The need to create culturally authentic and specific learning experiences is a call to action that all teachers must answer. Current definitions of differentiation either avoid or exclude topics of culture and race. These definitions are incomplete and must be expanded if the needs, interests, abilities, and cultural assets of gifted learners are to be addressed in a classroom. Under this expanded definition, differentiation strategies must be culturally authentic and purposefully integrated into the opportunities provided to gifted learners. It is incumbent upon teachers to reorient differentiation strategies they employ with gifted and advanced learners, so they become culturally authentic and contextually relevant. This chapter provides the reorientation of one differentiation strategy: the content imperatives. This chapter (1) defines the content imperatives, (2) demonstrates how they can be used as the catalyst for honoring the funds of knowledge that students bring into any learning experience, and (3) creates culturally-authentic access points into content for all learners.
TopThe Need For Authenticity
“There is no such thing as a neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom” (Freire, 1970).
The words spoken by Freire (1970) feel especially poignant and timely in today’s educational context. In his thesis, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire articulates that curriculum must focus on student experience, promote social action, and solve real-world problems. A curriculum that is disconnected from the learner quickly becomes ineffective, and is therefore unable to provide students with the opportunities necessary to invent and reinvent their world (Freire, 1970). The “distance” between the curriculum, both in relevancy and proximity, to the lives of the learners is not a new problem. Greene (1986) spoke about how teachers, classrooms, and students were moving farther away from participating in meaningful learning and towards “information machines” (p. 70). The shift from an assembly line curriculum designed to provide gifted and advanced learners with a static set of facts and skills, to a dynamic and culturally relevant curriculum is critical.
Curriculum for gifted and advanced learners must generate meaningful connections to the context and communities of the students who experience it. This context must include the recognition of the linguistic and cultural plurality that exists in our classrooms (Yosso, 2005). According to Yoon (2020), an authentic and meaningful curriculum must integrate students’ home pedagogies and life experiences into organizational structures that “affirm the personhood'' of children of color (p. 3). Culturally relevant and authentic curriculum for the gifted should provide students with opportunities to (a) increase academic success and motivation through content that is authentic and makes personalized connections to their own lives, (b) the space for students to analyze, critique, and debate social, political, and economic constructs that produce and maintain inequities, and (c) apply what they have learned to promote social justice and action in the communities in which they live (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Furthermore, the curriculum must be culturally sustainable by valuing, maintaining, and sustaining the linguistic and cultural aspects of a community (Paris, 2012). Culturally authentic curriculum for diverse gifted learners must:
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Recognize, value, and honor the lives and lived experiences of students and their families
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Focus on preparing students for participation in a just, humane, and democratic society
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Provide students with opportunities for analysis, critique, and debate on topics that maintain inequities
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Engage students in the study of perspectives that are inherent in a topic of study, focusing specifically on those that are underrepresented
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Examine issues and topics that encourage students to be agents of social change in their communities
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Utilize practices that sustain students’ cultural wealth and promote anti-bias thinking (Yosso, 2005)
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Incorporate pedagogical practices that spill over and are inclusive to all learners in the classroom, not just those who are formally identified as gifted and talented