Special Considerations for Culturally Responsive Teaching Online

Online learning is meant to be flexible and accessible, but to achieve that promise for every learner, it must incorporate culturally responsive teaching. Many college faculty will be familiar with the case for culturally responsive teaching generally, but what does that look like in an online learning context?

That’s the focus of many of the programs offered by Online Learning Consortium (OLC), including three services delivered in partnership with Every Learner Everywhere, Fundamentals of Quality and Equity in Digital Learning, Continuous Improvement Strategies for Advancing Quality Digital Learning, and Developing a Digital Learning Ecosystem to Ensure Student Success.

“In an online learning environment, we frame culturally responsive teaching as specific strategies around inclusiveness and equity,” says Josh Herron, Director of Professional Learning at OLC. “That includes being aware that learners are visible in the examples, and then, when they’re demonstrating their proficiency, that they’re doing so in a relevant way that’s applicable to their own goals, in addition to the goals of a course or program.”

Herron participates in delivering the professional development services with Every Learner mentioned above, and also helps develop customized workshops for unique cohorts, such as a recent program delivered to four tribal colleges that are part of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). Enhancing Digital Learning: Integrating Equity and Quality, delivered in summer and fall 2024, centered culturally responsive pedagogy in tribal institutions. The customized program emerged because AIHEC members wanted something with more emphasis on program improvement than the established services. Also, because the participants in the cohort are from very small institutions, they wanted more attention on long-term sustainability and capacity building for equitable digital learning.

Below, Herron shares some of the concepts about culturally responsive teaching online that he and colleagues at OLC emphasize in their established and customized programs.

Center equity, contextualize quality

Herron says he and his colleagues work with workshop participants to evaluate definitions of and frameworks for quality. However, they also caution against letting quality drive the bus.

“One phrase I use is that in online learning, we contextualize quality and center equity,” he says. “Quality sometimes can be used to lock folks into a certain way of doing things. If what we’re trying to do is based on equitable access and inclusivity we have to ask what quality means in this particular context.”

Considerations for equitable online teaching

Designing a course around culturally responsive teaching in an online context will reveal several special considerations.

• Power dynamics and identity. How students and instructors identify, the personas they project, and how they relate to one another can play out differently in an online environment than in person.
• Accessible design. The goals of digital accessibility for every learner will raise specific design implications.
• Community building. Instructors need to consider how to create a remote environment in which everyone feels they belong, are seen and heard, and matter to one another and to the instructor.
• Flexibility. Instructors have to think about times and spaces in which students work, and their personal and work responsibilities.
• Who the students are. Online learning may have more variation in the student body than traditional face-to-face courses, and a learner in their 30s who’s returning to college through an online program looks different from an 18-year-old first-time student with less work experience.

Designing with these considerations in mind “goes beyond the instructor,” Herron says. “An important element is a team supporting an online learner, just as there would be in any educational context, from advisors to mental health to career services. These resources need to be there specifically to help the online learner. It’s preparing folks who serve the learners holistically.”

More choices, more design considerations

One principle of culturally responsive teaching is to give students options for practicing and demonstrating proficiency. Digital learning technologies offer new and varied ways to do that — videos, podcasting, blogging, social annotation, or collaborative writing, for example. But that also raises new challenges around accessibility and design. Instructors have to think through how students have access to all the creative digital learning tools they could benefit from.

Herron also cautions against confusing convenience with flexibility. An asynchronous online platform may be convenient in that the material is available anytime, from anywhere. But “flexibility is the intentional part,” he says. Uploading the same readings, practice activities, assignments, assessments, and attendance and other course policies from a face-to-face course to an online format doesn’t magically create a flexible experience for the student.

“Technology allows us to personalize learning, building on the idea of differentiated instruction,” Herron explains. “We can actually get to a space where it’s personalized for learner success.”

Culturally responsive teaching in asynchronous formats

Herron says students will have different cultural expectations around using and observing non-verbal expression. Ideally, even a course that is technically asynchronous will have some times when everyone is together, at least on screen. And conversely, synchronous courses can use recordings of meetings to include more students who need to work asynchronously.

For online discussion activities in general, Herron advises caution. They can be useful for cultural exchange, for example, but they have to be well designed. (Every Learner’s Director Karen Cangiolosi made a similar point in an article about digital citizenship — that discussion forum assignments are artificial constructs and so can feel less relevant and authentic to students if not managed carefully.)

Asking is always a reliable tactic. For the recent AIHEC workshop, Herron says he and OLC colleagues began by asking how many synchronous sessions participants would like, if discussions would work in asynchronous threads, etc.

“Sometimes it’s choosing one and then giving an option for the other,” he explains.

“Asking for feedback from students is an underutilized element. Ask them, how am I doing? What should I start doing, stop doing, and keep doing?”

This is part of a larger perspective about culturally responsive teaching that remembers that people are involved.

“Acknowledge within the course, when things come up, that a faculty member is human and students are human,” Herron says. “Respond in real time, and use the online tools to keep acknowledging and celebrating.”