While the terms “cultural competence” and “equity” are common in many schools, they are actually very complex notions; most people find them hard to define and also hard to understand in their full complexity.

Culture

There are many definitions for "culture", "cultural competence", and "culturally responsive teaching." For our purposes, we use culture to mean the often unwritten and unspoken rules that a group creates, over time, to represent their agreements of the right, normal, logical, and moral way to act.

Cultural competence means being able to interact with others whose unwritten and unspoken rules are different than your own, respecting those rules without feeling that your own values are threatened, and finding ways to effectively work together. Culturally responsive teaching is the art and science of teaching in a deeply relational way that honors the cultural foundation and understandings of your students.

Equity

In this module, we use the term “equity” to focus our attention on systems and institutions. For example, historically in our country, and currently in our state, a student’s race, SES status, and first language can all be used to predict how that student will perform on the MCA math test.

Unless you think that a child’s race, class or first language inherently determine that child’s capacity to learn math (and we advise against that thinking), then we have to conclude that these disparities are built into the system. In other words, our system is inequitable.