Faculty Interest Groups
Culturally Responsive Teaching: Language Diversity in the Classroom
Kingsborough has been recognized as a leading community college when compared to other community colleges across the nation. However, our student population is diverse and our work with Achieving the Dream has revealed a number of achievement gaps that might be addressed through a culturally responsive teaching approach.
This semester, the group will be facilitated by linguist Carlos de Cuba (Speech Communication), and will focus on the diversity of language varieties our students bring to the classroom. We will discuss the myth that there is a "standard" language, and that this standard is the only acceptable variety for use in the classroom. This belief is widespread not only in the general public but also among many educators, and unfortunately this view can be extremely harmful to students who do not grow up speaking the so-called "standard" variety. The goal of this FIG is to explore the value of using different varieties of English both inside and outside of the classroom. For more information, please contact Carlos at carlos.decuba@kbcc.cuny.edu and please see our CRT work on our page on the CUNY Academic Commons.