Global Perspective: Education Best Practice Goals for Sustainable Development

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) outlined five key features of SDG4’s to meet the best practices:

1. Access: at least 12 years of free publicly funded, quality primary and secondary education, and quality of education for out-of-school children,

2. Equity & Inclusion: in access, participation, retention, completion, and in learning outcomes,

3. Quality: leading to relevant, equitable and effective learning outcomes,

4. Lifelong Learning: learning begins at birth throughout life,

5. Gender Equality: education for and as empowerment. (Ossiannilsson et al., 2019)

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP)

Geneva Gay began publishing about culturally relevant teaching in the early 1980s, and her scholarship offers a solid foundation to gain from. OER creators and educators need to refrain from making assumptions on what works in education and actively consider what will reach most, if not all, of the users of the materials to be disseminated.

Culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (Muñiz, 2021; Paris et al., 2017) should be based on high quality materials which are both rigorous and relevant to all. Learning materials, let that be for profit or OER, are often lacking in inclusivity of student experiences, backgrounds, or interests (Muñiz, 2021). The ultimate goals of culturally relevant and sustaining education is to create an inclusive environment where

a)    students achieve intellectual growth and academic success,

b)    students feel affirmed and sustained in their culture and heritage language, and they develop fluency in the cultures of others, and

c)     students develop the knowledge and skills to recognize critique and address societal inequalities. (Muñiz, 2021) (Figure 2). 

Creating Culturally Responsive Classrooms

There are four conditions that educators should fulfill to establish a culturally responsive classroom environment. Culturally responsive classrooms should strive to establish inclusion, develop positive attitudes, enhance meaning, and foster confidence.

1. 1. Establish Inclusion: Highlight how the topic relates to your students. Be intentional about grouping students with different classmates in order to encourage the exchange of unique perspectives. Encourage discussions using tasks that require problem solving. Establish class norms to create a safe place to share.

   2. Develop Positive Attitudes: As much as possible, relate the content to the students. Allow students to choose how they demonstrate their learning, while providing clear learning objectives and assessment criteria.

   3. Enhance Meaning: Draw connections between what is being taught and real-world student experiences. Allow students to use their prior knowledge and experiences to address problems/issues. When appropriate use student jargon to improve communication.

   4. Foster Confidence: Allow students to demonstrate mastery in a variety of ways. Allow students time for self-reflection.

Engagement Strategies for Diverse Learners

Lin, Y. J. & Wang, H. C. (2018). Using enhanced OER videos to facilitate English L2 learners’ multicultural competence. Computers & Education, 125, 74-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.06.005

The study results showed that incorporating OER encouraged students to use communicative strategies and attentive preparation for multicultural encounters. It also helped students believe that OER has educational values. It is an example of how to use OER to engage students in learning and increase their cultural awareness.

Trust, T., Maloy, R. W., & Edwards, S. (2023). College student engagement in OER design projects: Impacts on attitudes, motivation, and learning. Active Learning in Higher Education, 24(3), 353–371. https://doi.org/10.1177/14697874221081454

This article reported that engaging students in the creation of OERs in classes enhanced students’ motivation and attitudes toward learning. The researchers noted that providing opportunities for students to take active roles in curating and designing OERs can help students meet the course expectations and academic achievement. In addition, students can improve problem-solving skills, collaboration skills, and technology literacy through project-based learning.   

The Teacher and/or Designer's Role in Cultural Responsive Pedagogy (CRP)

According to the mind behind CRP, Gloria Ladson-Billings, instructing with a CRP approach requires one to:

• Set high academic expectations

• Demonstrate cultural competence and the understanding that their worldview may differ from those they teach

• Address inequity (Fink, 2016)

The following information responds to the last two bullets. These ask teachers and instructional designers to reflect on the beliefs and biases they hold personally and how they may appear in their instruction. Reflecting on one’s world view can be challenging work. Unpacking biases is a lifelong practice. 

Fortunately, there are many resources for supporting people in this process.

The P.L.A.Y. Network put together a ~2 hour long activity set to support teachers in cultivating a culturally responsive teaching practice. They point to this test to assess one’s personal biases.

The University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has many great resources to support teachers in cultivating cultural competence and learning how to address inequity. 

They urge educators to reflect on their personal experience with diversity before engaging students around it, noting that teachers set the tone for such discussions and need to be able to hold a safe space for them. They offer the following prompts for teachers to reflect on:

• Recall the incident in which you first became aware of differences. What was your reaction? Were you the focus of attention or were others? How did that affect how you reacted to the situation?

• What are the “messages” that you learned about various “minorities” or “majorities” when you were a child? At home? In school? Have your views changed considerably since then? Why or why not?

• Recall an experience in which your own difference put you in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis the people directly around you. What was that difference? How did it affect you?

• How do your memories of differences affect you today? How do they (or might they) affect your teaching?

The full article can be found here. 

This blog post offers insight into how biases can creep into one’s teaching, and includes strategies for identifying bias as well as ways to protect students from negative impacts of your biases. They offer specific teaching strategies for engaging students around differences in identity.

Enhancing Knowledge about Cultures Different from your Own

A key aspect of cultivating cultural competence is developing knowledge about students’ cultural backgrounds. If their culture is different from yours, looking to examples of how members of their culture navigated integrating their heritage into the demands of the standards driven classroom can be helpful. See how the Alaska Native Knowledge Network approached assessing their students from a western and indigenous perspective here. They attempt to align U.S. educational standards with traditional ways of recognizing performance.

The Hawai’i Online Portal for Education (HOPE) is a small OER repository of Hawai’i-based K-post secondary lessons that provides insight into Hawaiian culture, history, and science about its natural environment.

Application: Culturally Responsive Teaching and OER

How can instructors become more competent in implementing culturally responsive teaching? Jenny Muñiz from New America illustrated eight core competencies for culturally responsive teaching. Even though these competencies are not situated in creating and using OER, these are important for instructors to implement culturally responsive OER. 

Competency 1: Reflect on One’s Cultural Lens

Culturally responsive instructors reflect on their own experiences and identities, focusing on whether these influence their attitudes, belief, and behaviors. They develop cultural competency by continuously reflecting on their unconscious bias, stereotypes, or microagressive behaviors rooted from their identity membership. 

Competency 2: Recognize and Redress Bias in the System

Culturally responsive instructors can identify institutional biases and systematic injustice. They are aware of systematic inequality and privileges that can considerably influence students’ academic achievement.  

Competency 3: Draw on Students’ Culture to Shape Curriculum and Instruction

Culturally responsive instructors employ cultural scaffolding, bridging students’ cultural backgrounds with instruction. They consider students’ identities and experiences when selecting and creating instructional resources.  

Competency 4: Bring Real-World Issues into the Classroom

Culturally responsive instructors facilitate students to actively engage in solving problems in the real-world. They provide opportunities for students to connect their cultural backgrounds and social issues, supporting them in developing civic responsibilities. 

Competency 5: Model High Expectations for All Students

Culturally responsive instructors believe in students’ abilities to succeed regardless of their cultural backgrounds and identities. They support students without preconception or assumption, setting equally high expectations.

Competency 6: Promote Respect for Student Differences

Culturally responsive instructors create a safe and inclusive learning environment for students. They encourage students to value their cultures and also respect others. 

Competency 7: Collaborate with Families and the Local Community

Culturally responsive instructors put efforts in learning cultures, values, and trauma from students’ families to better understand their expectations and needs. They also collaborate with local communities to support students and their families. 

Competency 8: Communicate in Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Ways 

Culturally responsive instructors are vigilant in different communication styles based on students’ different cultural backgrounds. They consider cultural influence in students’ verbal and nonverbal communication and support multilingual students and families with appropriate resources.

Source:

Muñiz, J. (2020). Culturally responsive teaching: A reflection guide. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED609136 

Application: Culturally Responsive Teaching from the ADDIE Model Perspective

Analysis

Müller, F. J. (2021). On the road to inclusive education: Supporting diversity in education by state-financed, large-scale OER platforms—The example of user-oriented development of NDLA in Norway. Education Research International, 2021, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5534641

OER can support diverse learners since teachers can revise and modify it to satisfy the needs of students. Müller (2021) valued the OER’s role and contribution in enhancing diversity and inclusive education and researched how the team from the OER platform addressed diversity based on the different user groups. The author examined the example of the Norwegian platform called Norwegian Digital Learning Arena (NDLA), which has offered OERs in Norway since 2006. To study NDLA’s approach, the author interviewed nine NDLA management-level staff members, three cooperation partners, and a representative of schoolbook publishers. The results showed that the NDLA team considered diversity from various stakeholders (i.e., diversity of students, teachers, and staff members) and at different levels (i.e., diversity within an organization, diversity in the content of OER, and diversity in and between countries). Initially, NDLA focused on teachers; however, they expanded the consideration to students and editors in the development and revision of the platform and software because students are the main users of the platform. In addition, NDLA adopted an approach from Design Thinking, using various personas to understand the diversity of the students in developing OER. These personas describe “favorite subjects, interests, learning situations, life situations, and digital competencies of female and male learners and teachers” (p. 3). Through this approach, NDLA addressed diversity with user-centered OER design, content for various user groups, and inclusion of diversity as learning content.

Design

Parker, C. E., Thomas, K., Saucedo, D., & Griffiths, R. (2022). Open Educational Practices and Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Practices in Four K–8 OER Programs. SRI Education.

Notes:

Parker et al. (2022) conducted a focus group study to foster culturally responsive open education. The participants emphasized the following constructs to design culturally responsive OER: student agency and ownership, inclusive content, classroom culture of care, and high and equitable standards. Some pedagogical practices include creating a student-centered learning community where students can collaborate with peers and building a safe space in which students can speak up, present their thoughts and experiences grounded on cultural heritage, and learn from one another. They also suggested developing teacher materials to support student questioning and including “anchor charts” with a bank of terminology for students’ reference. In addition, the course content should consider students' home experiences, which encourages all students to learn from others. To increase instructors’ awareness, they shared a case where a curriculum development team and staff were engaged in training and book discussions to build their own perceptions and practices related to social justice issues. Learning materials and content also included a variety of instances for students to see diverse, non-stereotyped examples of the content. They also commented that the teacher lesson plan could include guidance for how teachers can engage and respond to students’ experiences, backgrounds, or sensitive topics.

Develop

Sáenz, M. P., Hernandez, U. & Hernández, Y. M. (2017). Co-creation of OER by teachers and teacher educators in Colombia. In C. Hodgkinson-Williams & P. B. Arinto (Eds.), Adoption and impact of OER in the Global South (pp. 143–185). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.604384

Sáenz and colleagues’ (2017) study shows how engaging teachers in the collaborative development process of OER can support their adoption of OER in their classes. The recruited teachers are from public schools in southwestern Colombia, which can represent the socioeconomic, cultural, and technological diversity in Latin America. The researchers hosted seminars and workshops to inform the adoption, curation, and creation of OER in educational contexts. Then, the teachers collaboratively discussed OER-related activities and pedagogical practices for using OER in Colombian schools. Analyzing data collected through questionnaires, teachers’ chats in workshops, interviews, and focus groups, researchers identified pedagogical support and formulation of institutional or national policies as important conditions to sustainably embed OER in schools. The pedagogical support includes (1) providing continuous, flexible, and personalized assistance and feedback on teachers’ OER projects, (2) encouraging teamwork and collaboration with teachers and students, (3) setting a role model for teachers in the processes of adaptation, curation, and development of OER, (4) encouraging teachers and students to have active roles in the development of OER, (5) promoting open licensing that respects copyright, and (6) facilitating the ICT use to access, create, distribute OER both at schools and home. The researchers highlighted that recognizing teachers’ efforts in the creation of OER in collaboration with teachers and students effectively supported the employment of OER. In addition, fostering an environment that allows team-based projects to develop OER is more effective in incorporating OER than offering general training sessions.

Implement: Best Practices for CRP

Evaluate

Portland State University also offers guidance on CRP, particularly around designing curriculum. The offer the following list of questions teachers can use to assess instructional materials and courses for their cultural responsiveness:

• To what extent did the instructor foster a class environment in which diverse points of view were respected.

• To what extent did the course content incorporate diverse voices and populations?

• To what extent did the assignments allow students to incorporate content related to diverse and/or underserved populations?

Application: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and OER How to Design A Culturally Responsive OER

Analyze Goal: Understand the needs of learners and the context for learning.

• Identify Cultural Contexts: Conduct surveys, interviews, or focus groups to learn about the cultural backgrounds, experiences, and needs of your students. For example, discover which languages they speak at home, their cultural traditions, and any historical or societal issues that are important to them.

• Evaluate Existing OER: Assess available OER to see how well they align with the cultural contexts of your students. Determine if existing resources are culturally responsive or need modification.

Design Goal: Plan the learning experiences and instructional materials.

• Incorporate Cultural Relevance: Design learning objectives and materials that incorporate students' cultural backgrounds. For example, in a history course, include objectives that cover both mainstream historical events and significant events from the students' cultures.

• Plan for Revising and Remixing: Identify OER that can be revised or remixed to include culturally relevant content. For instance, if using an OER science textbook, plan to add case studies about indigenous ecological knowledge.

Develop Goal: Create the instructional materials.

• Retain and Adapt OER: Develop instructional materials by retaining high-quality OER and adapting them to fit the cultural contexts of your students. For instance, create lesson plans that feature stories or examples from different cultures to illustrate key concepts.

• Collaborative Development: Work with colleagues or community members to ensure that the content is culturally accurate and respectful. This could involve co-creating resources with input from students or local cultural organizations.

Implement Goal: Deliver the instruction to learners.

• Flexible Delivery: Implement the adapted OER in a way that respects and celebrates cultural diversity. For example, use culturally relevant multimedia resources, such as videos or podcasts created by members of the students' communities.

• Inclusive Teaching Strategies: Use teaching strategies that are culturally responsive, such as group work that values collective learning or storytelling methods common in certain cultures.

Evaluate Goal: Assess the effectiveness of the instruction and make necessary adjustments.

• Formative and Summative Assessment: Use culturally responsive assessment methods to evaluate student learning. For example, instead of only using standardized tests, incorporate projects that allow students to explore and present topics relevant to their cultures.

• Feedback for Improvement: Collect feedback from students on how well the materials and teaching methods respected and reflected their cultural backgrounds. Use this feedback to revise and improve the OER.

Application: Policy Recommendations to Support Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) in Classrooms

Learn how policy can support the implementation of CRP at the institution, state, and societal levels below.

Summary: Inclusive Education

Putting it all Together

Use the mindmap below to help understand the concepts covered in this section and how they relate to each other.

See the glossary at the bottom of the page for more comprehensive definitions and an opportunity to contribute to this site.

Download the mindmap here. See use paramenters outlined in map.

Glossary of Terms

This is a living list of terms! As this section on inclusive education and CRP develops, new terms can be added or existing ones can be modified in this Google Sheet. 

• Instructions for adding to the list are included in a comment in the list. 

• As the site is developed, new terms can be added to this page.

Find the sources for each definition in this same Google Sheet.

Access (Instructional Design): design of educational environments, materials, activities and assessments that are accessible to all learners, regardless of their abilities, disabilities, or learning preferences. 

Cultural Competence: a set of behaviors, attitudes, policies, and practices that enable and empower a practitioner or organization to provide culturally maximizing service to a culturally complex clientele. Cultural competence goes beyond simply acknowledging cultural diversity or a conglomeration of groups. In practice, culturally competent practitioners and organizations should acknowledge the influence that culture plays in communication and action, recognize the dynamics within cross-cultural relations, enhance their cultural competence through the acquisition of additional knowledge, and amend and adapt existing knowledge and practice with accompanying shifts in cultural competence.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP): an approach to teaching that incorporates attributes and characteristics of, as well as knowledge from, students' cultural background into instructional strategies and course content to improve their academic achievement. A primary aim of culturally responsive pedagogy is to create learning environments that allow students to use cultural elements, cultural capital, and other recognizable knowledge from their experiences to learn new content and information to enhance their schooling experience and academic success.

English as a Second Language (ESL): also called English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as an additional language (EAL) or English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), is an English language education study program for non-native speakers

Diversity: the presence and acceptance of differences; the presence and acceptance of differences that may include race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, culture, citizenship, marital status, life and career paths, socioeconomic status, educational background, workplace position, language or dialect, (dis)ability, age, religious commitment, or political perspective.

Equality: provides the same resources, opportunities, and treatment for all people without accommodating their backgrounds or resources.

Equity: provides everyone with the unique resources and opportunities they need to reach an equal outcome.

Inclusivity: the outcome of a welcoming environment that incorporates diverse perspectives and equitable practices to ensure all people participate in decision-making.; the active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity to achieve a culture in which different people can come together to work, feel comfortable and confident to be themselves, and feel valued.

Inclusive Education: refers to a way of structuring educational services so that all students, regardless of labels or putative disabilities, are educated together in a shared community. Inclusive education is not only an administrative arrangement but also an ideological and philosophical commitment to a vision of schools and societies that are diverse and nonexclusionary. As such, inclusive education can be viewed as a civil rights issue, akin to ending racial segregation in schools. Although inclusive education originally was used specifically to describe the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms, a more comprehensive definition of inclusion can be extended to discuss the ways in which education is provided that recognize, honor, and respond to other demographic differences—race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, sexual orientation, and family configuration—in addition to differences in students' skills and assumed abilities.

Open Education: encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.

Open Education Resources (OER): any educational resources (including curriculum maps, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts, and any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and learning) that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees.

Open Education Pedagogy (OEP): describes both the learning philosophy and array of teaching and learning practices built around OER 

Universal Design: the design of products and environments that are made to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for physical adaptation or specialized design. The objective of universal design is to simplify life for everyone through the creation of products, communications, and built environments that are made more usable for as many people as possible. Universal design thus benefits people of all ages and abilities.

Universal Design for Learning/Instruction (UDL/UDI):  oriented toward the design, development, and implementation of instructional and learning environments, mainly within higher education settings. Instead of a focus on the needs of the individual, UDI considers the needs of all students to reduce any barriers within the instruction and learning processes without changing the instructional content or goals of a given course or curriculum or lowering the standards associated with the college or university.

Checklist and diagrams to assist your work

Resources for Inclusivity

Videos for Inclusivity

Culturally responsive teaching

Corwin. (2017, May 4). Zaretta Hammond: Culturally responsive teaching and the brain webinar [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2kzbH7ZWGg&feature=youtu.be

Races & Ethnicities

Bali, M. (2020, June 30). Inclusive citation, inclusive academy webinar [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z4EKEg_ZrY&feature=youtu.be

LGBTQIA+

Using open licensing to support LGBTQ-Inclusive learning [Video]. (2020, June 24). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV6lgxLYcBo&feature=youtu.be

English Language Learners (ELL)

African Latino Gender Studies Curriculum Administrator. (2020, June 1). Culturally responsive teaching strategies for ELLs [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=132fzK8X9hc&feature=youtu.be

Books on Inclusivity

• Chardin, M., & Novak, K. R. (2020). Equity by design: Delivering on the power and promise of UDL (1st ed.). Corwin.

• Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (Multicultural education series) (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press.

• Hammond, Z. L. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students (1st ed.). Corwin.

• Paris, D., Alim, S. H., Genishi, C., & Alvermann, D. E. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world (language and literacy series). Teachers College Press.

• Sensoy, Ö., DiAngelo, R., & Banks, J. A. (2017). Is everyone really equal?: An introduction to key concepts in social justice education (multicultural education series) (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.

Websites on Inclusivity

• Hammond, Z. (2020, June 23). CRT & the brain. Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. https://crtandthebrain.com 

• Lynch, M. (2016). What is culturally responsive pedagogy? The Edvocate. https://www.theedadvocate.org/what-is-culturally-responsive-pedagogy/ 

• Robertson, K. (2021, May 20). How to connect ELLs’ background knowledge to content. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/connect-students-background-knowledge-content-ell-classroom

• Safir, S. (2016). Equity vs. Equality: 6 steps toward equity. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/equity-vs-equality-shane-safir