Ever heard of culturally responsive pedagogy?
Sometimes it’s good to go to a new place and engage with a new subject. So it was that, this evening, I was at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at University College London (UCL) for the launch of a book titled “Culture and Science Education: Towards More Inclusive Practice”. The event was chaired by the co-editor of the book who is a friend of mine, Professor Justin Dillon.
It was a rather different event from my own book launch a week ago (check out “Everyone Has A Story” on Amazon). Thanks to a failure by the publisher Bloomsbury, there are no copies of the book currently available, whereas I self-published my book in time to give all attendees at the launch a free and signed copy. The Bloomsbury book will retail at £90, whereas Amazon is only charging £7.99 for mine.
Above all, of course, the subject matter of the book and the launch is utterly unfamiliar to me. So I learned a new acronym: CRP which stands for culturally responsive pedagogy. In non-academic language, this means teaching in a style which takes proper account of cultural background of the students, including issues like ethnicity, gender and language. Makes sense to me.
The event reminded me of an exchange I had with my mother when I was studying physics at school. I told her that my teacher was Scottish and it seemed to me that so many important scientists were Scottish: Maxwell, Kelvin, Watt … My Italian mother responded by advising me that, when she was at school, she was taught that all the greatest scientists were Italian: Galileo, Da Vinci, Marconi …