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Literacy PK-3

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Literacy PK-3>Strategies>Incorporate Students' Cultural Practices

Incorporate Students' Cultural Practices

Overview

Learning about students' cultures and connecting them to instructional practices helps foster a sense of belonging and mitigate Stereotype Threat.

When educators integrate the linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge that learners bring, they help learners draw on their Background Knowledge to better understand and relate to the material, supporting Motivation and learning.
Incorporate culturally oriented techniques into learning opportunities, such as call and response, music, or storytelling, to promote Attention and encoding into Long-term Memory. The teacher can integrate learner-centered stories and language into classroom instruction. Supplying a wealth of culturally responsive texts and encouraging students to bring and share artifacts of their identity and culture are two additional ways for students to see themselves reflected in the classroom environment.
Designing products that allow learners to see their cultures represented not only engages learners but also makes the learning more accessible and relevant. Products can work with schools to design content that is meaningful for their different populations. Student choice can also be incorporated with multiple settings and character representations for learners to choose from, allowing them to connect with the work.
Use It in the Classroom
Watch how this kindergarten teacher incorporates students' backgrounds into her lesson. By allowing students to explore their own families while also learning about each others', she is building a supportive and inclusive classroom community.
Design It into Your Product
Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.
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References: Incorporate Students' Cultural Practices
`Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (expanded edition). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Cummins, J. (2005). A proposal for action: Strategies for recognizing heritage language competence as a learning resource within the mainstream classroom. Modern Language Journal, 585-592.
Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the Hood... and the rest of y'all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Graham, L. J., & Harwood, V. (2011). Developing capabilities for social inclusion: engaging diversity through inclusive school communities. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15(1), 135-152.
Gueldner, B. A., Feuerborn, L. L., Merrell, K. W., Castro-Olivo, S., d'Abreu, A., Furrer, J., & Widales-Benitez, O. (2020). One size does not fit all: Adapting social and emotional learning in our multicultural world. In Social and emotional learning in the classroom, second edition: Promoting mental health and academic success. Guilford Publications.
Hammond, Z. L. 2015. Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Kana'iaupuni, S., B. Ledward, and U. Jensen. Culture-based education and its relationship to student outcomes. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools, Research & Evaluation.
Machado, E. (2018). Young Children's Translingual and Transnational Writing in an Urban Literacy Classroom (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago).
Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic Incorporated.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
O'Conner, R., De Feyter, J., Carr, A., Luo, J. L., & Romm, H. (2017). A review of the literature on social and emotional learning for students ages 3-8: What's Known Teacher and classroom strategies that contribute to social and emotional learning (part 3 of 4). Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, Department of Education.
Turnaround for Children. (2016, December 9). Stereotype threat: Strategies for the classroom (Blog post).

Additional Resources

Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.

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Factors Supported by this Strategy

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