I remember the moment I realized we had a bigger problem than what I originally thought. I was facilitating a professional development session and asked the room “what does culturally responsive teaching look like in your classroom?”
The responses varied, but were ultimately all pretty similar: diverse repertoire, artists of color, student choice. All important, all well intentioned. But also all missing the point.
In that moment I realized I had been focused on the wrong problem. Before we could even get into the application, we needed to address what culturally responsive teaching actually is, what it isn’t, and why understanding the difference is critical to the long-term sustainability of arts education.
Likely you’ve heard the term culturally responsive teaching, been to the workshops about what it means for arts classrooms, that’s information. But having information about culturally responsive arts education is not the same as understanding it. And when we mistake information for understanding, that’s where we see misconceptions and confusion creep in.
When we don’t have a clear and shared understanding of what culturally responsive arts education is and looks like in real arts classrooms, we maintain the inequities that occur when some programs are built to resonate with specific students, struggle to sustain enrollment and funding, leading to students who walk away from our programs not seeing the value of arts education, and thus feed the very pipeline problem that threatens the future of arts education itself.
We need a clear definition of what culturally responsive arts education is, rooted in the science of how students learn, and a shared framework for building it so that arts educators and leaders have the common language we need to collaborate, learn from one another, and collectively build and advocate for arts programs where every student can thrive.
Let’s explore my definition of Culturally Responsive Arts Education, address some of the biggest misconceptions directly, and discuss what CRAE is (and isn’t) in practice.
Defining Culturally Responsive Arts Education
I define Culturally Responsive Arts Education as leveraging the prior knowledge, experiences, and interests of our learners in order to work in partnership with them, and engage them in relevant artistic tasks that help them to construct understandings about themselves, others, and the world through the mediums of the arts.
That’s a lot of words! And I’ve been very intentional about every one, so let’s break it down:
- Leveraging the prior knowledge, experiences, and interests of our learners: This is the internal work. Examining our own values, beliefs, and cultural frames of reference to remove obstacles and barriers, so that our instructional decisions open doors for every learner to engage deeply, rather than quietly closing them for some.
- Work in partnership: This is the relational work. Co-creating a learning environment with learners where they don’t just feel welcome, but feel a genuine sense of belonging and ownership in the space and over the learning.
- Engage in relevant artistic tasks: This is the content work. Selecting and using diverse artistic content not as decoration, but as an intentional bridge to learning that connects to who learners are and what they know.
- Construct understandings about themselves, others, and the world through the mediums of the arts: This is the curricular and instructional delivery work. Designing instruction so that the artistic process becomes the vehicle for building understandings that extend beyond the classroom into learners’ real lives.
Rooted in my own experiences as an arts educator, and the field of culturally responsive education, particularly scholars such as Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings whose work on culturally relevant pedagogy has had a huge impact on my own work, I offer this definition to the field of arts education as a foundational part of the common language we can use to collaborate, build collectively and advocate for arts programs where every student can thrive. Because without shared language, it’s difficult for us to build the shared understanding needed to get momentum to move forward.
This definition not only offers shared language, but also defines the Arts as a Vehicle™ framework which provides structure for the “what” and “how” specifically for arts classrooms.
Let’s explore each.
Breaking Down the Misconceptions about Culturally Responsive Arts Education
“Leveraging the prior knowledge, experiences, and interests of our learners”
Ask most arts educators what culturally responsive teaching looks like in practice, and the conversation almost always turns to race, diversity, and diversifying the curriculum.
Maybe you’ve even been to a PD session that discussed considering the racial demographics of your students and diversifying your curriculum. Perhaps you even left with a list of diverse artists, techniques, or repertoire. This is an important conversation, and it’s definitely a start.
But the problem is that when arts educators return to their classrooms to teach this more diverse content, while the content is more diverse, the teaching wasn’t. The pedagogy, the instructional moves were unchanged. We changed the content thinking that would solve the problem, without examining the way that things are being taught.
Leveraging the prior knowledge, experiences, and interests of our learners isn’t about what’s on the walls of the art room or on the band concert program. It’s about the mindset of the arts educator. Specifically, the ability to see our own values and beliefs, understand how they shape our instructional decisions, and actively work to ensure that those decisions don’t create obstacles or barriers to learning for students. This is the internal work that often gets missed because it requires a hard look in the mirror at ourselves, and to question if what is happening in practice in our arts classrooms is in alignment with what we say we believe.
This is the internal work that makes all the external work of content, curriculum, and learning environment choices possible. Without it, all the diverse content choices we are making aren’t culturally responsive, they’re more accurately named as engaging in multiculturalism or diversity education.
Think about a time when you looked at a student and thought “something isn’t working for them, and it’s not about talent.” What did you do with that instinct? How did you adjust your instruction, your environment, or your expectations to remove that obstacle? That adjustment is your equity lens at work. The question now is how to make that instinct proactive rather than reactive, so that fewer students hit the barrier in the first place.
“Work in partnership”
Spend enough time in conversations about culturally responsive teaching and a pattern emerges: it’s described as a feeling. A warm classroom, a teacher who “gets” their kids, and students who feel comfortable and cared for.
Think about the last time you heard a teacher described as “so good with kids.” What did that mean exactly? Did it mean students liked them and felt comfortable in their class? Did it mean students were having fun and the environment felt good?
It’s hard to learn from someone you don’t feel comfortable with, so establishing a warm and positive classroom environment is absolutely important. But feeling welcome and belonging are not the same. And more importantly, feeling welcome doesn’t mean that students are learning.
A student can feel welcomed into a space that was never designed for them. But belonging means that not only was the space built for them, it was built by them.
Working in partnership means cultivating an environment of belonging where we work together with learners to establish the learning environment norms, beliefs, and values. In this way, their identities, voices, and ways of being aren’t just tolerated, but are embedded into how the environment operates. This requires us to have engaged in the internal work of identifying our own values and beliefs and how they impact our instructional decisions. This allows us to do the work of understanding our learners’ cultural frames of reference deeply enough to co-create a learning environment where they don’t just feel good, but they feel like they are a part of creating something. We can only operate from our own perspective and frames of reference, so working in partnership with our students matters because only they can tell us what makes them feel they truly belong.
This is how we prepare the brain cognitively for the work of learning deeply. And it’s not just good teaching philosophy. A 2019 meta-analysis of 82 studies on school belonging found that when students have a genuine sense of belonging, there is a positive correlation with academic performance (Korpershoek et al., 2019). Belonging isn’t a “feel-good” add-on; it’s the cognitive foundation that makes deep learning possible. This is the difference between creating an environment of welcoming, positive feelings where students can’t name specifically what they learned, and creating a learning environment where students have a sense of belonging and ownership and not only can share what they’re learning, but can also describe why learning it matters.
This week, ask students one question you don’t already know the answer to, not about their skill level or their favorite artist, but about how they experience your space. In visual art, that might be “which part of the studio feels most like yours?”. In theater, “when was the last time you felt like you could take a risk with a new technique we were learning?”. In music, “is there a part of rehearsal that you most look forward to, and why?”. Listen for what they say, but listen even harder for what they don’t say.
“Engage them in relevant artistic tasks”
The single biggest misconception about culturally responsive arts education is that it’s all about diversity. Diverse artists, diverse repertoire, techniques from “other” countries, artists of color, and so on.
Picture this: an arts supervisor sits down to evaluate whether their arts teachers are implementing culturally responsive practice. They walk into a classroom and see diverse repertoire on the stands, artists of color on the walls, and students engaged and energized. They leave satisfied. From everything they could see, culturally responsive teaching is happening.
But is it?
Commonly when I ask teachers to describe specific instructional moves they are utilizing to implement a culturally responsive approach they tell me about how they add songs from other countries, or they do art projects about graffiti or street art. What’s good about this is that it’s clear teachers are interested in students sharing about their interests, backgrounds, and exploring various genres. Definitely meaningful, and also not yet culturally responsive teaching.
Diversifying content is the most common entry point into this work, and it’s often where arts educators stop. They stop here because it feels like “enough”: students are represented, programming looks more inclusive. But diverse representation and responsiveness are not the same. You could have the most diverse concert program in your district, yet your pedagogy and instructional moves remain unchanged because diversifying content doesn’t require internal examination, it just requires swapping out content.
Culturally responsive teaching isn’t just about what you teach, it’s how you use the content as a bridge to learning. Diverse content and materials move past multiculturalism and diversity education into culturally responsive and relevant instruction when they are chosen intentionally to connect to learners’ cultural frames of reference and used as the vehicle not only for learning artistic concepts, but also gaining understandings about themselves and others, and examining how the learning applies outside the classroom.
This looks like digging into the story of the music, the context that the artwork was created in, and the lived experience behind the text. That’s where the kind of learning that deeply engages learners in more than just “fun” really lives.
Think about one piece of artwork, one text, or one piece of repertoire that learners really connected with. What was it that they connected to? Was it the person behind the art? Was it a personal experience they had? That’s a point of connection. What could it look like to further explore that connection with the intentionality of directly using it as a vehicle into artistic concepts, understandings about themselves and others, and how the learning applies out in the world beyond the arts classroom?
“Construct understandings about themselves, others, and the world through the mediums of the arts”
The misconception about culturally responsive arts education when it comes to curriculum is that it’s all about students being excited, energized, and choosing the artists or repertoire they’re learning.
Think about a time when your students were truly lit up in your arts classroom. Maybe it was a day when you built a project around street art or comics, or brought in a visual artist whose work reflected your students’ community. The energy was different, and the engagement was real. It felt like exactly what culturally responsive teaching is supposed to look like.
But energy and engagement, powerful as they are, are not the destination. They’re the on-ramp.
Engagement is evidence that something is working. Student engagement isn’t the final outcome; student learning is the outcome, engagement is what makes that outcome possible. When we stop at engagement, we’ve gotten their attention. And the question isn’t whether or not students are excited, it’s what are they learning and how do we know they’ve learned it?
Constructing understanding about themselves, others, and the world through the mediums of the arts means designing curriculum that is explicitly tied to the real world, and instructional delivery that accounts for the inherent variability of our learners. Designing curriculum around big ideas and real-world contexts that learners don’t just connect to, but explicitly see how it matters to their real lives outside the classroom. In this way, the arts become a vehicle for constructing the bigger understandings, not just a more engaging way to cover content.
The strongest arts educators I know understand and demonstrate a fundamental principle: teaching the arts isn’t really about the art form itself. It’s about who learners become because they’ve engaged in the artistic process. That outcome doesn’t happen by chance; it must be intentional and visible to arts educators, arts students, leaders, and other stakeholders.
Before your next project, unit, or performance, write down one sentence that completes this prompt: “By the end of this unit, students will understand _______ about themselves, _______ about others, and ______________ about the world because of learning ___________ through the artistic process.” That’s the anchor for the learning to keep in mind as you plan and deliver instruction.
Arts as a Vehicle™: A Framework for Culturally Responsive Arts Education
Culturally Responsive Arts Education (CRAE) moves past diverse content and student choice, to an intentional process of learning that explicitly develops the critical skills needed for success in learning, career, and life. This is what it looks like when the arts become more than enrichment. This is what it looks like when the arts become a vehicle.
While the definition of culturally responsive arts education and my breakdown help to better understand the “what”, and move past the common misconceptions, the Arts as a Vehicle™ framework provides the structure for collaboration around the “how.”
The Arts as a Vehicle™ framework provides structure for the five key components of Culturally Responsive Education:
- Developing a Lens for Equity in the Arts
- Designing Culturally Responsive Arts Spaces
- Navigating Diverse Arts Content
- Designing Arts Curriculum for Real-World Contexts
- Delivering Instruction That Expands Access
In practice, designing curriculum for real-world contexts and delivering instruction that expands access are related, but two distinct skills. The framework separates them intentionally, because knowing what to teach and knowing how to teach it for every learner in the room are two different kinds of work.
CRAE is by definition responsive. It looks different across different classrooms, with different students, and different communities. The framework does not give our field a script; instead it provides the shared language for arts educators and leaders to talk about this work, advocate, and build together.
From Definition to Practice
The arts belong to everyone, but how we ensure that the arts education field thrives in another 30 years depends upon the actions we take today to ensure that all learners not only can access arts learning, but can connect to it, see the relevance of the arts in their lives, and most importantly see the value of arts education so that when they are in the decision making seats 30 years from now, they fight for and defend arts education for all.
This article answered the question, “what is culturally responsive arts education?”, and now the question becomes, “how do we make CRAE visible, measurable, pointable, and sustainable?” That’s what the next articles in this series will dive into.
This is the second of a six-part series on building arts programs where culturally responsive practice is visible, measurable, pointable, and sustainable. If this resonated with you, I’d love to have you join the conversation! Subscribe to my weekly newsletter for deeper dives, behind-the-scenes thinking, and the conversations happening in the field — the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it into the blog.
Ready to build arts programs where culturally responsive practice is visible, measurable, and something you can actually defend? Book a discovery call to discuss today.