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The chapter establishes the rationale for the development of an online professional development course in designing culturally responsive assessment for faculty of the Institute of Education in Dublin City University. As the literature on which the course is based is from several countries, the course may be considered relevant for faculty in various countries and can be accessed as the course is online. The course of about 3.5 hours in duration begins with a definition of culturally responsive assessment before emphasizing the desirability of culturally responsive assessment based mainly on the obligation to design tests that are fair to all test takers. Key elements of the program are the concepts of multicultural validity, construct validity, language issues, dimensions of cultural difference impacting on learning and assessment, and the lecturer/supervisor as researcher of their own students as well as of their own enculturation. The focus is on the implications of these concepts for professional practice. The course synthesizes several sources to posit eight criteria for the preparation, process, and outcomes of culturally responsive assessment before presenting several assessment modes that have potential to be culturally fair. Finally, the course provides the opportunity for participants to design culturally responsive assessment in their own disciplines and then requests the participants to evaluate their designs in light of the criteria. Twelve respondents to a pilot study were essentially very positive about the value of the online course.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to design and implement a model of cultural-responsiveness within a social studies teacher education program. Specifically, we sought to understand how pre-service grades 6-12 social studies practitioners construct culturally responsive teaching (CRT) in their lesson planning. In addition, we examined the professional barriers that prevented teacher-candidates from actualizing culturally responsive pedagogy. Incorporating a conceptual model of Review, Reflect, and React, 20 teacher candidates in a social studies methods course engaged CRT theory and practice. Thematic analysis of lesson plans and clinical reflections indicated successful proponents of CRT critically analyzed their curriculum, explored the diverse needs of their students, and engaged learners in culturally appropriate social studies pedagogy. Findings also showed that unsuccessful CRT was characterized by a lack of content knowledge, resistance from the cooperating teacher, and a reliance on the textbook materials.

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates of Color (TCoCs) experienced and perceived culturally responsive teaching across three teacher education programs at a predominately White institution in the USA. At the time of the study, the campus was reeling from a series of racist incidents on- and off-campus, and the teacher education programs were attempting to recruit more TCoCs.

Drawing on a critical race theory counternarrative approach and qualitative research focus-group interviews, the authors centered the voices of seven TCoCs and their experiences with culturally responsive teaching in their coursework.

The TCoCs experienced and perceived culturally responsive teaching as promising yet fleeting, missing the mark, and a misuse of culture and language that resulted in harm. The TCoCs urge teacher education to hire racially–ethnically–linguistically diverse faculty, provide affirming spaces for TCoCs, and curricular transformation.

Study findings contribute to recent calls for teacher education programs to attend to the lived experiences, concerns and expectations of future teachers of color.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of instructional leaders in promoting culturally responsive practice in ways that make schooling more inclusive and humanizing for minoritized students and communities.

The data pull from a six-month long case study of a mid-sized, Midwestern school district that was attempting to implement culturally responsive leadership practices. After axial coding, findings emerged from interview data and field notes.

Instructional leaders can play significant and useful roles in promoting culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy in schools. Districts can establish positions in which instructional leaders can work to strengthen the culturally responsive pedagogy of every teacher in a district.

This study has implications for both research and practice. Culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL) exists in multiple spaces and at various levels in a district. CRSL is not only a school-level function, but it can also be a district-level practice. Culturally responsive instructional leaders (in this case, not principals, but coaches) can have significant impact in promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.

This contribution moves beyond school leadership and examines how district leadership practices and decisions foster culturally relevant practices and the challenges in employing this equity work.

As high school and college graduates enter today's highly competitive and diverse, globalized economies, cultural competence and social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies continue being essential skills for college, career, and life success. These capabilities are more than valuable assets, they are employability requirements in a modern workforce dependent on navigating relationships and interactions between people from different backgrounds. In education, educators are increasingly expected to cultivate these skills within equitable learning environments for all students, international and domestic. Recent research demonstrates greater need to support international students in the United States who often experience unique academic barriers, stressors, and lack of support services for managing international relocation and integration into unfamiliar academic and cultural systems. To better understand how culturally responsive SEL education can serve as a lever for increasing equitable conditions for international students and to contribute research-based practices on how distance learning can strengthen culturally responsive SEL skills, the following chapter introduces how one online academic and cultural studies course influenced high school and undergraduate international students. Through qualitative and quantitative sources (e.g., written homework reflections; cultural orientation indicator (COI) report; paper: My Action Plan; course evaluation survey), themes emerged from the data that identified how explicit online SEL education, using a culturally responsive lens, contributed to gains in cultural competence, educational equity, academic and professional development, and self-efficacy.

This paper aims to explore the potential for instructional video to build capacity in culturally responsive teaching, and outline an approach developed at NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools (Metro Center) for using inquiry-based, teacher-led teams to study, develop and film culturally responsive teaching in action. The paper explores the use of instructional video in an asset-focused model of professional development that develops culturally responsive teaching through digital videos that can be shared among colleagues, posted online and presented at professional conferences.

The primary aims of the paper are conceptual and include drawing on a review of the literature on instructional video to map onto one model of professional development the learning goals and reflective activities that are most likely to develop the potential of instructional video to change beliefs and develop critical consciousness, and providing anecdotal evidence to explore the potential for using instructional video in an asset-focused, transformative and responsive model of professional development in culturally responsive teaching.

Instructional video can be effective for professional development in culturally responsive teaching because people often need to see transformations in teaching and learning before they can believe such transformations are possible. Instructional videos of effective culturally responsive teaching, in this manner, highlight best practices and provide a way for schools to post an “early win” in their work in addressing achievement gaps.

Instructional video can assist educators in confronting and challenging prevailing deficit-based beliefs about ostensibly “low-achieving” students that limit possibilities for culturally responsive teaching; opening up opportunities for transformative learning and inviting the shift to a culturally responsive mindset; and examining and discussing models of excellent teaching. This model of professional development is asset-focused and transformative because it moves teacher voices from margin to center and empowers teachers as models and stewards of transformative learning.

Although numerous studies have documented the potential of instructional video in asset-focused and transformative models of professional development, only two studies explore the potential of instructional video specifically in the development of culturally responsive teaching (Lopez, 2013; Rosaen, 2015). This paper contributes to this nascent literature through documenting an approach to instructional video that was developed for and with teachers at a K-8 public school in Brooklyn.

The purpose of this paper is to present insights from the implementation of a dialogic social studies curriculum and its potential to support diverse learners. Policymakers and educators must attend to the learning needs of diverse/minoritized (Note: In this paper, the authors use minoritized and diverse interchangeably) students who have been marginalized in public education. A critical goal is to close racial, ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps by increasing, for example, students’ engagement with curriculum and instruction. In this paper, the authors bridge research on dialogic instruction and culturally relevant and responsive education with the goal of informing curricular design and instructional practice.

This conceptual paper discusses the utility of dialogic instruction in improving learning outcomes for minoritized student populations. While some researchers have examined the positive effects of dialogic instruction on underperforming students (e.g. Murphy et al., 2009; Pillinger and Vardy, 2022), few scholars have examined dialogic instruction through a culturally relevant and responsive lens. The authors argue that the application of this critical lens may improve learning outcomes for diverse learners who have been marginalized in public education systems.

The authors present illustrative vignettes and insights from a pilot study of a novel social studies curriculum. This curriculum applies a social justice lens by guiding students in the exploration of complex social issues that affect them. Given the diversity of their collaborating teachers’ classrooms (55% are racially minoritized students), the authors applied principles of culturally relevant and responsive education (e.g. Ford, 2010; Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1995) when designing and piloting the curriculum. Prior personal and professional experiences by the first author point to the potential of dialogic instruction to meaningfully support minoritized students’ learning.

This paper builds on two bodies of literature – dialogic instruction and culturally relevant and responsive education – to identify how an innovative social studies curriculum may improve learning for diverse student populations. It calls for the advancement of a research agenda that applies a culturally relevant and responsive lens to inform instructional practice. The authors begin this discussion with two vignettes.

Higher education institutions shape the professions which are the conduit for the disciplines’ ways of knowing, the worldview or mindset of the professions, and the intellectual frameworks by which problems and policies are defined. The generational, conscious, and unconscious agreements between higher education and the professions perpetuate the status quo, resulting in continued disproportional impacts based on race, gender, ethnicity, language, orientation, and differing abilities in every major industry sector; including education, health, employment, housing, finance, technology, and the criminal justice system. Cultural responsive pedagogy provides a process of altering these agreements by surfacing the dual consciousness of our multiple social identities and the multidimensional social, political, and economic contexts in our collective co-existence. The connections between culture and mindset, conscious and unconscious, and the social-political context shape teaching and learning. Mindfulness is a pathway for cultivating cultural competency through embodied awareness by building the reflective muscle to recognize, disrupt, and transform deep-rooted beliefs, entrenched assumptions, and well-established behaviors. Mindfulness invites both faculty and students to bring their intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual selves to the learning exchange.

This paper aims to provide insights for educators seeking to enact culturally responsive-sustaining education and research in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The authors examine what happened when the community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative they engaged with traditionally marginalized high school students was interrupted as a result of physical distancing necessitated by COVID-19.

Data for this inquiry were taken from a broader on-going ethnography of youth’s participation in the YPAR project and included audio and video recordings from meetings of the YPAR initiative and messages exchanged between and among authors and youth. Authors used components of culturally responsive-sustaining education and theories related to student voice as an analytic frame through which they considered how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced their work.

Three findings are examined in this paper. They consider: how youth participants and the authors stayed connected after they were no longer able to meet in person; how youth chose to center the needs of the subsidized housing community where they lived while continuing their work; and how youth and authors navigated the uncertainties they encountered in looking ahead to future possibilities for their study as the pandemic continued.

This study provides urgently needed insights for educators and researchers grappling with how they may enact culturally responsive-sustaining education and research during the COVID-19 global pandemic and beyond.