Welcome to the Teaching and Learning Guide for Engaging Students with Culturally Responsive Teaching! 

This guide includes tips and strategies to help you: 

• Define culturally responsive teaching

• Apply inclusive strategies to help students feel welcome and engaged

• Empower students through choice

• Use various methods to enhance student cultural competence

Culturally responsive teaching, sometimes called culturally relevant teaching, refers to practices that affirm and welcome the diverse cultures of students in the classroom. According to Gay (2010), culturally responsive teaching involves “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (p. 31). In this guide, we define culture even more broadly to include many aspects of students’ lived experiences. 

Culturally responsive teachers draw on students’ culturally specific ways of knowing and understanding the world when creating course content. Drawing on what is relevant to students can help them be more engaged and more likely to successfully apply course lessons to their lives.  

The main goals of culturally responsive teaching are to: 

1. Create or affirm a favorable disposition toward learning through personal relevance and choice

2. Create a learning atmosphere in which students feel respected by and connected to one another

3. Create engaging and challenging learning experiences that include students’ perspectives and values

4. Create or affirm an understanding that students have effectively learned something they value and perceive as authentic to their real world (Ladson-Billings)

Mirroring

Mirroring means designing your course so that students see themselves in course content, perspectives, and materials. When students see themselves reflected in course content, research shows they are more likely to be engaged in learning. 

One aspect of mirroring often overlooked is using inclusive images. In 2019, Rene F. Kizilec and Andrew J. Saltarelli conducted a study where they created two mock advertisements for a Probability and a Computer Science 101 course. One ad used technology images, like graphs and computers. The other ad showed a woman in front of a computer and a group of racially diverse women. The researchers found that more women clicked the ad with images of women. This study points to an idea others have theorized: students are more engaged and interested in a course or a discipline if they literally see themselves in it. 

Inclusive images can be helpful not just for course advertisements. Instructors can include mindfully curated images in presentations, worksheets, videos, and examples. Carefully chosen images that reflect the student population can help ensure that students feel seen and included. Then, students are more likely to engage in the course content. The following websites offer inclusive, open-access images to use in your courses: 

• OneTab is a website that lists collections of diverse, openly licensed images

• Picnoi is a collection of images of people of color

• The Gender Spectrum Collection offers free stock images that feature trans and non-binary models

• Affect the Verb is a collection of images featuring disabled people   

• Women of Color in Tech features a variety of stock photos featuring women using technology

• Jopwell Latinx Photo Collection is comprised of images of Latinix people

• All Go offers collections of photos featuring plus-size models

Other ways to mirror in your courses include: 

• Using culturally diverse names in examples

• Including resources from diverse authors

• Using culturally diverse examples, like foods and holidays 

• Acknowledging cultural practices

• Including holidays from many religions on schedules

Communication with Students

We’ve chosen the term responsive over relevant in this guide because it implies flexibility in teaching unique and varied student populations. Being responsive to the diverse needs of unique groups of students means instructors must communicate with students regularly about their interests and needs. 

In addition to flexibility, communication with students should also respect the students’ experiences and strengths. Student populations are becoming more and more diverse. Our students come from unique backgrounds and have individual experiences. Cultural diversity does not just center on identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality, although those are certainly factors. Consider other factors that contribute to students’ unique experiences, such as: 

• Job experience

• Current location and where they grew up

• Age

• Parents’ jobs

• Travel experiences

• Neurodivergence

• Hobbies

• Working styles

Students have important perspectives to contribute from their lives and instructors have multiple opportunities to make sure students can uniquely apply course content. Understanding and drawing on students’ strengths and interests can contribute to a more open, inclusive classroom.  

Instructors do not need to be an expert on every culture. Instead, they can rely on students to let them know what students will find relevant. Instructors can also enlist the help of experts in the form of readings, videos, and other course materials. Through communication with students about their interests and backgrounds, instructors can begin to tailor their course materials toward what their students might find most engaging. Student choice, discussed in the next section, can also help take the pressure off instructors to accommodate every culture. 

To ensure relevance, allow students enough choice so they can make the course relevant for themselves. When they can, students will make choices based on their own experiences, values, needs, and strengths. Then, they are more likely to apply their learning to their lives (Ginsberg and Wlodkowski). Allowing students to have choices in their learning makes them feel more empowered.

John Spencer talks about the importance of moving from compliance to empowerment when it comes to student experiences (AVID). Whereas compliance means students do what they are told, empowerment means that students take ownership of their learning. Students must have a meaningful voice in the learning process and make critical choices to guide their own learning path. 

In a Hanover Research study on student choice, researchers found that giving students autonomy to make their own decisions led to greater personal well-being and satisfaction as well as better academic performance. When given the opportunity to choose their projects, topics, and audience, students will do work to benefit themselves and their communities. Choice, then, achieves the goals of cultural relevance. 

There are numerous ways to offer students choice. However, instructors do not need to offer students infinite choices in order to be culturally responsive. Offering a selection of choices that allow instructors to use a common rubric or grading scheme can go a long way to empower students. The following table includes areas where you can offer choice, with descriptions.

In addition to learning about the varied cultures of their students, instructors can also encourage students to learn about each other. A culturally responsive classroom is one where students are encouraged to interact with their peers and learn from their differing experiences and backgrounds. 

There are several ways instructors can encourage students to learn cultural competence. These include: 

Start with respectful behavior.

Creating a space where diverse students are interacting with each other starts with respect. It is important for instructors to lay the groundwork for a respectful classroom. This means specifically letting students know respectful interactions with peers is a requirement of the course. The syllabus is a great place to set this expectation, but it will also need to be reinforced throughout the course. 

Invite students to share their experiences with each other.

Our global society necessitates interactions and relationships with people who are different. Yet, it is common for students to come to college not knowing there are so many other students with different backgrounds and experiences.

As students get to know each other and their unique qualities, it can be helpful to encourage students to reflect on their own experiences first. When students are aware that their own views are not universal and instead come from their unique cultural worldviews, they are more likely to understand diversity as a positive and not a negative quality.

Encourage openness and exploration.

As students explore their own worldviews and experiences, you can encourage them to be open to each other’s perspectives. It might help to let students know how to successfully interact with a person from another culture. Instructors can encourage students to suspend their judgment and biases so that they can learn openly from their peers.

Instructors can encourage openness and exploration by:

• Teaching and demonstrating deep listening skills. The Listening Deeply Strategy encourages students to develop their listening skills so that they can fully connect with others. 

• Asking good, thoughtful questions to students that promote understanding of different worldviews. Our Teaching and Learning Guide for Practicing Inclusive Communication in Your Courses has more tips and strategies for communicating with students thoughtfully.  

• Demonstrating cultural competence and sensitivity to students. Some examples might include: 

  • Not forcing students to maintain direct eye contact (a North American cultural norm)

  • Asking students what they prefer to be called, even if it’s different than the roster

  • Not relying on stereotypes to speak about different groups (and not asking a single student to speak for everyone in their cultural group)

  • Avoiding “Othering” language, i.e. “Us” versus “Them” or “Here” versus “There”

  • Double checking assumptions – for example, a student from a polychronic culture is always “late” to class. A teacher might assume they don't want to be there or are being disrespectful, when in reality, where they are from, a 9 am class may not get started till 9:15.

  • Embracing a both/and, rather than an either/or, approach

Instructors do not have to become experts on all cultural differences in order to become culturally responsive teachers. Employing simple strategies like mirroring, student choice, and cultural competence can help make cultural responsiveness a regular part of the teaching process. 

• AVID Open Access. “Empower Students Through Creativity and Choice. “ Retrieved from 

• https://avidopenaccess.org/resource/empower-students-through-creativity-and-choice/#:~:text=Consider%20where%20your%20students%20are,%E2%80%9Coffer%20choice%20with%20guardrails.%E2%80%9D

• Artze-Vega, I., Darby, F., Dewsbury, B., and Imad, M. The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023). 

• Evolve Communities. “Why is Cultural Awareness Important?” Retrieved from https://www.evolves.com.au/why-is-cultural-awareness-important/#:~:text=Cultural%20awareness%20can%20help%20you,individuals%20from%20different%20cultural%20backgrounds.

• Gay, G. Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010). 

• Ginsberg, M. and Wlodkowski, R. Diversity and Motivation: Culturally Responsive Teaching in College. (Honoken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2009). 

• Kizilcec, R. and Saltarelli, A. (2019). “Psychologically Inclusive Design: Cues Impact Women’s Participation in STEM Education.” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145.3290605.3300704

• Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-91. 

• Thomas, C. Inclusive Teaching: Presence in the Classroom: New Directions for Teaching and Learning (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014). 

• Ray, S. (2019). “Teaching Case - Applications of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Community College Classroom.“ New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resources, 31(4), 65-69. Retrieved from https://primo-tc-na01.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/110i679/TN_cdi_proquest_journals_2328304704

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