Culturally Responsive Teaching Increases Student Engagement

It has been great to hear from some of you about how you integrated things you heard from our convocation speaker Dr. Jennifer Waldeck into your classes. Her presentation was filled with so many things but one of the important topics she covered was how to be culturally responsive with your students. That ties in nicely with today's Faculty Focus article. Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) has been defined as a philosophy of education that centers students’ cultural backgrounds as essential to their learning by Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995. Dr. Gwen Bass and Michael Lawrence-Riddell propose integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with CRT to create "a powerful tool for preparing [students] for today’s professional environment, which increasingly acknowledges diversity as integral to success." They go on to note, "While educators need not be experts on every culture, they should make efforts to ensure that their students’ experience their own learning styles and their own cultures in the teaching and learning process." One of the ways they suggest we can do this is by giving students the opportunity to understand their own identities and to feel that they are honored in the class through identity mapping. They conclude by writing, "Simply providing choice for students in terms of the input of information, or their own output, is a step toward a culturally responsive classroom, as is inherent in the guiding principles of UDL—providing multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement."