Bridging the Ivory Tower: Culturally Responsive Education Connects Content to People

Higher education institutions shape the professions which are the conduit for the disciplines’ ways of knowing, the worldview or mindset of the professions, and the intellectual frameworks by which problems and policies are defined. The generational, conscious and unconscious agreements between higher education and the professions perpetuate the status quo, resulting in continued disproportional impacts based on race, gender, ethnicity, language, orientation, and differing abilities in every major industry sector; including education, health, employment, housing, finance, technology and the criminal justice system. Cultural responsive pedagogy provides a process of altering these agreements by surfacing the dual consciousness of our multiple social identities and the multidimensional social, political, and economic contexts in our collective co-existence. The connections between culture and mindset, conscious and unconscious, and the social-political context shape teaching and learning. Mindfulness is a pathway for cultivating cultural competency through embodied awareness by building the reflective muscle to recognize, disrupt and transform deep-rooted beliefs, entrenched assumptions, and well-established behaviours. Mindfulness invites both faculty and students to bring their intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual selves to the learning exchange