Relationships between Organizational Factors and Teachers’ Knowledge and Use of Culturally Relevant Education

Background/Context: Culturally relevant education (CRE) is a powerful tool for improving students’ educational experiences and outcomes. Yet CRE is not the norm in U.S. public education systems (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011, 2012; Borrero et al., 2016; Coffey & Farinde-Wu, 2016), perhaps because teachers are socialized into systems that reproduce and uphold white-normed practice (Leonardo & Manning, 2017). The organizational contexts and conditions surrounding teachers’ practice could be a tool for leaders and policy makers to promote the use of CRE in schools. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore how three organizational factors—administrative support, school culture, and curricula—may contribute to teachers’ knowledge and enactment of CRE. We framed our analysis using cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (Cole & Engeström, 1993), a tool for examining how learning is situated in contexts and conditions, and how these contexts and conditions mediate teaching practice (Foot, 2014). Research Design: Guided by the tenets of quantitative critical inquiry (Stage, 2007; Stage & Wells, 2014), we used survey data from 534 teachers in 33 schools in the 2019 school year to explore how three organizational factors (i.e., administrative support, school culture, and curricula) contribute to teachers’ knowledge and enactment of CRE. We collected data in spring 2019 in a high-poverty urban district in the southeastern United States serving predominantly students of color. We used confirmatory factor analysis to test each scale’s dimensionality, accounting for clustering by school, and then used structural equation modeling (SEM) to model relationships among the organizational factors and teachers’ self-reported CRE knowledge and practice. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analysis indicated that curricular resources for CRE and collective expectations for CRE—an element of school culture—were both positively associated with teachers’ self-reported CRE knowledge. CRE knowledge, curricular resources for CRE, and administrative support were positively associated with teachers’ self-reported CRE practice. Finally, CRE knowledge partially mediated the relationship between curricular resources for CRE and CRE practice. Notably, general curricular resources were negatively associated with CRE practice. Findings suggest that norms and curricula focused on the use of CRE are crucial for enhancing teachers’ knowledge and use of CRE practice; general curricular resources may not foster teachers’ work in providing CRE in their classrooms. Finally, findings suggest that administrators may be uniquely positioned to help teachers transform their practice. We discuss implications for research and practice, in light of present efforts to curtail teachers’ use of CRE in seeking to provide students with meaningful educational opportunities.