CRTL at 
The Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning program has its home in Maryland at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). CCBC is a large, multi-campus college in the Baltimore metropolitan area:
“Since 1957, we’ve opened the doors to accessible, affordable, high-quality education, inspiring generations of people in the region to enhance their lives and careers. We offer the region’s most expansive selection of degree, certificate and workplace certification programs in industries such as business, education, health care, information technology, cybersecurity, construction and transportation.”
CCBC -> About Us
CCBC’s CRTL program is a partnership between Enrollment and Student Services and the Office of Instruction. We are organized under CCBC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and the Office of Intercultural Engagement (OIE). The CRTL Program is one of many equity initiatives at CCBC, including the Accelerated Learning Program, the Institute for Social and Economic Justice, and the Male Student Success Initiative.
Our domain name captures the synergies of fields connected to culturally responsive teaching and learning and training for cultural proficiency. Visitors to this web site may already be engaged in work in the related fields of culturally relevant teaching, critically reflective teaching and cultural proficiency training for school, workplace, community and global understanding.
The Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning Training Program at CCBC enhances participants’ awareness, changes attitudes, adds to their knowledge of others, and strengthens their skills at interacting effectively in the field with clients, patients, customers, co-workers, colleagues—and students.
The CRTL Program
The CRT Program focuses on the following core modules:
- The Meanings of Culture and Race
- Overcoming Stereotype Threat
- Culture and Mindsets of Intelligence
- Social Capital, School Learning, and Success
- Using Restorative Justice Practice to Combat Bias
- Facing Whiteness
The CRT emphasizes that because we human beings are the most social of animals, wherever we are, culture is present. Our perceptions, interpretations, and beliefs are culturally framed by our experiences and “upbringing” in unique social capital networks of meaning-making. Because perceptions of culture and race are learned within such social-cultural networks, we are unwittingly guided by these perceptions and interpretations.
To grow cultural proficiency further, we should actively examine our perceptions of culture and race, engaging in the ongoing practices of both self-reflection and cooperative dialogue across lines of culture.
A wide range of additional interconnected topics are addressed by the CRTL Program, such as attribution theory and productive persistence, micro-aggression, intersectionality, identity contingencies, language variation, privilege and power.
In addition, because we are guided by the adult learning principle that the answers are always in the group (i.e. the process of collaboration), in group after group, participants create unique synergies of stories and related ideas about how to best apply our discoveries to our learning relationships with our students and with each other.