A Culturally Responsive Teaching Curriculum for Adolescent ELL Students

The purpose of this research project was to create a curriculum that supports each student’s English language learning needs while not only representing each student’s culture, but also create learner autonomy and multi-cultural awareness and acceptance. It records the theoretical research behind creating the curriculum and also documents the personal attempts of administering the curriculum within a classroom setting, which included mostly Somali students in an urban school. Erikson’s theory played a huge role in this project as students search for their own identities within their peer groups and their own uniqueness. The project explains how the theory of building more learner autonomy in the classroom comes down to how the classroom is set up, creating a community, and giving more focused direction than what would originally have been taught. Even though this is a capstone project, this paper includes a lot of trial and error as the writer experienced challenges in her own classroom and had to move away from what she thought students could do, and focus on where students were at.. Some students were able to grasp the knowledge quickly, while others had to have more support. Future research would include further focus on motivation and school set up