Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: The Inward Mountain

I touched on the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy (let's call it CRP for simplicity's sake) at the beginning of the school year when I wrote about the quotes from non-Peruvians that the Belgian volunteer chose for the welcome back to school board. In that post, I focused on “active anti-racist teaching.” CRP was about building cultural pride and working against all too common idea that only white produce worthwhile things.

Today I want to talk about a different aspect of CRP. Sometimes, CRP isn't a political decision, it's just a practical decision. That was the case for me about a month ago when I decided to build a lesson focused on the following meditation from Howard Thurman:

There is in every person an inward sea,
And in that sea there is an island
And on that island there is an altar
And standing guard before that altar is the 'angel with the flaming sword.
Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless it has the mark of your inner authority.
Nothing passes 'the angel with the flaming sword' to be placed upon your altar
unless it be a part of 'the fluid area of your consent.
This is your crucial link with the Eternal.

I planned out how the lesson would flow. I would introduce the idea of guardian angels and ask what the kids thought about them. Then they would close their eyes and listen attentively while I read the meditation for them and they imagined the scene. When they opened their eyes I'd ask a few volunteers what they saw and then I would set them the assignment of drawing out what they had imagined.

I was pretty proud of the whole thing. I was all rocking 3 Gardner's multiple intelligences (intra-personal when they imagined their inner sanctuary, linguistic when they told me about it, and spatial when they drew). On top of that, the lesson had the nice overall message that you are special enough that God assigned an angel to take care of you, and smart enough that God trusted you to tell the angel what to do. Not to mention the personal responsibility for your own actions and feelings implied by the meditation. This was going to be great.

So I took a moment to imagine how the lesson would play out (a tip I got from The Skillful Teacher). Everything went pretty smoothly until I imagined reading the passage to the children. “Profe, what does the ocean look like?” asked one kid. That was enough to derail my entire class of imaginary 2^nd graders into a lively discussion of what the ocean was like.

I opened my eyes to the obvious flaw in my lesson: these kids haven't seen the ocean. The biggest body of water most of them have seen is probably the lake by Urcos: 

It's that small bit of blue on the left.
Source

For me the sea image works well because I grew up on the coast and went to the beach every summer. But for my students, the inward sea is as difficult a concept to grasp as the flatness of the Great Plains is for me. Inward seas are culturally irrelevant here. I cast about for a way to save my plan, looking all around for inspiration.

What's right outside my bedroom window? What's outside pretty much every window of our house, and surrounds the valley? Mountains. Mountains, which in Inca belief are the dwellings of the gods. An inward mountain would be easy for the kids to imagine. Mountains were already connected to the idea of the sacred because of the syncretism of Andean belief with Catholicism, and wouldn't distract the students when they set their imaginations to work. It was culturally relevant. So I changed and simplified the meditation to this:

There is in every person a mountain,

And on the top of that mountain is an altar.

And standing guard before that altar is the angel with the flaming sword.

Nothing can climb the mountain and get by that angel to be placed upon that altar 

unless it has the mark of your inner authority.

The lesson ended up working pretty well. Of course no class sat completely still and quiet as they imagined the inward mountain, but they did pretty well. My second graders were the most into the imaginative part of the class. When I asked them what if they would tell the angel to give the devil permission to come to their altar they shouted out a big “NO!” The virgin Mary, on the other hand, was welcomed up the mountain with open arms. It was a particularly strong example of how I have to tweak ideas I learned back in the port city of Boston to apply in the mountain town of Andahuaylillas. Sometimes I tweak it because I don't want to reinforce the idea of US American culture as the best culture ever, and sometimes I tweak it because otherwise, it just wouldn't make sense. Culturally relevant pedagogy is as much about practicality as it is about politics.