Post written by guest author Dr Marina Iskhakova from the ANU College of Business and Economics
On Day 1, we identified Cross-Culturally Responsive (CCR) educators as academics who are subject matter experts who are also equipped with CCR teaching strategies. Today’s post explores those strategies in greater detail.
In using inclusive instructional strategies and curriculum materials, CCR teaching encompasses curriculum content, learning context, classroom climate, student-teacher relationships, instructional techniques, classroom management, and performance assessments. Given its holistic nature, how can you incorporate CCR teaching strategies in your teaching?
Here are three practical areas to apply a CCR teaching philosophy:
- Curriculum design and resource development – expand to be culturally inclusive
- Assessment development – assess learning in a variety of ways and formats
- Course delivery – manage cross-cultural diversity in the classroom
1. Curriculum design and resource development
This central element requires incorporating multicultural information, resources, and materials into course design. For example, activities and teaching that:
- help students navigate from the familiarity of their own culture to learning more about other cultures;
- promote positive attitudes towards other cultural backgrounds;
- build students’ personal knowledge of their own and other cultures; and
- help students see and understand issues, concepts, and events from the perspectives of other people.
While traditional curriculum does not reflect these principles, a CCR curriculum does.
Instructional materials can unintentionally convey an educator’s preferences and prejudices. CCR educators might address this by encouraging the use of national leading sources, and adding culturally-diverse resources to the course reading lists.
Below are some examples. Click on the images to explore further:
For example, CCR educators who teach in Business, Management, Economics, Finance, Accounting or Statistics could easily cover at least three Chinese CEOs. Educators could still talk about the world leading CEOs (such as Elon Musk), but they could expand their focus to examples of leaders from both developed and developing economies, and examine various start-up companies.
Images from Chinadaily.com.cn
Similarly, CCR educators in fields such as Mathematics, Statistics, or Engineering could engage students to a higher extent through acknowledgement and inclusion of culturally-relevant examples and conventions from all over the world. For example, what is this number below?
87,099
If you have a European background, you are likely to read this as a number smaller than 88 because commas are used as decimal separators. However, other cultures might read this as a much larger number in the tens of thousands. Including diverse examples and conventions in the teaching of your discipline helps your students learn more easily and retain learning for longer because you will be connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge, frames of reference, or cognitive schemata (principle of congruity) (Gay, 2010).
Discussion
1. What examples of cross-culturally responsive curriculum design and resource development could you apply to your discipline?
2. What conventions in your field are you taking-for-granted? Similarly, what other culturally-relevant examples are you excluding?
2. Assessment development
Students are often exposed to one type of assessment: written assessment. Writing is a critical employability skill, but it is not necessarily more important than teamwork, project delivery, oral presentations, or video production, to name just a few basic skills.
CCR assessments follow guiding principles such as:
- reflecting student experiences;
- attending to students’ learning styles by providing multiple ways for students to demonstrate their learning; and
- providing choice to enable students to utilise their strengths.
For example, I inherited a course that heavily featured written assessments. I introduced teamwork that requires students to work in cross-cultural teams to make a class presentation by the end of the semester. To inform and guide their class presentation, students must reach out to industry experts, interview them on the assignment topic, and incorporate the experts’ advice into their team’s recommendations for a business case. This contrasts sharply with the individual work they were previously engaged in.
The full range of assessment options and examples will be explored further at the CCR Teaching Strategies Workshop.
Discussion
Have you tried using any of the above-mentioned assessment strategies in your teaching? What worked? What didn’t? Why?
3. Course delivery
“Please share your critique of this model” the experienced and accomplished professor said addressing the class. The class, comprising mainly of students from an Asian cultural background, kept silent. “I await your critical comments and critical judgements on the presented model”. The class remained silent …
This scenario may be familiar to many educators in Australia. The professor asked for a direct critical opinion from students who were educated in a significantly different pedagogical paradigm. Asian students tend not to declare either definitive or adversarial positions in either oral or written discourse, preferring moderate stances, seeking out compromise, and looking for ways to accommodate opposites. How might this scenario look with a CCR educator taking the class?
CCR delivery involves the following guiding principles:
- reflecting on a multitude of students’ learning styles;
- providing multiple instructional approaches; and
- integrating students’ cultural strengths into the course delivery.
CCR course delivery is thus based on creating a culturally trustful and transparent educational environment. The educator is sensitive to cultural dimensions, equipped with cultural knowledge, and effectively manage and addresses cultural gaps. In turn, students become more engaged, appreciative, and able to learn more and to a higher standard.
Operationally and practically, CCR delivery focuses on the following dimensions (Gay, 2010):
Procedural
The variety of ways to work through learning tasks – pacing rates, distribution of time; predictability, activity, extent of freedom; direct teaching or discovery learning
Communicative
The organisation of thoughts, sequencing of ideas and arguments; preferences of written or oral forms; open storytelling vs precise factual questions; passionate advocacy of ideas or neutral reporting of records and facts; importance of factual accuracy
Substantive
Format and content: descriptive details or general pattern; statistics or personal experiences; preferred intellectual tasks: memorising; describing; analysing, classifying, criticizing, systemising
Environmental
Preferred physical; social interpersonal setting for learning, including sound or silence
Organisational
The amount of personal space; structure of the learning place; organisation of learning resources; rigidity or flexibility towards the learning process
Perceptual
Visual, tactile, auditory, kinetic, oral, multiple sensory modalities
Relational
Formality or informality; individual competition vs class cooperation; independence or interdependence; authoritarian vs egalitarian atmosphere
Motivational
Individual accomplishment or group well-being; conquest or harmony; external awards or internal desires
An inherent challenge for educators is bias – when you teach your own experiences and worldview while excluding that which you disagree with or are unaware of. For example, selectivity bias could manifest in situations where lecturers exclusively call on students who are active and vocal in class, ignoring quieter students. Alternatively, linguistic bias might arise in situations where lecturers do not involve students with heavy accents in a discussion as it may be harder to understand them. We will explore each of these practices further at the CCR Teaching Strategies Workshop.
Through consciously thinking about curriculum design, assessment development, and course delivery, you can start becoming a CCR educator.
Discussion
Are you aware of your own biases? Review Harvard University’s Implicit Association Test and share your reflections.
References
- Gay, G. (2010). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research and Practice. 2nd ed, Columbia University, NY and London.