Responsiveness to culture through literature

Abstract

This position paper argues that creative writing can be a fruitful tool for cultural responsiveness in secondary education and calls for creative writing to be viewed as a more natural part of language teachers’ culturally responsive pedagogical repertoire. The integration of creative writing exercises in culturally responsive language arts education may rouse a strengthened voice, benefit cultural literacy, engender the discovery and exploration of individual funds of knowledge, enhance relational competence, and bring about the critical crafting of and engagement with cultural representations. These arguments are convergent with the view that teaching, in order to be culturally responsive, should originate from students’ funds of knowledge, taking both subject content and relational aspects into consideration – and this paper proposes that creative writing is uniquely positioned to facilitate these aims.

Keywords

• creative writing
• culturally responsive pedagogy
• language and literature education
• writing instruction
• cultural empowernment