One of the challenges educators face in the classroom is planning lessons that reach students from different backgrounds. Every class a teacher has will be filled with diverse learning styles, thought processes, and cultures, which makes tailoring content difficult. In the past, schools saw any variations from the norm as aberrations in need of correction. But over the past few years, more and more educators have embraced culturally responsive teaching.
What is culturally responsive teaching?
Culturally responsive teaching means adapting your teaching style to fit students’ cultures rather than forcing them into the mold of school culture. Figuring out how to do this is tricky. Teachers need an approach to instruction that focuses on student strengths and sustains their culture. Remember that culture is more nuanced than putting labels on a particular ethnic group. A student’s individual family culture, friend culture, and ideological background all combine to make up a student’s culture.
What are the benefits of culturally responsive teaching?
Though culturally responsive teaching is still relatively new, some studies show that this approach to culture in education has a positive impact on students. It can tackle issues like language barriers, systemic discrimination, and lack of representation. So, at this point, you might be wondering, ‘What does it mean to be culturally responsive?’
It means taking the time to consider a student’s life so far and responding to that perspective. To use culturally responsive teaching in the classroom, you also need a basic understanding of the key concepts behind the method and how technology can help to realize those ideals.
Technology and key concepts of culturally responsive teaching
Technology offers powerful tools to realize some key concepts behind culturally responsive teaching practices, from differentiation to student voice. Let’s break down five of these concepts and look at some examples to see how technology can help.
Differentiation
While it’s impossible to do this perfectly in a large class, differentiation means running a class in a way that everyone learns regardless of their abilities. For example, English might be a second language for some students. For others, their culture may emphasize listening or physical activity more than sitting still with a book. Educational technology presents some great solutions here. Interactive displays work well for games that let students move and manipulate objects on screen, participate in polls and quizzes, or work with simulations. The wide variety of lessons and approaches to learning make it easier to find ways to engage all students in a classroom. Lesson creation software like Explain Everything Advanced also helps educators build personalized learning experiences for students based on their needs.
Cultural representation
Technology allows educators to reach far beyond the printed textbook for learning material – which means easy access to content from other cultures. A paper textbook can only represent a set number of cultures, but virtual field trips, online museums, and multimedia resources from around the world present students with multiple perspectives. While these technologies have been around for a while, virtual reality technology allows students to experience cultures in a much more visceral way. For example, the Anne Frank House’s Secret Annex VR app lets students start to get a real sense of what it’s like to be a refugee.
Collaborative learning
In many cultures, collaboration is a much bigger part of life than it is in the U.S. Other cultural expectations common in collaborative cultures include sticking close to friends in class, not wanting to speak in class, and having more interest in learning how to do rather than learning how to think. To support collaboration, you can incorporate collective document editing tools, project-based learning platforms, and flexible software to build lessons that focus on groups. For example, let students form their own teams and allow them to work together with limited supervision to accomplish a task.
Accessibility and engagement
There are over 5.3 million students in the United States who are learning English as a second language. Another 7.5 million receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. That means over 25% of students in the education system have limited accessibility to content, which can in turn lead to less engagement. Incorporating technology like text-to-speech software, translation tools, and closed captioning in presentations and lesson plans will allow more students to get involved with the content.
Student voice and agency
This refers to a student’s ability to share their perspective and to let you and the class know what’s working and what isn’t. It’s important to remember that listening is one of the biggest aspects of culturally responsive teaching. More than ever before, students can create content through technology that they can then share in the classroom. Bringing in student perspectives to shape the class culture is also important because every year, the makeup of classrooms changes, which means the culture changes as well. Each new student brings a new perspective and background, and each student who moves on to another class leaves an impact.
With this basic understanding of the key concepts of culturally responsive pedagogy, you can start to consider ways to use it in your own classroom. However, determining the next steps is tricky—implementing culturally relevant pedagogy that speaks to multiple cultures is quite a challenge.
How to use technology to develop a culturally responsive classroom
Each student is different, which means each classroom is different. Trying to impose this method uniformly would defeat the purpose of culturally responsive teaching in the first place. That’s why it’s important to adapt to student needs as much as possible – which means you need maximum flexibility. For example, let’s suppose we have a class of twenty-five second-grade social studies students and look at five steps to designing a culturally responsive classroom for them.
Step 1: Learn about your student’s cultural backgrounds
You don’t want to start using culturally responsive teaching based on your assumptions about students. Every student is an individual, and it is important to take that into account. Thankfully, technology allows us to sort through large amounts of data in meaningful ways.
While it’s unrealistic to expect teachers to know everything about every student, you can use online surveys and interactive polls to get information on students’ cultural backgrounds, the language they speak at home, and their preferred learning styles. Consider using an interactive display at the beginning of the year to let students identify these traits about themselves in front of the class through polling on their devices. An added benefit of this method is that students learn about each other’s cultures at the same time. That way, how you implement culturally responsive teaching will make more sense to your students.
Alternatively, you can choose to keep the poll anonymous so you get a picture of the classroom’s cultural makeup without asking students to publicly self-identify. In our example class, let’s say 50% of students are suburban white students and 50% are urban Hispanic students. Language also differs, with 60% speaking only English in the home, 30% English-Spanish bilingual, and 10% Spanish only in the home. Finally, 30% are visual learners, 30% auditory, and 40% kinesthetic learners.
Step 2: Utilize culturally relevant content
Now that you have a basic understanding of your class’s cultural makeup, you can actively work to find content that is culturally relevant to them. This can be anything from examples you use in a lecture to sources you assign for reading or studying. For our class, when we cover the concept of ‘community,’ we can use interactive displays to show some neighborhoods with houses, parks, and yards and other sections featuring bustling urban scenes with apartment buildings and a community center. The text is in both Spanish and English. Then, use lesson creation software to create an interactive activity where students get more information about each community aspect by touching that part of the screen.
Step 3: Use differentiation in designing interactive lessons
Creating accessible lesson plans for various student abilities is challenging, but technology allows educators to customize tasks and content for student’s abilities and backgrounds. For our example, we could create a lesson called ‘Homes around the world’ using interactive displays. Students could interact with images of various housing styles by dragging and dropping furniture and decorations onto the images to represent their own homes. This integrates active learning and movement as well as cultural responsiveness. The key here is to look at your student’s ability levels and use technology to create variations of lessons designed to allow them to do their best work.
Step 4: Give students a voice through collaboration
Group projects are always difficult because while they appeal to some students, others despise them. Technology is a major benefit here because it allows individual grading while encouraging students to have their voices heard. For our class, we could create a ‘cultural food exchange’ by grouping mixed-language students into a group and asking them to develop a menu for a celebration that incorporates dishes from all of their backgrounds. Then, we could use an interactive display to help them create images and recipes for this feast.
Step 5: Give culturally responsive assessment and feedback
Technology allows you to provide students with feedback in a variety of formats. You can make feedback videos for the visual learners and audio feedback for the audio learners. Work to tailor exams to students’ strengths and to provide a culturally responsive teaching environment. This includes using culturally relevant examples in tests, writing questions that cater to different learning styles, and incorporating culturally diverse criteria into the grading process.
In the case of our example class, we might use software to create sections of exams that relate to the different cultures of students within the class, followed by a section about a culture that you learned about in class but that is foreign to your students. This allows you to asses both students’ understanding of one another’s culture and course material.
Conclusion
Building a culturally responsive classroom can be overwhelming, particularly if you are dealing with a large number of students. It is a lot of work, but it is possible with the help of the right tools. Consider your teaching area, your expertise, and how technology might help you.
Find the tools you need for a culturally relevant pedagogy
Request a free demo of the Promethean ActivPanel to see how it could enhance your classroom.
Recommended articles: