TrueFiktion Content Development Philosophy for Culturally Responsive Social Studies Curriculum

Jan 25, 2022 | 7 min read

TrueFiktion’s Perspective to Culturally Relevant, Responsive, and Sustaining Pedagogy

Written by Stephane Manuel | Illustration by João Marcus Felix

It is difficult to implement culturally responsive pedagogy if there are confusing definitions. To help clear up confusion, we’ll define the different types of cultural pedagogy and explain how TrueFiktion’s approach to content creation aligns with each type.

We believe high-quality, culturally responsive content requires stories about people that reflect the identities of students having agency during difficult moments in history. We seek to represent those historically marginalized as people who have agency and can show a range of emotions and responses to significant historical moments that shape our current world. Culturally responsive content in historical narratives also helps students develop the agency to advocate for themselves. To advocate for yourself, you should know about your history and the genesis of the issues you face and have mental models that help you solve current social issues. If the content is culturally responsive and sustaining, it will center one identity and perspective at a given moment. We do not believe in spotlighting every identity in one story. By centering one identity in each story, we can provide opportunities for greater empathy and cross-cultural understanding of history and current social issues. 

Culturally responsive content is not designed to make everyone feel comfortable. It should be designed to drive critical thinking. Thinking critically about American history might make someone uncomfortable. We often work with the communities or leading experts to craft our content. If you are making things for communities of color, you should include them in the design process. We use a human-centered design process to create our content. This process helps us solve many challenges with creating culturally responsive content by putting real people at the center of the content development process, enabling us to create learning experiences and products that resonate with students and their needs for engaging, culturally affirming content. We truly empathize with educators and students and want to create world-class, culturally responsive resources for their learning. We leverage multiple creative methods to deliver culturally responsive content and are constantly working to ensure the content fits into the education systems that govern learning environments.

“We seek to represent those historically marginalized as people who have agency and can show a range of emotions and responses to significant historical moments that shape our current world.”

TrueFiktion Alignment Definition of Culturally Relevant, Responsive, and Sustaining Pedagogy

We believe that it is very difficult to be successful at culturally relevant/responsive/sustaining teaching methods if the content you are using was never designed or intended to serve the cultures of the students you are serving. Also, it is very difficult to implement culturally responsive pedagogy if there are confusing definitions and a resource’s alignment to definitions is not clear. There are many definitions of and perspectives on culturally responsive pedagogy. To help clear up confusion, we’ll define the different types of cultural pedagogy and explain how TrueFiktion’s very specific approach to content creation aligns with each type.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy is a theoretical model that focuses on multiple aspects of student achievement and supports students in upholding their cultural identities. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy also calls for students to develop critical perspectives that challenge societal inequalities. Gloria Ladson-Billings proposed three main components of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: (a) a focus on student learning and academic success, (b) developing students’ cultural competence to assist students in developing positive ethnic and social identities, and (c) supporting students’ critical consciousness or their ability to recognize and critique societal inequalities.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Component	In Practice	TrueFiktion Approach and Perspective
Student Learning	The students’ intellectual growth, moral development, and ability to problem-solve and reason.	We provide standards-aligned content with our comics. We have inquiry workbooks built around our comics. We introduced students to systems thinking models to improve their critical thinking.
Cultural Competence	Skills that support students’ ability to affirm and appreciate their culture of origin while developing fluency in at least one other culture.	We provide a diverse content catalog to affirm student identities and learn about other cultures. We often consult with and include interviews from SMEs and members of the featured marginalized community. We include primary source documents in our resources in our resources to support students analyzing the cultural characteristics at a particular moment in history.
Critical Consciousness	The ability to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems, especially those that result in societal inequalities.	We specifically provide lesson planning on historical content that helps explain current social issues. We have our own framework woven into our products. Our workbook questions require students to examine policies, laws, and events that result in social inequalities. Our workbook activities ask students to analyze the world of our characters through an inquiry arc.

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Five essential elements of culturally responsive teaching are examined: developing a knowledge base about cultural diversity, including ethnic and cultural diversity content in the curriculum, dem­onstrating caring and building learning com­munities, communicating with ethnically diverse students., and responding to ethnic diversity in the delivery of instruction. Culturally responsive teaching is defined as using the cultural charac­teristics, experiences and perspectives of ethni­cally diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively. It is based on the assump­tion that 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 (Gay 2000).

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Component	In Practice	TrueFiktion Approach and Perspective
Developing a knowledge base about cultural diversity	Teachers should understand different racial and ethnic groups’ cultural values, traditions, and contributions to society and incorporate that knowledge into their instruction.	Each comic has embedded interviews from SMEs that speak to different racial and ethnic groups’ cultural values, traditions, and contributions to society. We focus on untold narratives of historically marginalized groups that increase a students knowledge base about cultural diversity.
Including ethnic and cultural diversity content in the curriculum.	Teachers should include multiple perspectives in their instruction and ensure the images displayed in classrooms represent a wide range of diversity. Teachers should also contextualize issues within race, class, ethnicity, and gender.	We provide a diverse catalog of perspectives on U.S. history. Historical issues are contextualized via the comic art within race, class, ethnicity, and gender. The workbook activities further contextualize issues via multiple sources and standards-aligned curricula. We provide high-quality images that not only include diversity, but present different cultures in an affirming light.
Demonstrating caring and building learning communities	Teachers should understand different communication styles and modify classroom interactions accordingly. For example, many communities of color have an active, participatory style of communication. A teacher who doesn’t understand this cultural context might think a student is being rude and tell the student to be quiet. The student may then shut down.	Our products can support this, we are in the process of developing our approach to this component.
Responding to ethnic diversity in the delivery of instruction.	Teachers should connect students’ prior knowledge and cultural experiences with new knowledge.	Our products can support this, we are in the process of developing our approach to this component.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Culturally sustaining pedagogy, explores, honors, and nurtures students' and communities' cultural ways of being. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy views schools as places where culture is sustained and affirmed.  Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy also encourages students to critique and question dominant power structures in societies.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Component	In Practice	TrueFiktion Approach and Perspective
Valuing community languages, practices, and ways of being	Students’ languages, literacies, and cultural ways of being are centered meaningfully and consistently in classroom learning instead of being considered as “add-ons.”	We provide a diverse catalog of content that shows student identities meaningfully represented in the classroom. Our workbooks are designed at the unit level around major historical moments.
Schools are accountable to the community.	Educators and schools are in conversation with communities about what they desire and want to sustain through schooling.	We do not support directly, but we can support schools in expanding the inclusivity of their content.
Curriculums that connects to cultural and linguistic histories	Educators connect present learning to the histories of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities both locally and nationally.	Our workbooks are designed along an inquiry arc that connects the past to current social issues and circumstances. We co-design local content with schools so their local history can be engaging, relevant, and thoughtfully integrated into the school’s curriculum.
Sustaining cultural and linguistic practices while providing access to the dominant culture.	Educators value and sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of the community while providing access to the dominant culture (white, middle class, and standard English speaking).	Our products can support this, we are in the process of developing our approach to this component.