In a world where non-native English speakers now outnumber native speakers, CRT is increasingly relevant to language learning and materials development. CRT is generally defined as using ethnically diverse students’ cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives as conduits for teaching them more effectively. It is based on the concept that when knowledge and skills are situated within students’ lived experiences, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal, and are learned more efficiently and thoroughly (Gay, 2000). Consequently, the academic achievement of ethnically diverse students can improve when taught through their own cultural and experiential filters (Gay, 2000; Kelley et al., 2015; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Moreover, when learners can identify and connect with materials that reflect their culture, participation can be more effective, and participation can rise (Dar, 2012; Bal et al., 2012; Mahardika, 2018, Sheridan, et al., 2019).
Dr. Yilin Sun’s recent plenary speech and workshop at the JALT’s 48th Annual Conference addressed approaches in integrating CRT to achieve equity and success for English language learners by sharing stories and poetic modes of expression from immigrants, refugees, and people of color. In the following interview, I tap into her extensive background and her conceptualization of CRT to broaden language practitioners’ understanding of CRT and generate ideas for creating a more inclusive and positive experience with constructive outcomes for their learners.
Dr. Sun’s Background
Gordon Carlson: Thank you for taking the time to be with me today. To begin, would you mind briefly sharing a little about your background and how that led you to explore culturally responsive teaching?
Yilin Sun: Sure. I grew up in China, went to university in China, and eventually became a teacher, teaching English to science students at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. I wanted to upgrade my knowledge and pursue opportunities for further studies, and in 1985, I got an opportunity at the Ontario Institute for Studies (OISE) and the University of Toronto (U of T) as a graduate student. It was not easy to leave China at that time, but I was fortunate. The president of the university was supportive and allowed me to fulfill my goal to pursue studies. So, as a young teacher full of dreams, I left China and crossed the ocean to Canada. There, I experienced firsthand an immigrant’s challenges and struggles, but with persistence and support from wonderful professors, such as Michael Canale and H.H. Stern, and cohort groups with people like Alastair Pennycook, Alister Cummings, Bonny Norton, and Ryuko Kubota, I became the first graduate student from mainland China to receive a Ph.D. in applied linguistics and curriculum instruction from OISE /U of T. Jim Cummins was my master’s supervisor, and Dale Willows was my Ph.D. dissertation supervisor, so with all these wonderful professors and students, I could be persistent.
(From here, Dr. Sun talked extensively about her involvement in the TESOL International Association, where she was eventually the first female Chinese-English bilingual elected as president. In 2021, she was recognized as one of 30 English language specialists who have made a lasting impact on the global TESOL field from the United States Department of State English Language Programs. She shared that through interactions with many ELT professionals in about 100 countries, she got exposed to the concept of CRT and could see the equity issues in the TESOL field). In your experience, what do you think is the leading cause of such equity issues?
You often hear such remarks like, “The students are not prepared,” “they are not motivated,” or “they are just not university material” We blame students when, in fact, we really must ask ourselves, “How is the educational system?” “How about our leaders?” The system has institutional learning problems because we don’t know how to serve the students. Higher education, as we know it, was created by Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) people with a long history. We have not really addressed the need to make the higher education system serve all people, especially students who are underrepresented and who are from systematically underserved populations. Many students have limited access to quality education, and we have not addressed it, so we must look at institutional problems. We, as educators, don’t always know how to help the students. It’s our learning problem, so to change this mindset, I think we have to have a paradigm shift. When we talk about equity, we must walk the talk so that we look at the curriculum gaps, achievement, and opportunity gaps. That’s why we need to embrace culturally responsive teaching/instruction. I use CRI because when you say “CRT,” sometimes people get mixed up with critical race theory.” Anyway, CRI uses asset-based pedagogical principles to serve students, and they truly work. I’m committed to promoting awareness among more educators about the value of the CRI approach.
Using Culturally Familiar Materials in Language Teaching
There are two things that I want to cover today. First, how you feel about using culturally familiar materials in language teaching, and second, building a community in the classroom. In your plenary session, you talked about CRT or CRI. In essence, it connects students’ languages, cultures, sub-cultures, and life experiences with what they learn in the classroom. Basically, students learn when they have a kind of a hook or handle to hang on to, and that hook is familiarity and background knowledge. According to Gay (2000), when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference of students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal, and are learned more easily and thoroughly. What are your thoughts on presenting culturally familiar materials to English language learners as an educator? For example, learning English in Japan, or in Japanese contexts?
Students feel more connected if they learn by targeting and connecting their own culture. If we can share meaningful cultures through English in a local context, students will feel connected. Lots of people come to Japan to visit and want to learn about Japanese culture. When they are impressed, the student will be motivated and want to introduce their culture to the rest of the world. That is not one-way traffic. When we say crossing borders and building bridges, we need to go both ways, right? Bridges are pathways that connect East and West, multiple perspectives, and diverse cultures. By crossing borders, we broaden our perspectives while recognizing differences and similarities in different cultures, which leads students and us to appreciate and value local cultures and cultural diversity and develop cross-cultural, trans-cultural competence. So, you must have fluidity and cross-cultural, trans-cultural communication.
Allow me to flip things around. Language teachers often have different layers of complexity within themselves and are also eager to share their culture with their students. But when they do that, they are sometimes accused of English colonialism. CRT literature always talks about the learners’ cultures, which is important, but does CRT leave room for teachers’ cultures, and if so, to what extent?
That’s a great question. I think, “Why, now, is there criticism and concerns about imposing colonialism or the colonial concept into language teaching?” I think, for a long time, it’s always been that way in textbooks, the publishers, media, everything, right? Now, it’s CRI trying to emphasize student cultures, the value of local communities, history, tradition, experience, and values. I don’t think that should limit teachers and educators from sharing their own cultures and beliefs because, eventually, students are still learning the target language and cultures, which are closely related. But it’s the way you introduce your culture, or cultures—how you will portray yourself. What do you want to talk about? What are the things that you intentionally or unintentionally missed? When we share our culture, even in the “colonial sense,” we must look at issues broadly. Sometimes it might not be comfortable for us because everybody has these implicit biases, and that’s the way we’ve grown up. I have implicit biases, and I admit them and constantly remind myself. We must be conscious and cognizant of all these issues when introducing our own culture or cultures. When I introduce culture, there are parts that I feel comfortable and proud of. But is there any part that I feel is painful? If so, it is part of my culture that I need to share. That’s the job of an educator; when we share our culture, we will give a more accurate picture of what that culture is about rather than reinforcing the stereotypical perceptions that people have had for a long time.
The literature for CRT seems to assume that teachers come from the dominant culture and that the students come from different backgrounds. However, for many TLT readers, it is the opposite. In Japan, many, if not most, foreign language teachers come from a minority culture in this country. And sometimes they want to push back a bit, as if to say, “Instead of looking inward so much, it’s time to look a little more outward.” What would you say to teachers who sometimes want to make students venture out of their comfort zone by trying to make them look beyond their own culture and views?
To help students develop 21st-century skills, we teachers need to encourage students to step out of their comfort zone. To make students step out of their comfort zone, I think you have to do some scaffolding activities. I noticed that young people in Japan, many of them, are very critical. They really think outside the box and are very creative. So, it’s not that they can’t think outside the box and be out of their comfort zone; it’s how we lead them to do something they are willing to take risks. It depends on the subject or theme you teach. You can create some scenarios, not just about them, but in a situation. Use some meaningful themes related to global issues and also to Japan. Like culture, for example. How Japanese pop culture is similar to black culture, rap, and so on. They won’t be able to stop talking because they love it. They will step out of their comfort zone and then do things very creatively and critically. So, it depends on the topics and how we scaffold them.
Building Community in the Classroom
Let me switch gears and talk about relationships with the learners. Your talks at the conference touched on creating an inclusive classroom environment. According to CRT, the emphasis should be on holistic or integrated learning. CRT integrates cognitive, physical, and emotional learning instead of treating them separately. In other words, you simultaneously teach moral, social, political, cultural, and academic knowledge and skills (Gay, 2000; Howard, 2003; Khalifa et al., 2016). However, to some educators, teaching such things distracts students from learning the basics needed to pass benchmark exams or hard skills for the workplace. How would you respond to those who think language teachers should focus strictly on reading, writing, listening, and speaking?
I think in my talk, I did say to build a community where students feel a strong sense of belonging, which I think is somewhat different from saying an inclusive community. Inclusion, I think, nowadays, has been overused somewhat. You can include anybody, but if a person doesn’t feel they belong to the community, they are not going to do anything or make any contribution. Students must feel a sense of belonging first, and then they will be motivated and engaged. I synthesize the eight principles for CRI based on the work of various CRT scholars like Ladson-Billings (1995), Gay (2000), Hammond (2014), and Paris and Alim (2017), among others. One of them is cultivating an academic mindset—building a strong sense of belonging: “I belong to this academic community. My work in this learning community or the classroom has great meaning and value for me, not only now, but five or ten years from now.” We have been doing that in the State of Washington; we call it the Transparency in Teaching and Learning Project (TILT). The TILT framework emphasizes three key components in designing assignments and teaching materials: a clear purpose—why the assignment matters in this course and life beyond the course—skills practiced, and knowledge they should gain, not only for the present but for five years from now; tasks with clear steps; and criteria for success—what success looks like on this assignment and how students will know if they’ve been successful. To give them a clear understanding of success, you can give them examples. Rubrics are one thing, but they can sometimes be very abstract. Providing students with different examples will give them a much better idea of how to do things.
I think teachers sometimes misunderstand and say, “Oh, CRI is talking about teaching culture, social justice—just multiculturalism.” However, it’s not just about that. CRT/CRI should focus on how we can develop students’ academic competencies. Competence proceeds confidence, which is the academic rigor and sense of belonging to an academic community. It also includes using the CRI-guided information processing strategies related to their culture and values to help them to develop academic success. And then, the student can pass the standardized tests and be successful because, eventually, our goal is to help students for academic success. That’s the goal and what I think CRI should be. It’s not a “kumbaya” food festival, drinks, costumes, or whatever. No, that’s so superficial. We are talking about changing our mindset and valuing student backgrounds. But the emphasis is on helping students develop academic rigor and be ready for academic tasks.
One of the authors you mentioned at the conference was Django Paris (2012), who stated that, to implement a culturally relevant and sustainable pedagogy, teachers must maintain an affirming student-teacher relationship and see excellence as a complex standard that takes student diversity and individual difference into account. Instead of focusing on theories and pedagogies, what can our readers do to help under-represented students be heard? For example, could you briefly share how teachers can create an experiential and intersectional space?
My workshop had some concrete examples to create intersectionality and space for students, especially those underrepresented, to have a voice. For example, creating opportunities for students to share counter-stories and untold stories to challenge majoritarian narratives about systematically under-represented students as a way to shift victim narratives to victory narratives about them. Those voices can be very powerful and inspiring.
There are many other ways to bring student voices to the learning space. For example, if you do an extensive or intensive reading based on a topic, you can create what some authors talk about as windows and mirrors. The windows let students see what’s outside to get a broader perspective, whereas mirrors reflect their own culture and stories. And then, in that way, everybody can show what their windows and mirrors look like. Give them some examples, and students can really work with that. You can expand reading in a lot of different ways to talk.
Another takeaway from your workshop at the JALT conference was that the knowledge teachers need about cultural diversity goes beyond mere awareness or respect for the fact that marginalized students have different values or express similar values in various ways. Therefore, how important is it for teachers to develop a knowledge base for CRT by acquiring information about the particularities of their learners? How far should one go beyond merely learning about different ethnic or minority groups?
I think learning about different minority groups is a never-ending task. It’s impossible to learn all of them. I think it’s more important to develop the right mindset because we cannot know every culture, every language, and every background. Even when looking at the same culture, there are so many complexities and aspects. There’s no way to learn them all. It’s not realistic. The important thing is how you treat your students—especially those from a totally unfamiliar culture. If you have the right mindset and attitude and constantly ask yourself questions: “When I made this decision, did I exclude somebody? Because of my background, there are some students whose voices I missed. Did I intentionally or unintentionally miss them?” If so, what actions do I need to take now to include them?
(At this point, Dr. Sun shared some of her personal experiences with marginalized students, including her son. She highlighted that to give parents and their children a better sense of belonging to a learning community, teachers can invite parents to share their traditions and histories in school.) Some teachers embrace the idea of CRT but still have little success creating an inclusive environment. Learning about various cultures and subcultures isn’t working for them. What are some of the pitfalls teachers can encounter, and what might some be doing wrong?
I think it’s a long process, and teachers need to have a supportive community so they don’t feel alone. And inclusion is so problematic to me. Having an inclusive mind is good, but you have to create a sense of belonging. If you want to be openly inclusive and say, “I want to reach everyone,” you can’t. Again, you need to have the right attitude and mindset, and then you’d always be positive toward every student, even those who challenge you. Then, you can find out the reasons why their challenges make sense. And on my part, what can I do to ensure the students challenge me the right way? I cannot just make them talk. I want to draw them out so they can start challenging me instead of me trying to push them to speak. It’s more than making your room colorful with greetings in different languages represented in the class. That’s superficial work. The substance of your work starts with your attitude and everyday interactions with students and the materials you select. I know we have rigid curriculums with desired outcomes, but teachers still have a lot of flexibility and can bring in different ideas to supplement and follow the same curriculum using different or modified materials. Although a little different, they incorporate something to make things fun rather than just following books from page to page. You have to follow certain things in the books because that’s what is on the test. Interjecting a bit, bringing in some interesting topics will raise students’ curiosity. One of the good things about being a teacher in the classroom is that you have a lot of autonomy, as long as you do it strategically, making sure it’s related to the curriculum.
Another thing that stuck with me from the conference was that you said, “We all have a story to tell.” Would you agree or disagree that regardless of whether students are of a different race, LGBTQ+, disabled, and so on, almost anybody can feel they are different or marginalized somehow? Maybe according to their learning styles, social status, economic situation, survivors of abuse, and many other areas?
I think this is relative. Any student can feel they have been marginalized, but certain students have not been marginalized. They ride through the system because they have a supportive family, resources to access, and excellent schools and education. They are well-liked by the teachers, and because of how they look, they get a supportive reaction everywhere they go. So, I don’t think we can say these people are marginalized. It has to be systematic, oppressive, and painful to say one is marginalized. Once you have lived through that experience, you know what being marginalized is. In China, I was from an intellectual family. Both my parents were medical doctors. I dreamed of being a medical doctor and ophthalmologist like my father, but with the Cultural Revolution—forget about it. I was sent to the countryside to reform my ideology because I was not from a revolutionary, working-class background. Intellectuals were on blacklists. I was thirteen years old and went to the countryside with five other thirteen-year-old girls, sent to a remote village, not living in a house but in a barn. We were given a pile of hay to sleep on in the beginning, and rats about “this big” were running in the barn at night. Can you imagine? But I learned and understood what hardship is. I worked so hard with those farmers. I could plow and do all the farm work with the young girls in the village. I would compete with them because I truly believed I had to reform my ideology. The farmers eventually voted I could graduate from “Countryside University,” so I returned to the city and went to the nursing school of a medical university hospital. That’s where I was able to finish my education. Otherwise, I would not have been able to get a chance to take the exam to go to university, and I would not be here. But I think I’m getting a little off track!
I would love to see you write a book about that! Back to the previous question, do you think it is as important to focus on learning about individuals as it is about marginalized groups?
I think yes. But if you have limited energy or capacity, you should focus on marginalized students if your class has a percentage of them. It’s not to say we ignore the students in the mainstream or those who want to excel. For high achievers, you can always give challenging tasks. It’s a matter of asking the right and critical questions and then utilizing their experiences and abilities to help marginalized students. The students who become teachers to help you can feel proud of their role. That also helps alleviate some of your tasks and lets the students help each other. The most important thing is to set the right tone at the beginning—build the community so everyone feels they belong and contribute to it. High achievers won’t feel like they’re wasting their time. They’ll utilize their experience and knowledge, teach others, and learn more in the process. Also, tell them the value of helping others and that they’ll benefit from it. The first two weeks are extremely important in how you set your class up, what kind of communities you want to build, and then set the expectations you have for your students. I have a reputation for being tough and really getting students to work hard. But soon, they know that I genuinely care for them. They say, “If you go to Yilin’s class, you have to work a lot, but you will get a lot out of it.” That’s the thing we want.
Recommended Reading and Materials
My final question for Dr. Sun related to tools she could recommend for teachers to develop better cultural competence? Dr. Sun referred to Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond (2014), which offers advice on how to close achievement gaps, diversify classrooms, and offers a framework for optimizing student engagement. She also recommended Suhanthie Motha’s (2014) Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice, citing that it gives many practical examples of decolonizing the mindset in the classroom. However, it is geared more toward North American language teachers. Finally, she endorsed Cultural Responsibility in School cards, a set of 25 cards designed to engage and involve all students in a class. Each card contains an activity and how to use it in the classroom.
References
Bal, A., Thorius, K. K., & Kozleski, E. (2012). Culturally responsive positive behavioral support matters. The Equity Alliance.
Dar, F. (2012). Textbook materials and their successful application in the classroom: Implications for language development. Journal of Educational and Instructional Studies in the World, 2(4), 109–114.
Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice, Teachers College Press.
Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching & the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Sage.
Howard, T. C. (2003). Culturally relevant pedagogy: Ingredients for critical teacher reflection. Theory Into Practice, 42(3), 195-202. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4203_5
Kelley, H. M., Siwatu, K. O., Tost, J. R., & Martinez, J. (2015). Culturally familiar tasks on reading performance and self-efficacy of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Educational Psychology in Practice, 31(3), 293–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/02667363.2015.1033616
Khalifa, M. A., Gooden, M. A., & Davis, J. E. (2016). Culturally responsive school leadership: A synthesis of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 1272–1311. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654316630383
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465
Mahardika, I. G. N. A. W. (2018). Incorporating local culture in English teaching material for undergraduate students. SHS Web of Conferences, 42, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20184200080
Motha, S. (2014). Race, empire, and English language teaching: Creating responsible and ethical anti-racist practice. Teachers College Press.
Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.
Sheridan, R., Tanaka, K. M., & Hogg, N. (2019). Foreign language, local culture: How familiar contexts impact learning and engagement. TESL-EJ, 23(1), 1–27.