College classrooms consist of students from different nationalities, cultures, beliefs and mindsets who may feel invisible to their instructors or peers, a feeling that be exasperated due to the move to an online learning environment. Instructors have a golden opportunity to set the stage for success by creating a culturally diverse setting.
When students feel safe in a positive, engaging environment, learning will flourish. This hold true in an online setting as well.
Essie Childers, Professor of Student Success at Blinn College, addressed these issues during the REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit. Childers has been teaching for more than 25 years and developed the first online Learning Frameworks course at Blinn.
“We all know that when we have students coming in, they're coming from different backgrounds. They're coming from different religions, from thoughts, from languages. They're coming from different rituals and courtesies and values,” Childers said. “And so, we need to know that each and every student is unique. Also, after the COVID-19 and the social unrest and racial unrested that we had, we're going to have students in our classrooms that we'll be bringing in baggage,” she said.
As a result, instructors need to approach their classes with compassion and create environments where they feel comfortable with who they are and where they came from, according to Childers. They need the working knowledge to be a “culturally responsive teacher,” she said.
Culturally responsive teaching occurs when there is respect for backgrounds and circumstances of students. To do this, teachers must re-examine their course curriculum and design to include components to make the learning environment warmer and more welcoming.
Childers offered these tips to help guide instructors to be culturally responsive.
- Get to know you students: Ask students to tell the rest of the class a little about themselves. She instructs here students to create an “academic biography” where they write four paragraphs introducing themselves, sharing their academic past and their goals for their academic future. Childers also suggests establishing a dialogue with students and write guided journals so she can know each student better.
- Have students to establish their personality: This can be as simple as asking students to create PowerPoint presentations representing photos from their grandparents or family celebrations. This can also help avoid “a self-fulfilling prophesy” where a teacher will have a pre-conceived notion about a student based on their race or ethnicity even before the first assignment is handed in.
- Adopt online collaborative testing: Students working together will have the ability to bounce ideas off one another and get to know each other better. Collaborative testing with the same groups can establish rapport and create a social support system. It decreases prejudice and it also increases empathy.
“We have a golden opportunity as educators, now that we moved into an online class environment, to help students prepare for an evolving world. We need to prepare them for a global society. Our world is diverse,” Childers said.