Questions surrounding the intersection of culture and classroom spin in education circles. Gloria Ladson-Billings addresses both the need for and demands of “culturally-relevant pedagogy” in classrooms dominated by chronically-underserved communities. Though she focuses her research on African-American students, Ladson-Billings’ theories and arguments can be applied to community dynamics across the country and even across the world: the pertinence and necessity for culturally-motivated and independent pedagogies span far past physical or otherwise-constrictive borders. Ladson-Billings found that one of the most effective ways to teach students is through culture: using what the students are familiar with to teach new concepts to a deeper and more meaningful level. Ladson-Billings also found that the most respected and effective teachers, per their students, communities, and test scores, were not homogenous in their teaching approaches: classrooms were both structured and fluid, routine-based and day-by-day formulated. Though originally dissuading, these results pushed Ladson-Billings to look beyond conventional measures of teaching pedagogies. She found that the most successful teachers invested in relationships with their students and their communities, both inside and outside of the classroom. Not only that, but teachers taught their students to actively construct and challenge knowledge, incorporate and seek multiple perspectives, as well as learn from their community as much as they learned from prescribed standards. This melding of home and school allowed the students to stop melding who they were to their environment; instead, they learned to incorporate aspects of both settings into one construction of understanding.

As Maguth, List, and Wunderle explored, teaching through relevancy can also extend to video games. By using one of the games from the Age of Empires franchise, this research and teacher trio found that students learned to problem solve, understand different perspectives, realize implications of decisions, and connect to abstract ideas through a series of prescribed digital modules. The students engaged with the various aspects of building an empire: citizens, armies, goods, currency, trade, war, etc., all while reflecting and relating their virtual experiences to the very real history they were studying. Middle school students, like the ones included in this study, have a previously-conceived familiarity and interest in playing video games; Maguth, List, and Wunderle were able to harness this excitement and use it to similarly excite the students about learning history. Students also related information learned through Age of Empires to in-class discussions or assignments with great ease; facilitated by online modules, questions prompted students to connect between their digital experiences and the events they were learning about in class. Maguth, List, and Wunderle saw wonderful success with the students’ overall comprehensions of the material, as well as a connection to the intricacies of past events to a greater depth, gained through first-hand experimentation through the video game. The study encouraged other teachers to utilize video games to connect their students with the content areas, but simultaneously stressed the need to form tight associations between prescribed standards, as well as gain administrative and community support before venturing into video game lessons.

My educational experiences never involved learning through video games, but I did experience a large amount of “culturally-relevant pedagogies”. Specifically, my 11^th grade English teacher had a master’s degree in rhetoric, and a large portion of her curriculum surrounded understanding how and why writers write in the styles they do. She could have easily stuck with more classic texts that have large amounts of resources attached. Instead, she taught us rhetoric and rhetorical analysis through texts that were relevant to us: “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldúa, Delfina Cuero by Delfina Cuero (an autobiography), and “Arts of the Contact Zone” by Mary Louise Pratt. These texts tackled issues and topics that we lived on a day-to-day basis. Seeing yourself and your community reflected in text is simultaneously empowering and engaging; my peers and I gained skills and techniques unique to our lives while also learning about how an author’s style or form can reach readers at different levels. Comparing these lessons to those we learned through other texts like 1984 by George Orwell and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, I maintain a deeper understanding and connection to what I learned through the texts that were relevant to me than the texts that are more widely read.

My educational experience was incredibly unique due to the community that I grew up in. From my peers, I am interested to know: did any of your teachers incorporate media, print or digital, that was unique to you and your peers? If so, what did they use and how did it affect you? If not, do you wish that they had? What would be some suggestions that you would make to your former teachers?