Designing a Cultural Efficiency Model for Elementary School Teachers based on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Being an efficient educator is a virtue that includes the notion of cultural efficiency as well. To assess the extent to which Iranian teachers/educators are culturally efficient a model is needed by which different components of this construct are clearly defined. To design such a model a group of ten elementary school teachers with maximum cultural diversity was selected and then asked to write autobiographies to be put to content analyses. Results show three intertwined and mutually interactive dimensions to the concept: knowledge (pedagogic and student related), attitudes (towards cultural diversity, construction of knowledge, and students), and performance (reflection, pedagogic initiatives aimed at affective and academic achievement, cultural competency, and socio-political awareness among students). Iranian efficient teachers, depending on the situation, prioritize one of these pedagogic initiatives in order to promote students’ affective development in both areas of cultural diversity and academic achievement. Such initiatives are not limited to the classroom, as they are aimed at other students and their families, and colleagues.