Puente Teaching Practices

Public education was built on the values, needs, and experiences of European and middle-class people, forcing those outside of those identities to do what Du Bois (1965) refers to as double consciousness, and be measured by those norms (Paris & Alim, p. 2). We first learn about Culturally Relevant Pedagogy from Ladson-Billings (1995), then Gay (2000) and Hammond (2014) extensively wrote about culturally responsive teaching, and Paris & Alim (2017) ask us to reimagine education by sustaining culture through emancipation. This theoretical framework requires us as  teachers to examine our beliefs, both implicit and unconscious, in order to integrate and celebrate the culture and identities of our students.