User:JamieW104/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Culturally relevant teaching

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This topic has come up in courses I've taken, in district professional development sessions and during equity committee meetings. I've read some of the material that the article references and am interested in the topic. I want to help colleagues understand the topic and how to incorporate it into their practice, as well as clarify some misconceptions that the general public has on the topic.

Evaluate the article
The lead of this article gives a good definition of culturally relevant teaching, but does not follow up with a good overview of what to expect in the rest of the article. The statements after the introductory sentence attempt to expand on the definition, but seem too specific to give the reader a broader understanding of the topic. There is no indication what will be included in the rest of the article. There was a major comparison to constructivism in the body of the article which is not mentioned at all in the lead.

The content of the article felt repetitive at times. After a brief history of the writings on culturally relevant teaching, the article is broken into characteristics, principles and suggested teaching strategies. I didn’t like the way the information was organized because it didn’t seem to connect the three ideas together in any obvious way. The nature of the subject matter means the article appropriately addresses underrepresented populations and topics.

I think the tone and balance of the article was trying to be neutral, because it included language such as “many educators believe” or “some researchers think”, but came off as contradictory at times. You were left wondering if it was possible to implement this type of teaching successfully. Public education was also criticized a few times suggesting it was a difficult concept to implement in public schools. The suggested use of technology to make up for inadequate textbooks and rigid public school curriculum was not neutral. Based on the lead I thought the article was just trying to define it as best as possible and lay out some of the standards for using it. A “challenges” section was added to the article that did not seem neutral and included many opinion based statements about education and educators.

The references in the article seemed diverse but not up to date. I think that is why the tone and balance felt a bit off for me. This is a big topic and most of the reference material was written prior to 2010. You can see that a lot of people have made edits, added more recent information, and attempted to reference more up to date material. Maybe this is why the article doesn’t seem to flow easily from one section to the next. The links work and there is a wide range of reference material incorporated into the article. Sometimes too wide a range to keep the article focused.

There are minor grammatical errors throughout the article but nothing that distracts from its readability. The talk page is short. There is a list of edits which reflect more recent additions to the original and attempt to bring the topic up to date. It does not contain images, nor would they enhance the understanding of the article. It is rated C class by Wikipedia which makes sense to me given the description of the rating system.

My overall impression of this article is that it needs to be updated and organized differently. The topic is an important one and one that is getting a lot of attention in the media right now. It would be beneficial for people outside of education to understand what it means to teach in a culturally relevant way. I would update the article to include what culturally relevant teaching looks like in a classroom and what it does not look like. Educators will understand the details of this article better than individuals working outside of education. Because this is such a broad topic, and there is so much new information being published, it seems like it would be difficult to update to include everything. Perhaps cleaning up the existing information and adding a "recent findings" section would tie all of the information together. In addition, I would like to see more quantitative data about the effectiveness of culturally responsive teaching so it seems less based on the belief system of certain researchers and educators.