An Overview of Instructional Violence: Promoting Culturally Responsive Instruction

Black students in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs are often subjected to biases, as well as barriers to success. Some of these biases and barriers include deliberately leaving culture and race out of the curriculum, lower education expectations, and entering higher levels of school discipline. Separately and combined, this leads to academic/educational violence. In this article, we discuss one aspect of barriers— instructional violence —on Black GATE students. We incorporate Boykin’s Afro-centric cultural styles framework for educators to avoid and end instructional violence. Boykin’s culturally asset-based framework is intended to assist educators in becoming culturally responsive and competent when working with Black GATE students. We draw implications for other minoritized students; although combined, minoritized represents the majority of students in public schools, despite some being inequitably underrepresented in GATE.