Good teaching? An examination of culturally relevant pedagogy as an equity practice

The adoption of educational policy measures to close the achievement gap, as well as the significant amount of scholarship dedicated to the subject, are just some of the indicators that reflect the tremendous concern in education about the academic performance of stu-dents of colour. Within research aimed at promoting equitable practices in education, culturally relevant teaching has emerged as a good teaching strategy to improve achieve-ment. Using genealogical methods to examine the ways in which culture has become rel-evant to classroom practice, the author argues that that the perceived difference from white students that made it possible to conceive of children of colour as culturally deficit in the 1960s is also invoked in more recent literature that promotes attending to culture as an equity strategy. The take-up of culturally relevant teaching as something that a teacher can ‘do’, instead of a critical stance that a teacher takes, is also examined and critiqued.