Cultural Assets: An object or idea of value to a particular group because of its role in the artistic, creative, economic, historic, and/or social fiber of that community. This may be tangible such as a heritage site, piece of artwork, tool or device, etc. Intangible cultural assets could include events, activities, expertise, support networks, community knowledge, language, family structures, symbols, and more.
Cultural Asset Mapping Project, City of Austin; PlannersWeb.com, Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s Arts & Culture Department
Cultural Integration: The process of adapting to the practices and beliefs of another group while also maintain one’s own culture.
Cultural Integration: Definition, Examples and Benefits
Cultural Proficiency: A mindset, personal or organizational, for effectively describing, responding to, and planning for issues that arise in diverse environments. Cultural proficiency focuses on developing knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that promote healthy, effective interactions in cross-cultural settings.
Lindsey, R. B., Robins, K. N., Terrell, R. D., & Lindsey, D. B. (2019). Cultural proficiency: A Manual for School leaders. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
Cultural Proficiency Continuum: One of the tools of cultural proficiency, the continuum provides language to describe both unhealthy and healthy values and behaviors of persons and policies and practices of organizations. The stages include Cultural Destructiveness, Cultural Incapacity, Cultural Blindness, Cultural Precompetence, Cultural Competence, and Cultural Proficiency. Movement along the continuum represents a paradigmatic shift in thinking from holding the view of tolerating diversity to transformative action for equity.
Lindsey, R. B., Robins, K. N., Terrell, R. D., & Lindsey, D. B. (2019). Cultural proficiency: A Manual for School leaders. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
Culturally Proficient Communication: A respectful communication style that recognises that generalizations do not apply to everyone within a cultural group and shows understanding and sensitivity to different languages, norms, and values.
Culturally Responsive Communication
Culturally Proficient Leadership: Characterized by values and behaviors that allow a leader to engage effectively with the students, educators, and communities they serve. Evidenced through policies, practices, communication, resource allocation, and social interactions informed and shaped by the diversity of the environment.
Lindsey, R. B., Robins, K. N., Terrell, R. D., & Lindsey, D. B. (2019). Cultural proficiency: A Manual for School leaders. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
Culturally Responsive: An approach to viewing culture and identity as assets and using knowledge of social dynamics, relationships, and cognition to inform one’s actions.
Supporting Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Practices
Hammond, Z., & Jackson, Y. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: A theoretical model that focuses on multiple aspects of student achievement and supports students to uphold their cultural identities by drawing from familiar cultural information and processes to facilitate learning.
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Gloria Ladson-Billings, "Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy"External link opens in new window or tab. (PDF), American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 3 , accessed January 2020.
Hammond, Z., & Jackson, Y. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: An approach to teaching and learning focused on preserving and supporting the presence of distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a student body through the reverence and appreciation for each group's heritage, values, cultural and linguistic norms.
What the term 'Culturally Sustaining Practices' means for education in today's classrooms
Historical Trauma: Collective intergenerational trauma experienced by a group of people who share identity, affiliation, or circumstance, often related to major historic events of oppression, colonialization, forced relocation, slavery, abuse, or genocide.
What is historical trauma?
Historical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present day health
Place-Based Instruction: An approach that uses the local geography, community, and environment as a vehicle for content delivery that is authentic, meaningful, and engaging for students.
Learning within the local community: What is place-based education?
Tools of Cultural Proficiency: An interrelated set of four tools that, when used authentically, help develop cultural competence. These include identifying barriers to cultural proficiency, examining guiding principles of cultural proficiency, utilizing the cultural proficiency continuum, and applying the essential elements of cultural proficiency.
The framework for equity and access
Ways of Knowing: The manner in which a person interacts with the world to identify, process, and internalize new information. This includes a complex interplay between language, the senses, reasoning, intuition, memory, emotion, observation, logic, experience, representation, and faith or spirituality.
Ways of Knowing