Stories of Culturally Responsive Teaching from Frontline Instructors
by Annie Zhou February 18, 2025
Overview
Leveraging cultural knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students, culturally responsive teaching (CRT) aims to enhance learning outcomes for all. In today’s polarized climate, where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives face scrutiny, culturally responsive teaching empowers educators to foster inclusion, challenge inequities, and affirm diverse student communities.
My Journey with Culturally Responsive Teaching
I completed my education in a system that prioritized conformity and collectivism, where I once assumed all students shared similar cultural backgrounds and prior knowledge. However, teaching students from diverse cultures has revealed how standardized curricula often overlook local contexts. These experiences as a learner and teacher sparked my inquiry into the essence of good teaching, particularly in fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Culturally responsive education has broadened my perspective, reaffirming my ambition to be an effective teacher and a lifelong learner. In my teaching and research, I strive to explore students’ identities as members of their families and communities, integrating their lived experiences into the classroom. Drawing from my personal experiences, this blog post aims to offer practices, insights, and recommendations for implementing culturally responsive teaching.
Case Studies as Mirrors and Windows
While existing research provides valuable insights into CRT, much of it examines the practice from an external perspective—interpreting ideas through the lens and narratives of researchers. Case studies, as a form of self-reporting and self-reflection, can provide some glimpses of culturally responsive teaching from the inside out. Instructors, as narrators and protagonists, share their own stories. As Joseph Catapano (n.d.) has illustrated, “There’s something about stories that stick with us. Something about an organized narrative teaching strategy that serves as a unique kind of glue, lingering with us long after the facts and formulas fade away.” Similar to Bishop’s (1990) metaphor of books as mirrors and windows, case studies from frontline instructors both reflect their lived experiences with culturally responsive teaching and provide valuable insights into the experiences of others. The following three case studies from equitable educators across disciplines will enhance your understanding of culturally responsive teaching in higher education, advancing our ultimate goal of empowering diverse students to thrive both academically and socially. Leave a comment at the bottom of the page with your thoughts, insights, or experience with culturally responsive teaching.
Resource Goals
1. Help instructors recognize key elements of culturally responsive teaching, enhancing the understanding of how these practices address diverse student needs.
2. Help instructors implement culturally responsive strategies in their own classrooms by drawing inspiration from real-world examples in the stories.
3. Help instructors evaluate the impact of culturally responsive teaching by critically examining the successes and challenges faced by the instructors featured in the post.
What is Culturally Responsive Teaching?
Scholars have used a variety of terms, such as “culturally relevant,” “culturally responsive,” and “culturally sustaining” (Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris & Alim, 2017), to describe a stance and approach to teaching that prioritizes equity and inclusivity. These approaches challenge us to put equity at the forefront and center the knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities in classroom instruction. This blog post uses the term “culturally responsive” to highlight the focus on integrating students’ cultural knowledge and experiences into teaching. Gay (2018) provides a clear and comprehensive definition of culturally responsive teaching as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of references, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” ( p. 36). Culturally responsive teaching values students’ cultural backgrounds, integrates diverse perspectives, and fosters student-centered instruction through critical reflection, active engagement, and connections to students’ communities.
Where Did Culturally Responsive Teaching Begin?
Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) emerged from the foundational work of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP), a framework introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s. Frustrated with deficit-based narratives about Black students, Ladson-Billings sought to highlight the strengths of Black children, their families, and their communities by studying highly effective teachers of Black students (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Through her research, she identified key teaching practices that promoted academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness, forming the basis of CRP. Geneva Gay later expanded on this work, coining culturally responsive teaching in the early 2000s, with a focus on practical classroom strategies that incorporate students’ cultural backgrounds into pedagogy to improve engagement and achievement (Gay, 2000). CRT has since become a widely used framework for fostering inclusive and equitable education.
Why Does Culturally Responsive Teaching Matter?
Engagement and Equity Through CRT
Integrating students’ cultural identities into teaching practices fosters greater engagement and equity (Ladson-Billings, 1994). By weaving students’ backgrounds, interests, and lived experiences into the fabric of instruction, culturally responsive teaching (CRT) enhances the relevance and impact of learning, making it more meaningful and inspiring. True equity in the classroom extends beyond uniform treatment—it requires intentional, targeted support that addresses systemic barriers and meets students’ diverse needs. This approach fosters an inclusive environment where all students feel respected, valued, and empowered to reach their full potential.
Academic Concerns over CRT
While some educators worry that CRT may compromise rigor or prioritize identity over content mastery, evidence strongly counters this notion. Research demonstrates that culturally responsive practices not only deepen critical thinking and encourage diverse problem-solving but also significantly improve outcomes for historically marginalized students (Gay, 2010; Aronson & Laughter, 2016). Rather than lowering standards, CRT redefines them to reflect the strengths and realities of a diverse world, fostering academic excellence for all. For instance, Hurtado, Alvarado, and Guillermo-Wann (2015) found that culturally inclusive environments increased GPA outcomes for underrepresented minorities by an average of 0.15 to 0.30 points, underscoring CRT’s potential to narrow academic achievement gaps.
Figure 1: Academic Benefits of Culturally Responsive Teaching
Left Chart: On average, culturally inclusive environments raised GPA outcomes by 0.15 to 0.30 points for underrepresented minorities (Alvarado, & Guillermo-Wann, 2015).
Right Chart: Culturally relevant strategies can improve cognitive engagement, leading to a 15-25% increase in performance in high-minority schools (Hammond, 2015).
Cognitive Impact of CRT
Zaretta Hammond, in her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, highlights that culturally relevant strategies can improve cognitive engagement, leading to a 15-25% increase in performance in high-minority schools. For deeper insights into Dr. Hammond’s research on culturally responsive teaching and its connection to the brain, explore this video.
Case Studies: Culturally Responsive Teaching in Action
I will highlight three informative and compelling cases of culturally responsive teaching, each demonstrating the application of CRT in different educational settings.
CASE 1: Navigating Diversity and Conflict: A Conversation with Dr. Stephanie Hicks
I chose to interview an instructor at the University of Michigan because of its strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. Dr. Stephanie Hicks, in particular, stood out for her extensive knowledge and application of culturally responsive teaching, as well as her unwavering commitment to inclusive learning.
Dr. Stephanie Hicks is a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations, specializing in diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, intergroup dialogue, and social justice education. She also coordinates Race & Ethnicity Engagement efforts in the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and founded Yoga for Black Lives to support resistance against state violence toward Black communities.
During my conversation with Dr. Hicks, she shared her journey into DEI work, strategies for culturally responsive teaching, approaches to navigating classroom conflict, and tips for fostering inclusive, culturally aware learning environments. Explore our discussion below!
Q: How do you integrate culturally responsive teaching principles into your teaching practices?
In my teaching experience with intergroup dialogue, we explore what it means to belong to various social identity groups—race, gender, socio-economic status, religion, nationality, citizenship, sexual orientation, and more. We examine how these identities influence interactions with others and the broader world. This pedagogy involves exercises that push students to reflect critically on their knowledge sources and how their social identities shape their perspectives. Students reflect on their families, communities, educational backgrounds, and religious spaces, considering how these contexts influence their values and notions of in-groups and out-groups. Activities focus on storytelling, where students share their journeys and explore how the places and people they’ve encountered have shaped them. A key aspect of my culturally responsive teaching practice is encouraging students to examine and share their cultural influences, fostering mutual learning about the differences that shape their experiences and perspectives.
Q: How do you navigate intergroup dialogues in the classroom, especially when there are conflicting perspectives or sensitivities?
Intergroup dialogue assumes conflict is inevitable and productive, viewing it not as something to resolve but as an opportunity to navigate and learn. When conflict arises, we reflect on how we reached that point, ask questions to genuinely understand others’ perspectives, and share information in a mutually beneficial and vulnerable way. This process requires reciprocity—if I expect others to share their experiences, I must also reflect on and share my own identities and how they shape me. Navigating conflict involves surfacing and acknowledging it, recognizing different perspectives even within shared spaces. Building trust in the classroom is crucial for navigating conflict collaboratively.
Q: What advice would you give to other faculty members who want to incorporate more culturally responsive teaching into their classrooms?
Remember, small changes can make a big impact. While we aim for meaningful progress, it’s crucial not to underestimate the power of simply getting to know our students. That in itself is a culturally responsive practice. Reflecting on our own cultural background and finding ways to share it with students is another small but significant step. It’s also about the power of inquiry—asking thoughtful, respectful questions. As educators, we can get caught up in providing answers, but being curious about how students think and bring knowledge into the classroom is incredibly valuable. These small practices matter and help us stay open to learning about both ourselves and our students’ cultural backgrounds.
Q: What advice would you give to other faculty members who are resistant to practicing culturally responsive teaching?
Some instructors may resist culturally responsive pedagogy without realizing they already use culturally responsive practices—just primarily for dominant cultures or ways of being. My advice to them would be to reflect on their teaching: What cultures are they already responding to? Are they intentionally or unintentionally supporting the success of only some students? We’re all responsive to certain cultural practices, but often without realizing the assumptions we’re making about which cultures are valuable. Instructors should consider whether they’re overlooking the value, wisdom, and knowledge that students from different backgrounds bring to the classroom. Reflecting on these dynamics is key to becoming more inclusive and responsive to all students.
CASE 2: Dr. Beverly Tatum’s CRT Approach to Address Racism
Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emerita of Spelman College, recent interim president of Mount Holyoke College, and author of the groundbreaking book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, she has spent decades advancing conversations on identity, inequities, and inclusive education. Her culturally responsive teaching practices focus on fostering dialogue, creating inclusive spaces, and addressing structural barriers to equity.
In her college social science course, Dr. Beverly Tatum combined academic theory with real-world experiences to explore the psychological and emotional dimensions of racism. Her innovative approach highlighted how everyday practices perpetuate systemic inequities, encouraging students to move beyond passive learning through immersive assignments. Students from diverse backgrounds engaged in tasks to expose tangible inequities. They compared product prices and quality in supermarkets across racially distinct neighborhoods, revealing resource disparities, and collaborated on apartment searches to confront housing discrimination. These activities offered key insights into how racism manifests in everyday life.
While organizing such research trips may seem daunting, these strategies are adaptable to different classroom contexts from in-person to online courses, seminars to lecture halls. Students can explore resource disparities by analyzing local community data, mapping access to essential services, or conducting case studies on policy impacts. They can also engage in virtual interviews with residents, policymakers, or professionals to examine real-world challenges related to housing and healthcare. Additionally, role-playing scenarios—such as simulated hiring decisions, college admissions, or workplace interactions—allow students to critically assess biases in employment and education. By transforming abstract concepts into lived experiences, such approaches offer meaningful opportunities for critical analysis and reflection, helping students confront and better understand racial disparities.
Throughout the course, students maintained journals to reflect on these encounters and examine their beliefs, gaining insight into racism’s impact on daily life. Class discussions following each experience fostered dialogue, deepening students’ understanding in a supportive environment. Research from Intergroup Relations (IGR) also highlights that effective facilitation of these discussions is key to fostering meaningful dialogue, enhancing understanding, and promoting inclusivity in educational settings. Additionally, students were encouraged to record the interviews about their racial views at the beginning and end of the course, capturing their personal growth. By the end, they gained new insights into racism, enhanced self-awareness, and helpful tools to act on their learnings.
CASE 3: Redefining Evaluation: Jori Hall and Kwame Acheampong’s CRE Course
Dr. Jori Hall is a scholar and educator specializing in culturally responsive teaching, qualitative research, and equity-focused education. A faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago, her work centers on creating inclusive learning environments and advancing equity in higher education. Dr. Hall emphasizes cultural awareness, student-centered approaches, and critical dialogue in the classroom.
Kwame O. Acheampong is a scholar in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy at the University of Georgia. He brings both theoretical and practical experience to development policy planning, project management, and monitoring and evaluation.
In spring 2023, Dr. Hall and Dr. Acheampong co-taught a 15-week hybrid graduate course on culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) at a predominantly white institution in Georgia, USA, with an all-Black student group. The course alternated between online and in-person sessions and focused on exploring CRE principles while challenging traditional evaluative assumptions. Aimed at equipping students with evaluation tools to address systemic inequities, the course examined how evaluations can reflect cultural biases and power imbalances, particularly around race and identity, and engaged students with concepts like intersectionality.
The instructors encouraged critical analysis of evaluative methods and explored how they could be made more inclusive, equitable, and culturally responsive. For example, students critically examined real-world evaluation reports to identify biases and propose alternative approaches that center marginalized perspectives. The course was designed using the Community of Inquiry framework, a model for online and blended learning emphasizing the interaction of three key elements–cognitive, social, and teaching presence. Cognitive presence supports critical thinking and knowledge construction, social presence fosters a sense of connection and open communication, and teaching presence ensures the effective design and facilitation of learning. By incorporating these three elements, the course aimed to foster collaboration and reflection, creating meaningful educational experiences for participants.
A unique aspect of the course was the use of the Metaverse, a 3D VR environment where students and instructors engaged as avatars in a CRE-VR classroom. The Metaverse provided an immersive space for discussing complex topics like privilege, racism, and sexism. As students and instructors navigated the VR environment together, relationships deepened, and collaboration on VR tasks laid the foundation for discussions on ethical issues, such as privilege and intersecting oppressions (Hood et al., 2015). To adapt this experience for non-VR classrooms, similar activities—like role-playing, group discussions, and collaborative tasks—can be used to explore these topics and foster critical thinking and connection, even without the immersive VR element.
These three case studies collectively illustrate diverse approaches to culturally responsive teaching (CRT), which aims to empower students by incorporating their diverse cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of references, and performance styles. Blending immersive, reflective, and innovative methods, these cases align with the core principles of CRT by challenging assumptions, fostering critical dialogue, and promoting a deeper understanding of social justice issues. Through strategies ranging from technology integration to real-world experiences, they encourage self-reflection and collective responsibility, equipping educators with practical tools to advance inclusivity and equity. These examples provide adaptable frameworks that educators can use to enhance their teaching practices and create more inclusive learning environments.
Glossary
Community of Inquiry Framework
The Community of Inquiry framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements: social, cognitive, and teaching presence.
Critical Consciousness
According to Ladson-Billings (1995), critical consciousness is the ability to recognize, analyze, and challenge social inequities and injustices. In the context of culturally relevant pedagogy, it involves helping students develop a critical perspective that empowers them to question and transform oppressive systems in society.
Cultural Competence
According to Ladson-Billings (1995), cultural competence is the ability of students to maintain and appreciate their own cultural identities while successfully navigating and engaging with different cultural contexts.
Culture
Includes the values, norms, and assumptions of our College organization; they are more often top-down (set by leaders via communications and reward structures, based on historical structures and influenced by the broader societal context) but continually reinforced at all levels of the organization.
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Culturally relevant pedagogy is An approach that uses students’ cultural backgrounds to promote academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness, empowering students to challenge societal inequities.
Culturally Responsive Evaluation
Culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) is an approach that integrates participants’ cultural contexts into the evaluation process to ensure that assessments are meaningful, relevant, and effective for diverse populations. It emphasizes cultural awareness, community engagement, and social justice to produce more accurate and equitable evaluation results.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is an educational approach that goes beyond cultural relevance by actively sustaining and promoting students’ cultural practices and languages, ensuring that they thrive academically while maintaining their cultural identities in a rapidly changing world.
DEI
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. View the University of Michigan’s DEI Strategic Plan.
Frames of Reference
In an educational context, frames of reference refer to the ways individuals interpret, process, and respond to information based on their cultural backgrounds, lived experiences, and social contexts.
Intergroup Dialogue
Intergroup Dialogue is a structured, facilitated conversation between individuals from different social, cultural, or identity groups. It has four stages: forming and building relationships; exploring group differences and commonalities; exploring hot topics; and building alliances and planning for action.
Performance Styles
The ways students express knowledge, participate in learning activities, and demonstrate understanding based on cultural norms and expectations.
Racism
The fusion of institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry, and social prejudice against Black people, Indigenous people and People of Color in a complex web of relationships and structures that shade most aspects of life, and serves the function of upholding White supremacy. Racism limits the life chances and opportunities of BIPOC people, creates and maintains the hierarchical structure of Whiteness, and supports the internalization of beliefs of group dominance of White people and subordination of BIPOC people.
References
Aronson, J., & Laughter, J. (2016). The theory and practice of culturally relevant education: A synthesis of research across content areas. Review of Educational Research, 86(1), 163-206.
Dee, T. S., & Penner, E. K. (2016). The Causal Effects of Cultural Relevance: Evidence from an Ethnic Studies Curriculum.
Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and Practice. Teachers College Press.
Ginsberg, M. B., & Wlodkowski, R. J. (2015). Diversity and motivation: Culturally responsive teaching in college. Jossey-Bass.
Hall, J. N., Avent, C. M., Boyce, A. S., & Acheampong, K. O. (2023). Culturally responsive evaluation teaching and learning in higher education: A higher calling. New Directions for Evaluation, 2023(180), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.20574
Hammond, Zaretta. (2015). Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Corwin.
Hood, S., Hopson, R. K., & Kirkhart, K. E. (2015). Culturally responsive evaluation: Theory, practice, and future implications. In K. E. Newcomer, H. P. Hatry, & J. S. Wholey (Eds.), Handbook of practical program evaluation (4th ed., pp. 281–317).
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. Jossey-Bass.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. (n.d.). Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (Eds.) (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press.
