Redesigning content so that it’s sticky and relevant for students is the first step in moving toward crafting an effective culturally responsive lesson (aka one that uses students’ schema and transitory culture to connect the unknown to the known).

This is what I mean when I say we can use culture as a cognitive scaffold — connecting students’ funds of knowledge to the content being presented not as a one-off example, but when possible also as an extending metaphor.

A word of caution. Resist the urge to over-simplify this process and label it as an “anti-racist” approach to UDL (universal design of learning). It is not.

This desire to quickly equate CRT to UDL in an attempt to “get on with it” means you will be unconsciously maintaining the entrenched tentacles of white supremacy culture embedded in curriculum and instruction that makes schools mechanisms of social reproduction and racial structuralization. If you make this common UDL mistake then you will be unwittingly contributing to inequity by design.

Knowing how to use culture as a cognitive scaffold begins here. Remember, “chunking” isn’t about making content smaller and digestible as our common denotation of the word suggests. Instead, connect the idea “chunking” to the science of learning and conjure up the image of a barrel of monkeys — one thing connecting to another.