Rethinking Culturally Responsive Teaching: Toward New (Im)Possibilities of Curriculum Studies and Policy

Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is one of the major discourses in multicultural education. The author challenges the assumptions of CRT to explore the (im)possibilities of expanding discourse around this pedagogy and policy. Framed with poststructuralist theories, he argues that dominant CRT discourses tend to label cultural identities using the binary identity categories of center/peripheral. He problematizes conventional CRT, which proceeds by (1) ignoring power circulation through normalizing judgment (Foucault, 1978) and (2) disregarding discursively constructed identities (Butler, 1999). This paper provides different theoretical structures for research and practices for diverse racial/ethnic groups.