2) Ensure instructional materials reflect the identities represented by students

The Key to Success with this Strategy

The instructional materials we use often reflect our position and perspective, but that can be very limiting for our students. Their cultural backgrounds may share qualities with our own, but they also might be drastically different. Being open to the benefits of difference and diversity can start with acknowledging there is more than one way to teach a curriculum.

There is an opportunity to evolve our materials to acknowledge our students’ lives as well. Successfully reviewing and evolving materials starts with asking questions about your students, like:

• How do my students learn?
• How do they communicate?
• What are qualities of their identity that contribute to their learning and communication methods?
• Can the students and their experiences replace external resources (e.g. textbooks, videos, lectures) that might not look like or speak like the students themselves?

Answers to these questions are not easy, but with time can be useful and informative to how you integrate materials into your teaching.

Using this Strategy is Culturally Responsive because…

Students bring their identities with them to class, just as educators do. Keeping in mind the many backgrounds and experiences of your students can create a learning environment that is built upon the many variations in life and lifestyles out there. Maintaining this intention from the beginning of your curriculum and course design can anticipate the diversity of students in advance, and encourage responsiveness and flexibility that otherwise would not be there.

While it is very tricky to learn the depth of students in a single quarter in order to impact the materials used, starting small and work your way through your materials over time.

You can learn a lot about the importance of student identities with these readings:

• “Classroom Culture” in Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education (Links to an external site.) (2018)
• “When Students See Themselves in their Learning, Achievement Soars” (Links to an external site.) (2019)
• “How can You Create a Learning Environment that Respects Diversity?” (Links to an external site.) (2004)
• “Making Business English materials that reflect learner realities: Summary and Q&A” (Links to an external site.) (2020)

How do I Implement this Strategy?

Learning about Students and their Identities

Identities are incredibly complex and require a lot of work to understand. While learning deeply about a person can take years, there are plenty of activities that can be implemented into your class in a way that develops trust and comfort and eases stress and a sense of unknowing. A handful of lightweight examples include:

• Icebreakers covering cultural themes (hometown life, local customs, family cuisine, etc)
• Regular personal reflections, where students have the ability to share something from the class
• Connecting classwork to everyday life experiences (past and present)

What are Your Instructional Materials?

A quarter-long course can contain a lot of instructional materials. Before you can make changes to what you use to teach, you need to identify what you use to teach! The following are a few common instructional materials. As you read them, think about how you feel they connect to and make room for your students’ experiences and identities:

• Course textbook and online supplements
• Readings, including articles, videos, and websites
• Slideshows, and everything that is in them (images, videos)
• Discussion boards and other communication spaces
• Activities and assignments

How Fixed/Rigid are Your Instructional Materials?

Are the instructional materials you use fixed? Are they copyrighted and created externally, or have they been developed in-house? Asking how rigid your instructional materials are will determine how much emphasis you on developing supplemental activities and materials to make teaching and learning feel relevant and personal for your students. Identify what can be changed easily and what might need to be replaced.

Consider the opportunity to update your textbook and other instructional materials to an open educational resource (OER), where the text, images, and videos can be improved upon to be more culturally-responsive. Because of OER’s natural flexibility, adopting OER and integrating it into your classroom can be the starting point for many more conversations of improvement and evolution. You can even integrate your students’ voices and experience directly through open pedagogy/OER-enabled pedagogy, and open practices.

What Else?

On Complexity of Identity

Of course, you may also want to ask the students how they want to share. Identities are not always composed of tangible/observable qualities. While race and language are important qualities of one’s identity in our country, taking efforts to understand the identities of your students should go beyond only race and language.

On Feedback to Publishers

One of the greatest challenges in updating instructional materials is the nature through which “required” resources are created. Textbooks, for example, might have no room for modification within themselves, and might be required for your course or program. If you are using a textbook that is updated once every year, you may see better representation and language within it; however, many books are published less frequently. Many of the issues educators have to confront when it comes to their instructional materials are systemic in nature. Consider reaching out to publishers you use and provide them with feedback on how far they go with representation. If they are not currently producing materials that connect to students’ identities, what is their plan? We have the opportunity to provide this feedback to publishers to make them aware of culturally-responsive pedagogy. We all have a part in this conversation.

On Iterative Improvements

Just as courses are imperfect, so are the materials that carry them. Improving on them when it comes to reflecting student identity is a long journey and will require multiple iterations. Every moment you work with students is a new opportunity to see how well you are doing and where you need to improve. With every activity and every conversation you have, as an educator, the opportunity to assess your materials in their effectiveness and relevance.