CRE STEM Toolkit

Culturally Responsive Education STEM High School Toolkit

Empowering Teachers to Close STEM Education Opportunity Gaps

The Culturally Responsive Education STEM High School ToolKit

This project is a collaborative effort to create a Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) STEM Toolkit to support environments, curricula, and instructional methods that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, and lived experiences of all high school students in the state of Texas. The toolkit will be implemented to better reflect students' cultural and linguistic diversity and simultaneously ensure that all teachers are equipped and resourced to empower students with STEM in a culturally responsive way. Project collaborators include 100Kin10, The National Math and Science Initiative, and the University of Houston teachHOUSTON program.

What is Culturally Responsive Education?

Culturally responsive education uses students’ cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles to make learning encounters more relevant and effective for them. Click on each box below to familiarize yourself with these Culturally Responsive Education components below.

Cultural Knowledge

Knowledge of cultural characteristics, history, value, beliefs, and behaviors of another ethnic or cultural group

Prior Experiences

Information and experiences someone already has before they learn new information

Frames of Reference

They way a person perceives the world and their surroundings

Performance Style

The preferential way in which a person absorbs, processes, comprehends and retains information

Culture

The lens through which individuals see the world

Identity Components

Included but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background, gender, sexuality, lived experiences

Getting Started in Culturally Responsive Education

Use the resources below to begin to familiarize yourself with Culturally Responsive Education pedagogy and to gauge your prior knowledge and biases.

Being a Culturally Responsive Educator

This course provides an overview to Culturally Responsive Education, as we define and embrace it at The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI).

Implicit Association Test

Project Implicit is a collaboration among researchers who are interested in thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control. Click above to access a variety of implicit bias tests.