The ARCS project is built on the social justice ideology that all students should have access to high-quality, relevant computer science education. Dr. Geneva Gay has been writing about culture and education since the 1970s and developed a theory in the 1990s designed to support underserved students through a cultural lens. She writes about Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian students in her works and grounds her concept in tailoring teaching methods to the unique cultural and ethnic contexts that the children in question come from, discouraging the use of European-American centric values of assimilation and sameness.
Dr. Gay's theory has similar goals and uses comparable strategies and language as her culturally relevant theories but her inclusion of multiple cultures or ethnicities is appropriate for the many diverse learners supported by the ARCS project.
In a 2013 retrospective essay of the development and dissemination of her theory, Dr. Gay notes that engaging diverse learners demands different ideas of relevance for Asian students (and by extension, different ethnic backgrounds of Asian) as it would for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and White students. This appears to be a prominent misconception regarding Gay's theory, that the ways in which teachers try to foster diversity is sometimes with a broad brush, when this may be inappropriate across racial identities that have heterogeneous and varied cultural differences by nationality or ethnicity.
Notable Quotes on Culturally Responsive Teaching from Dr. Gay
"The best quality education for ethnically diverse students is as much culturally responsive as it is developmentally appropriate, which means using their cultural orientations, background experiences, and ethnic identities as conduits to facilitate their teaching and learning"
"The more variance that there is between students' cultural, racial, ethnic, and intellectual characteristics and the normative standards of schools, the greater are the chances their school achievement will be compromised by low or negative teacher expectations. Children of color, poverty, and disability are highly variant on these criteria of normalcy, and are subjected to greater unfair teacher attitudes, expectations, and actions"
Scholarly References
Gay, G. (2002). Culturally responsive teaching in special education for ethnically diverse students: Setting the stage. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(6), p. 613-629. DOI: 10.1080/0951839022000014349
Gay, G. (2013). Teaching to and through cultural diversity. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(1), p. 48-70. DOI: 10.1111/curi.12002
Compiled by Melissa Kuhn, The Center for Educational Partnerships, Old Dominion University