VIDBE-Q Volume 66 Issue 1
effectively teaching blind and visually impaired students from diverse cultural and
linguistic backgrounds.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) is a central theoretical underpinning
of K-12 pedagogical reform efforts focused on improving educational success
among students from historically underperforming racial and ethnic groups. The
origin of CRP dates back nearly two decades to Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings' (1992)
landmark research on successful teachers of African American students. Ladson-
Billings (1992) attributed the teachers' remarkable successes to what she called
culturally relevant teaching, a model that empowers historically underperforming
students of color academically, emotionally, socially, and politically. Ladson-
Billings' (1992) framework posited three key tenets: a) educational success:
maintaining high expectations and ample opportunities for learners to be
successful; b) cultural competence: understanding and valuing one's own cultural
background as well as the cultures of others; and c) critical consciousness:
developing students' awareness of cultural norms, values, and institutions that
produce and maintain inequities (Ladson-Billings, 1992).
Over the past twenty years, a number of educational scholars have engaged
and extended Ladson-Billings' original concept (Alim & Paris, 2017; Gay, 2010;
Muhammad, 2020; Hammond, 2015). Notably, Gay (2010) presented CRP as a