Exploring the Relationship between Teachers' Religious Identity and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

The Separation of Church and State Clause prohibits religious practices in public schools; however, this does not inherently allow for the exploration of how religion/faith influences K-12 education and school dynamics. Administrators’ and teachers’ religious affiliation contributes to their positionality and shapes their moral ethics. To assume that K-12 teachers are not engaging with their faith and allowing it to influence how they view their students, and their teaching practice is naïve and negligent. Additionally, explicitly discussing faith is prohibited and to this end, this restriction can breed ‘unchecked’ unconscious bias. This leads to a lack of training and reflexivity for religious identity in teacher education programs. This establishes a need for teacher candidates and existing teachers to consider how their faith influences their pedagogy in school systems where faith is both engaged and restricted. Culturally responsive pedagogy is a valuable and beneficial approach to addressing the diversity reflected in schools across the United States. It is an approach widely respected among practitioners, has been widely researched, and is the focus of countless amounts of scholarship. There is a gap in the literature addressing culturally responsive pedagogy and religious identity, and teacher training programs are not engaging their faith identity and how it may shape or contribute to their teaching practices. Employing FaithCrit as a lens and framework, this qualitative study aims to examine the religious identity of urban K-12 schoolteachers and how their religious identity is related to and influences their culturally responsive pedagogy.