Culturally responsive practice considers how to engage students in the learning process, both cognitively and emotionally, through an understanding of how their identity and perspective is shaped by their culture and community experiences (Muñiz, 2019). Though culturally responsive practices often focus on aspects of racial identity, they should encompass many different aspects of a person’s identities including native language, gender, and able-bodiedness as well as aspects that may be less visible such as mental health and learning disabilities.

A short course review checklist for college-level courses. Building on the OSCQR Rubric and the Peralta Online Equity Rubric, this checklist integrates strategies for Universal Design for Learning, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Open Pedagogy. It includes Quality indicators for Course Site Design, Assessments, Course Activities and Content, and Course Accessibility. It is intended to support meaningful consultation between subject matter experts and instructional designers. This resource is developed for Open Oregon Educational Resources.

The purpose of this Guide for Culturally Responsive Practice is to provide educators and educator teams with questions and protocols to guide and/or reflect on how to apply culturally responsive instruction practices as they address learner variability. Learner variability is a recognition that all students differ, and that learning sciences research guides us in understanding how these differences matter for learning. It embraces both students’ struggles and strengths. It considers the whole child—academic, social-emotional, and student background. When people understand learner variability, they see a design challenge, not a student problem.

 This lesson is designed for a 90-minute period at the high school level for a dual language Heritage or Spanish Language Arts class. However, it could easily be divided into sections or modified for middle school students or advanced Spanish world language students. In this lesson, students explore how identity is formed through various life influences and analyze the cause/effect relationship between their personal identity and significant influences in their lives. Students will explore the topic through the RadioAmbulante podcast “Sisters” and the painting “Las dos Fridas” by Frida Khalo. Students will practice metalinguistic awareness and develop their translanguaging skills through explicit instruction on the use of transitional phrases related to cause and effect in English and Spanish. Then students will use these phrases to engage in conversations with their peers to discuss how the different influences in their lives have shaped their identities. Finally, students will produce a written summary of the relationship between the primary influences in their lives and the primary characteristics of their identities.