt with, and entangled in the hands of their oppressors. The solidarity to their teachers beneath them derails their intuition and objectivity to subjects of lesser value. Students are entitled to liberation from a culture of...