Glossary

Cultural Competence
The ability for educators to successfully teach students who come from a culture or cultures other than our own; entails developing certain personal and interpersonal awareness and sensitivities, understanding certain bodies of cultural knowledge, and mastering a set of skills that, taken together, underlie effective cross-cultural teaching and culturally responsive teaching.

Cultural Destructiveness
Seeking to eliminate the cultures of others in all aspects of the school and in relationship to the community served

Cultural Incapacity
Trivializing and stereotyping other cultures; seeking to make the cultures of others appear to be wrong or inferior to the dominant culture

Cultural Pre-Competence
Increasing awareness of what you and the school don’t know about working in diverse settings; at this level of development, you and the school can move in a positive, constructive direction, or you can falter, stop, and possibly regress

Cultural Proficiency
Holding the vision that you and the school are instruments for creating a socially just democracy; interacting with your colleagues, students, families, and the community as an advocate for life-long learning to serve effectively the educational needs of all cultural groups

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Addresses student achievement and supports students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities in our schools and other institutions.

Deficit Thinking
Blames students for their shortcomings and can lead to educators believing that such shortcomings are incapable of being changed or supported at school.

Diversity
The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, as well as experiences.

Equality
System in which each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities.

Equity
Recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.

Equity-Mindedness
Refers to the perspective or mode of thinking exhibited by practitioners who call attention to patterns of inequity in student outcomes.

Reality Pedagogy
A framework that supports cultural competence in the classroom and centers students’ experiences; focuses on teachers gaining an understanding of student realities, and then using this information as the starting point for instruction.