What is Culturally Responsive Pedagogy?

In today’s classrooms, you will find students belonging to diverse cultural groups, races, identities, and socioeconomic statuses. This makes the need for a culturally responsive pedagogy crucial.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy is a teaching style that must integrate students' cultural identities into instructional methods. A Culturally Relevant Pedagogy can create an inclusive environment in class to promote engagement that can lead to better learning outcomes.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), also known as Culturally Relevant Teaching, helps students build empathy towards different opinions and perspectives by boosting their engagement with peers. Biases permeate assessments. Instructors must conduct their courses with cultural consideration.

For instance, learners belonging to low-income families or marginalized communities often feel disconnected from their peers and instructors in class; however, in a culturally responsive classroom, pedagogy can help them better engage with course material and contribute with their point of view.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy method often depends on the student-centred approach. In this teaching method, educators tend to identify their cultural strengths and strive to nurture them to create a positive sense of self that helps boost student engagement. Specifically, these culturally responsive pedagogies require them to encourage knowledge-sharing about diverse cultures among students to build an inclusive learning culture.

4 Conditions Necessary for Culturally Responsive Teaching

1. Inclusion

In order to create a culturally responsive environment in the classroom, they must establish inclusion in the classroom. They should emphasize the human purpose behind the learning objectives of the course and its connection to the experience of students. 

In an inclusive environment, educators must treat all students fairly and encourage each one of them to share their diverse practices with other classmates. This, in turn, helps students feel confident and boost their engagement in class. They can ensure inclusion by implementing a collaborative learning approach, peer teaching, and focus groups in the classroom.

Kritik360 is built to facilitate inclusivity through anonymous and meaningful peer assessments. As one student put it, "I like that all feedback is anonymous; it removes any personal biases, and multiple peers can assess my work, which provides different perspectives."

Download Now: 2023/24 Student Survey Results

2. Positive Attitude

Developing a positive attitude in a culturally diverse classroom is equally important to enhance engagement. In a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, learning activities must relate to experiences as well as previous knowledge of students. By providing options in how students would like to be assessed based on their strengths, experiences, values, and learning needs, there is room to see equitable outcomes and a positive attitude towards learning.

3. Enhance Meaning

Creating an environment to enhance the meaning of course content by providing students with challenging and thoughtful learning experiences is essential to culturally responsive teaching. More importantly, these learning experiences must include their values. Educators must encourage group discussion in the classroom by incorporating students' dialect in the discussion. Through dynamic conversations and engaging online environments, students develop a deeper understanding of course concepts.

Read more: How Prof. Chantal Viens uses Kritik360 to Create Engaging Presentations

4. Create Competence

Culturally responsive teaching should connect the assessment procedures to the students' frame of reference, social situation, values, and learning needs. By creating an understanding that students perform well in something that they value, the lessons could include different ways to represent unique skills and knowledge to address potential bias in academic assessment. This can significantly develop their intrinsic motivation towards learning and thereby enhance their engagement in classrooms.

Kritik360 users are able to develop new & unique activities and grading that are designed to strengthen problem-solving skills.

Read more: How Prof. Kevin McGinniss uses Peer Assessment to Boost Discussion

‍

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Strategies to Boost Student Engagement

1. Student-centric Course

Identifying and incorporating interests in the course plays an important role in keeping the motivation to learn and stay connected. Culturally Responsive Pedagogy must identify the likes, dislikes, interests, and learning needs of the class. This should be incorporated into the class lessons so that students feel more engaged with the course content.

2. Make Room for Differences

By celebrating differences, students feel motivated and respect among their peers who are curious to learn about their culture. In this culturally responsive teaching strategy, educators must encourage students to acknowledge and respect each other’s cultural differences with a positive attitude. Besides, they can also reinforce student engagement and enhance the social skills of students, such as knowledge and respect for other cultures.

Download now: Facilitating Diverse Perspectives with Peer Learning

3. Encourage Group Interaction in Class

Culturally responsive teachers should incorporate team-building activities with the purpose of promoting peer support, which positively influences academic performance. This is essential for creating a social-emotional environment in culturally diverse classrooms that is conducive to boosting a sense of solidarity among students.

4. Validate Multiple Perspectives in Class

By validating the different perspectives, students will automatically feel connected to their class. Listening and incorporating multiple perspectives positively impact the classroom environment and build confidence in students.

By integrating lived experiences, cultural contexts, teachers can illustrate key concepts in their approach to help students understand societal inequities and develop critical consciousness. They can authenticate students’ perspectives by responding like ‘Good Idea’, ‘It is one way to understand the problem’, ‘Does anybody have any alternative opinion or idea? And so on.

Watch Now: See how Catherine Walter Guides Multilingual Learners by Leveraging AI

5. Culturally Responsive Curriculum

A culturally relevant instructor should be sensitive to the competence, academic performance, and socio-political consciousness of students when planning culturally relevant lessons. It is worth mentioning here that culturally sensitive educators expect a high level of academic success from students irrespective of their race, ethnicity, and culture. This is because the student-centred curriculum is more meaningful as it takes into account the values, interests, and experiences of students.

6. Connect Instruction with Lived Experiences

Pedagogy and assessments must connect theory to practice so that student learning is meaningful. Students take more interest in the information that they can relate to their personal circumstances.

By creating content-based projects, including storytelling, free-writing exercises, and surveys, an opportunity to collaborate with peers can improve instruction. Setting clear learning goals for these projects and encouraging students to reflect on their own progress can further enhance engagement and growth. Professors using Kritik360 administer creative and unique learning activities that enable students to apply course concepts to real-world applications.

Overcoming Challenges and Barriers

While the benefits of culturally responsive teaching are clear, there could be several challenges when putting these practices into action. One significant barrier is the lack of cultural competence, which can result in unintentional biases or misunderstandings in the classroom. To address this, teachers can participate in professional learning opportunities focused on diversity, equity, and culturally responsive pedagogy. These experiences help educators reflect on their own perspectives and develop the skills needed to support all students effectively.

Another common challenge is the limited availability of culturally responsive materials and resources. Teachers may find it difficult to locate curriculum content that reflects the diverse backgrounds of their students. To overcome this, educators can explore online platforms, educational blogs, and community resources that offer culturally relevant teaching materials and ideas. Collaborating with colleagues and reaching out to families and local communities can also provide valuable insights and resources that enrich classroom instruction.

Building strong relationships with students’ families and communities is another powerful strategy for overcoming barriers. By engaging with parents and community members, teachers gain a deeper understanding of students’ cultural experiences and can better tailor their teaching strategies to meet learners’ needs. This partnership also demonstrates respect for students’ backgrounds and helps create a supportive, inclusive environment.

Finally, culturally responsive teaching requires a commitment to ongoing growth and adaptability. By staying open to trying new teaching strategies, such as learning stations, gamification, or project-based learning, and promoting critical thinking, a sense of agency and motivation is built that leads to greater academic success.

By acknowledging and addressing these challenges, educators can continue to create classrooms where every student feels valued, engaged, and empowered to achieve their full potential.

Benefits of a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

There is multiple research-backed evidence that culturally responsive pedagogy practices offer students various social, emotional, academic as well and cognitive benefits. Some of the benefits of CRP are as follows:

1. Facilitates Brain Processing

Studies have shown that cultural norms and knowledge of students significantly contribute to mathematical thinking and reading comprehension of students. As per neuroscience research, students learn new information more when it is linked with their existing knowledge. Since culturally responsive pedagogy focuses on a student-centred curriculum that draws from cultural background and schemas, students can learn fast and easily.

2. Strengthens Sense of Belonging and Identity

This pedagogical method promotes inclusion and equity in the classroom. Students belonging to diverse backgrounds are engaged in the course material, which ultimately enhances their learning. Due to open class discussions involved in culturally responsive teaching strategies, the critical thinking skills of students are developed and improved. 

3. Makes learning more meaningful for students

This approach motivates and engages students as a connection to academic concepts with their lived experiences, making their learning more engaging, meaningful, and effective. 

4. Promotes a sense of safety and support among students

This is because educators cultivate collaborative feelings using different strategies, like encouraging social interaction and building respectful relationships among students. 

Implement Kritik360 To Achieve Equitable Outcomes

With Kritik360, students experience a 360-degree peer feedback loop that is anonymous, enabling them to write unbiased feedback and learning from each other's prior knowledge, cultural identities, and connection with the course concepts. Educators using Kritik360 have always found student learning and the sense of community to be higher year after year, which makes teaching a more holistic experience for the students.

Download now: How Kritik360 Develops the Higher-Order Thinking Skills Students Need Today