Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) and Socio-Cultural Cognition (SCC)

While our Anti-Bias/Anti-Racist (ABAR) training focuses on the decision-making of school community members, our work in developing culturally responsive communities develops the adaptability of adults in response to the child learner’s needs and identities. While ABAR contends with static and oft-unacknowledged ideas and frameworks, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) demands dynamic action and nuanced awareness of intersecting contexts. At Grow Society, we assist school communities in arriving at better understandings of how the intersectional identities, socio-cultural contexts, home languages, cultural environments, and family structures of their community members. Moreover, we uncover how these factors result in unique experiences and needs for each student learner. While there are many approaches to CRP, most frameworks replicate incomplete materials and processes. The result is that many well-meaning educators do a disservice to their students and the broader school community, often exponentially concretizing existing trauma and simultaneously creating new traumatic injury for students and their peers.

By developing educators’ abilities to serve students’ distinct individual needs while applying efficacy-building practices that raise students’ collective agency, Grow Society ensures that its partnering schools provide students with culturally authentic and critically responsive classrooms.

One of the differences in the Grow Society approach is our unique Socio-Cultural Cognition element that serves as a metric and vehicle for authentic CRP. Through the application of our SCC framework, school communities can ensure that their CRP is effective from year-to-year, between one classroom and another, and even within an individual class over the course of the year.

For teacher-practitioners, on whom the onus for delivering CRP and fostering SCC often disproportionately falls, doing this work can feel overwhelming. While this is true for pedagogues who do not share identities with their students, it is also true for those who do. Understanding that every adult in the community is a leader of instruction and accountable for the learning and growth of our students, Grow Society includes the entire school community in our development of CRP, not just traditional grade teams and departments. Together we’ll ensure that no matter their role, each member of the school community has the tools, strategies, and insights needed to support all students.

Grow Society will partner with you to build a school community where each child feels seen, heard, understood, and protected — and can flourish as dreamers, creative thinkers and, solution-creators.