Connecting Cultural Responsiveness and Inquiry

by Barbara K. Stripling

"Miss, do you have another book just like this one?" Librarian hearts thrill when their students connect with a book powerfully enough that they are motivated to read another…and another. By surrounding students with books where they can see themselves and learn about people who are not like them, some librarians believe that they have built a culturally responsive library. But, the focus on building a diverse collection and guiding students' reading is only a small part of a school librarian's responsibility for creating a library program that respects students' differences, enables all students to build on their identities and cultures, and teaches them the skills and attitudes to become motivated and empowered lifelong learners.

Successful, independent learning requires students to engage socially, emotionally, and culturally, as well as academically. Library programs are in a unique position within the school to take a "whole child" approach to teaching and learning by developing an instructional program that responds to the identities, cultures, strengths, interests, and curiosities of the students. Librarians are learning to shift from a purely academic focus to one that includes teaching students to respect and interact positively with others, to collaborate, to recognize their own multi-faceted identities, and to draw on the strengths of their own cultural backgrounds and the diverse perspectives of others.

Much of the professional literature about cultural responsiveness and social and emotional learning focuses on the teacher's role and instructional practices. Classroom teachers are offered strategies for establishing the environment, curriculum, and instruction to foster personal growth along with content learning. Unfortunately, these strategies are often implemented in an ad hoc way (e.g., If it's Tuesday morning, it's time to talk about a cultural responsiveness issue).

Because librarians teach the skills and processes of learning rather than subject-area content, they have the opportunity to shift the focus from what teachers need to do to what students must learn to do. Cultural responsiveness skills enable students to develop self-respect and respect for others, to detect bias and inequity, to be open to diverse perspectives, to empathize, and to connect their learning in school with authentic issues in the real world. Students who start from their own identities and strengths are motivated to engage in personalized, authentic, and sustained learning on their own. Librarians employ strategies to facilitate tough conversations about authentic issues, but they also teach students to form and express opinions, listen to the diverse perspectives of their classmates, change their opinions when merited, and recognize the power of collaborative learning. As students develop these personal and social skills, they develop agency; they learn to make choices based on their own strengths and then have the confidence to express their ideas to others.

The Power of Inquiry

Many librarians frame their library instruction around inquiry. Inquiry provides a powerful opportunity for librarians to integrate the teaching of cultural responsiveness and social/emotional attributes seamlessly as a part of the teaching of inquiry skills. Jeffrey Hinton, in his article in Edutopia entitled "Culturally Responsive Inquiry Learning," captured the impact of integrating cultural responsiveness with inquiry: "[It] can empower all students to become academically successful, culturally competent, and socially conscious learners."

Combining cultural responsiveness with inquiry results in a number of benefits. Learning that is founded on a student's own identity and culture becomes more authentic to the learner. Inquiry enables students to make choices and to connect their learning with ideas and questions that they want to pursue, or, as Hinton writes, "to think about problems that matter."

Inquiry learning experiences framed by cultural responsiveness become more personally meaningful and, therefore, motivate students to challenge themselves and produce high-quality work. Students invest in their investigations and develop agency, the self-confidence to find and express their own voice about those issues. Ideally, students will begin to recognize that their voice can have an impact on the world. In their article entitled "Student Voice with the 10 Questions for Young Changemakers," Laura Gardner and Chaebong Nam propose questions for students to ask themselves in order to guide their path of inquiry from personal concern ("Why does it matter to me?") to shared ownership ("How do I make it about more than myself?") and finally to real-world outcomes and change ("How do we get from voice to change?").

Ultimately, culturally responsive inquiry empowers students to be independent learners, capable and motivated to ask questions that are relevant to them, investigate new ideas, evaluate diverse perspectives, engage in the respectful interchange of ideas, draw their own conclusions and opinions, and express their ideas effectively to others.

Culturally Responsive Inquiry in Practice

Librarians who plan to implement culturally responsive inquiry will need to create a curriculum map that aligns specific cultural responsiveness skills with the inquiry skills taught at different phases of inquiry. For example, during the Wonder phase, students can be guided to ask questions that connect their in-school learning to issues in their community. I recently worked with a dynamic team of school librarians in New York City to begin that curriculum-mapping process. We developed an integrated alignment of the skills of digital inquiry with cultural responsiveness skills for every phase of inquiry. The inquiry skills were drawn from the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum (https://slsa-nys.libguides.com/ifc). We selected student cultural responsiveness skills from the Cultural Responsiveness-Sustaining Education Framework published by the New York State Department of Education (http://www.nysed.gov/crs/framework).

Although our work has not yet been published, an excerpt of that integration work can be seen in the "Culturally Responsive Inquiry Curriculum Map." In the first phase of inquiry (Connect), for example, culturally responsive learners will begin an inquiry experience by connecting to their own identity and drawing on their past learning experiences and the richness of their cultural background. Students recognize that their own strengths and interests are the foundation of authentic inquiry.

Portrait of an Engaged and Empowered Learner

School librarians can draw passion and motivation to change their library programs and integrate cultural responsiveness and social and emotional learning into their inquiry-based instruction by focusing on their end goal: an engaged and empowered learner. Visualizing that learner at benchmark grades (e.g., grades 2, 5, 8, and 12) provides a clear answer to the question, "Why do we do what we do?" This "Portrait of an Engaged and Empowered Learner at Twelfth Grade" captures the essence of students who emerge from a library program that nurtures the development of the academically successful, culturally strong, and emotionally healthy child.