As educators, it is essential that we support our students to have agency to be in charge of their own learning.

The tips listed below come together to make for a highly personalized class experience where all students know their backgrounds are celebrated and embraced. This creates a positive learning environment where students feel safe and secure enough to relate their coursework to personal experiences and learn how the course content applies to their own lives.

Open up your curriculum

• Learning should be student-centered. This validates students and shows that you respect who they are. Let the learning be social, and let students know that in order to be successful, they should just be themselves.

• Recognize your students as individuals who have rich inner lives and experiences, and perhaps possess knowledge that you don’t have, and that your students may have been marginalized in academic settings throughout their lives.

• Make connections between school and real-life.

• Design projects and lessons that make connections to student backgrounds

• Use resources from students’ communities to connect to your topics and themes.

• Bring in voices from students’ communities.

• Search for universal themes, then work with students to make connections between these themes and their own lives.

• Provide a variety of entry points into content, and adjust according to student needs.

• Allow for a variety interpretations. The arts are wonderful for this, as so much of what we do relies on interpretation. Make space for multiple perspectives.

Educate yourself

• Try to understand and respect a student’s economic background especially when it is different from our own. 

• Attend an event in your students’ community/communities.

• Take a deep dive into learning about the cultures represented in your classroom (their history, their art, their values). Go deeper than listening to the culture’s music or eating traditional foods. Try to answer the question: What might it be like to belong to this culture?

• Educate yourself on the many positive experiences the student has because of their culture.

• Learn about parent/child relationships within different cultures. 

• Understand the role of the student within their family and home, and how this role shapes their identity and how they interact with others.

Set a high bar

• Students should know they are expected to work hard and learn. Be consistent about this, and have frequent, open conversations about progress.

Culture can shape the way a person grows and learns. We must consider the nuances of who a student is and what they have experienced.

As arts educators, whether we work with children or adults, we must include content that embraces and celebrates a variety of cultures. In order to do this, we must get to know our students and their backgrounds so we may choose examples of artists, authors, and projects that are related to their cultural experiences. This should be exciting for us as educators, as it means that the classroom will always be a vibrant place where we are all actively learning——about ourselves, about each other and about the world we live in!