It is well established that there are significant and alarming disparities in higher education enrollment, persistence and completion among racially and ethnically diverse students. “In light of the current COVID pandemic, we see even more evidence in the decline of enrollment among racially and ethnically diverse students,” says Dr. Deborah Manning.
While education is the great equalizer, enrollment and attainment gaps linked to race and ethnicity have long plagued the nation’s educational system, particularly among African American, Hispanic and Native American students. Researchers and practitioners emphasize the need for culturally relevant supports and interventions to address issues of equitable enrollment, retention and completion practices on college campuses. One such intervention, Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), has proven to be a powerful strategy to improve student success and completion.
Research demonstrates that CRT minimizes student alienation and aids student adjustment to the post-secondary environment. As a result, community colleges today are confronting the need to evaluate their teaching methods to ensure culturally responsive practices are sensitive to students’ identity and heritage. Dr. Terry Calaway has seen firsthand the positive effects and success when CRT is utilized in course curricula.
As students populate 21st-century classrooms, the need for culturally responsive pedagogies intensifies. Research shows racial and socioeconomic diversity in the classroom provides students with a range of cognitive and social benefits. Our challenge, then, is to ensure each student is successful through the intentional design of the college experience. It is incumbent upon educators to scrutinize and dismantle barriers facing underserved students and invest in equity-minded policies, practices and behaviors that lead to success.
To that end, we, as researchers, explored the groundbreaking work being done at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). The faculty and leadership at CCBC have worked collaboratively to explore best practices in the classroom and have implemented these strategies to the significant benefit of students.
Consistent with the findings of Gay, culturally responsive teachers at CCBC are socially and academically empowering; engage in cultural knowledge, experiences, contributions and perspectives; validate each student’s culture, bridging gaps through diverse instructional strategies and multicultural curricula; are socially, emotionally and politically comprehensive, seeking to educate the whole student; transform practice by using students’ existing strengths to drive instruction, assessment and curriculum design; and are emancipatory and liberating from oppressive educational practices and ideologies.
With a decade at CCBC of proven success, we found four themes that drive the work of this outstanding group of faculty.
