The Begin With Their Culture Podcast: Recent Episodes
Dwayne D. Williams
Begin With Their Culture is a podcast that provides practical solutions for teachers who wish to design culturally responsive teaching and antiracist practices, but have no idea where to start. School psychologist and author Dwayne D. Williams says “Educators attend workshops on culturally responsive teaching and read popular books on the topic, but struggle to apply culturally responsive theories in the classroom.” This show is dedicated to helping educators just like you pair theory and practice in order to design effective, culturally responsive and antiracist activities in your classroom. Each episode includes narratives from K-12 educators who practice from a culturally responsive and antiracist lens. While listening to narratives, you will learn about the challenges educators experienced with culturally responsive teaching and what they did to resolve those challenges, giving you practical solutions to help you get started and/or unstuck!
In this episode, Dr. Williams reveals the #1 activity equity coaches and directors can employ to revive equity and culturally responsive teaching in their buildings!
In this episode, we introduce our new and first podcast series–The Need for Revival: Reviving Equity and Culturally Responsive Teaching in Schools. In 2020, when Derick Chauvin murdered George Floyd, school districts responded by hiring equity coaches, providing antiracism training, and offering strategies for culturally responsive teaching. Inspired to take action, many educators joined Facebook groups and other social media platforms aimed at designing culturally meaningful and equitable practices. Motivated by the time, educators worked during the summer on equity efforts without pay to prepare for the school year. Now, in 2024, school districts cannot pay some teachers enough to engage with equity work; some educational leaders have decided not to use the word “equity” in their language as a strategy to get teachers to attend meetings related to diversity, equity, and inclusion; and teachers who were fired up to engage with equity and culturally responsive teaching in 2020 now work in isolation in their classrooms apart from equity teams and communities. What has happened since 2020? What has caused teachers to become jaded with equity efforts? In this podcast episode, I discuss what happened. I introduce our first podcast series aimed at helping equity directors, coaches, and leaders, in general, revive equity efforts in their buildings. If you want to enhance your equity efforts in your building, you DO NOT want to miss this series! Learn how this series will help you revive equity and culturally responsive teaching in your buildings. We need a real revival!
What is the #1 problem educators experience with culturally responsive teaching–the #1 contradiction that prevents us from designing culturally meaningful practices?
In this podcast episode (less than 10 minutes), I reveal the #1 problem, the #1 contradiction that prevents educators from designing culturally meaningful activities. I explore why the problem exists, then I share how The LEARN Framework transforms this problem.
If you are a K-12 educator, you have–
- experienced this problem,
- know colleagues who have experienced the problem, and
- have friends who have discontinued “the work” because of the problem.
In fact, you may have discontinued equity work because of the problem.
Check out the podcast and reflect on whether you have experienced this problem–or if you are currently experiencing the problem. If you provide professional development on culturally responsive teaching and equity, consider how this problem burns educators out. Pause and reflect on how to transform this problem so that educators can start designing culturally meaningful activities with confidence. Consider how the LEARN framework is key to transforming the #1 problem that prevents us from designing culturally meaningful practices!
In this trailer episode, I discuss why I changed this podcast name and brand from Begin With Their Culture to The LEARN Framework for Practice. Begin With Their Culture reflects my early work with culturally responsive teaching; it refers to the importance of “beginning with students’ cultures” when designing culturally responsive practices. The limitation of this approach was that it did not coach educators through designing culturally meaningful practices. The LEARN Framework is a 5-step approach to designing culturally meaningful practices or redesigning instructional lessons in culturally meaningful ways. In this trailer, I explain why The LEARN Framework is much more expansive than Begin With Their Culture and is a foolproof guide any teacher can use in any classroom with any subject!
In Episode 2 of the Begin With Their Culture Podcast, I share the "Begin With Their Culture" story - the story of how I was inspired to design culturally responsive social emotional learning activities. Prior to designing culturally meaningful SEL activities, I was ineffective when working with culturally diverse learners, including African American students. My reason for struggling to connect with and boost engagement among culturally diverse learners is a common reason why many educators struggle to connect with students of color. Check out my story and learn exactly what I did to not only inspire students to develop SEL competencies, but also to codesign and colead SEL activities in the classroom.
In this episode, I describe the purpose and vision of this new show, The Begin With Their Culture Podcast. Using a reflection activity, I illustrate the challenges teachers experience when attempting to design culturally responsive teaching (CRT) practices, and I describe the main tool I will use in this podcast to help teachers like you resolve common challenges. I describe the tools I will employ in each episode that will help you design practices that place the cultural values, lived experiences, and community practices of culturally diverse learners at the center of instruction!
SHOW CONTENT
The reflection activity (3:00)
Challenges many teachers experience with CRT (7:04)
CRT trainings, books, and articles were ineffective (7:40)
Purpose of The Begin With Their Podcast Show (9:30)
Tool we will use to enhance our knowledge of CRT (10:53)