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In my opinion, any classroom of students that I teach, regardless of age, diversity, or level of education, deserves a chance to feel connected to me and to what they are learning.

When I teach science, I want my students to see the subject’s universality and experience how it can connect with their world. With each new year of students, I want to recognize and harness the diversity of their physical, mental, emotional, social, and language abilities while guiding them to learn and connect with the science that I teach.

I have a somewhat unusual teaching history, as I’ve taught all ages of school, pre-K-12, along with adult learners. With each new population of students, I’ve learned new ways of connecting with my students. I have experienced classrooms with diverse populations, and others that were homogeneous; those comprising only special education students, only regular education students, and some with a mix of both.

Reaching a broad range of students

I currently teach middle school science in a Virginia public school system that includes an Acknowledgement & Inclusivity Statement on the main webpage in seven different languages! What’s more, the nearly 7,000 students in my district speak 57 different home languages, with 38% enrolled as English learners, and 18% having successfully tested out of the program¹. This diversity of home languages reflects a similar diversity within the classroom. There are well-established supports in place for students who are Spanish speakers; however, much of this is simply based on translation between languages. I’ve found that even the methods and strategies used to reach our Hispanic students that aren’t limited to translations are still less effective with students whose families come from other places, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. Whether the discrepancies are due to differences in language or culture, I believe we can do better in providing academic support for the many different students who attend our school system.

Figure 1. Location of Ghana. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In keeping with my goal of connecting with all students, I decided a few years ago to apply to the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms Program. Once accepted, I was directed to develop a guiding question and choose where I’d travel for my field experience. As I had been specifically noticing an increase in families from Sub-Saharan Africa moving into my district, I decided I’d travel to Ghana (see Figure 1) to immerse myself in this culture. My hope was that comparing the way Ghanaian students learn in their home culture to what I’ve experienced in my own classroom might help me to better connect with my own students from this area. I also hoped that those revelations might help me find more inclusive ways of teaching students from other parts of the world.

Definitions of culture vary, but I have always considered it to be more than just ethnicity. Instead, I believe it includes everything a person has experienced, such as languages, abilities, disabilities, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, geographical regions, politics, socioeconomics, orientation, family values, traditions, upbringing, and more additional categories than I can even name.

According to Geneva Gay², culturally responsive teaching uses “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.” I’ve seen many people resist learning about this type of practice, but it is important to realize that it is not about educators learning details about all the cultures, races, languages, or ethnic groups we have in our classrooms. Instead, culturally responsive practices encourage an awareness of cultural differences that influence how students learn. This approach encourages us to tap into the banks of knowledge that each student brings with them to the classroom. If we can allow students to show us what is relevant to them, it can help us to teach them what they need to thrive.

The insights I gained from this amazing field experience are summarized in the Global Education guide I created during my time in the Fulbright program. One major observation that has stuck with me is that, when students feel connected, trusted, and allowed to be curious, it doesn’t matter what language they are speaking or what clothing they are wearing. Rather, the most noticeable feature is that they are engaged and are driving their own learning.

Below, I’ll share some strategies I’ve been using in my journey to make better connections with students through cultural responsiveness. These are simple changes I’ve made that seem to have significantly improved students’ learning experience and agency in my classroom.

To encourage students’ connections, ask — don’t assume

While teaching a lesson on acids, bases, and salts, I displayed several different household products for students to reference. I was surprised to learn that only 25% of students in the class were familiar with Milk of Magnesia! To get the rest of the class involved, I asked what products they might use if they couldn’t ‘go’; needless to say, it became an exciting and informative class discussion. Many of the students mentioned Andrew’s Liver Salt which, like milk of magnesia, is a magnesium-based remedy for constipation and upset stomach.

Previously, it hadn’t occurred to me to even ask whether students were familiar with the “common” household products I often reference to add relevance to my lessons. This amusing spontaneous conversation with my students made me more aware of how simple cultural differences can arise in any setting and gave me insight into some simple ways I could be more culturally aware and responsive within my multicultural classroom.

Now, when referring to things I consider to be common products, I first ask whether students have seen or used the product before and then allow time for student discussion. If a given product is unfamiliar to students, I give the students the chance to discuss any similar products they’ve encountered. This has become a very simple way to help all my students connect with the lesson, without making assumptions about what they might or might not know.

Remove limits to increase cultural awareness

Short research projects can be a powerful and simple way to increase cultural awareness and responsiveness in the classroom. I typically do two or three short projects throughout a given year.

Table 1 shows some minor shifts in how I design and implement projects that have had some wonderful effects on my students’ levels of interest and effort. A result of these modifications is that my students (and I) have been exposed to scientists across a wide timeline, from long ago to the present, while not being limited to only those scientists who can be found in textbooks. Another benefit is that all students have a chance to connect with something familiar while learning about something unfamiliar, through both their research and the class conversations throughout the projects.

Be aware of alphabet diversity

Some time ago, during a lesson about the periodic table, a student pronounced the word period as beriop. Some students started giggling, and a few laughed. I happened to have a related personal anecdote, so I made this into a teaching moment. I told the students about my mother, who has difficulty in pronouncing the letter ‘v’. My mother’s first language, Yoruba, contains no letter ‘v’, so when she learned English as an adult, she struggled to make that sound. The best she can do, even now, is pronounce it as ‘b’; so to her, the word velocity is pronounced belocity.

Figure 2. Percentage of public-school students who were English learners (ELs), by state or jurisdiction, Fall 2021. Source: National Center for Education Statistics.

I also told my students about some of the different cultures, languages, and heritages of other students I have worked with in the past, discussing how some grew up with completely different alphabet sets than the English alphabet, or simply pronounced the same alphabet letters differently. This led to a dynamic class discussion, where several students introduced the class to letters or sounds that they pronounced differently at home and/or those they struggled to pronounce. For some of my students, this was the first time I’d seen them willingly speak directly to the rest of the class.

Ever since this spontaneous alphabet discussion, I now make a point, each year, while highlighting science’s social nature, to explain that in my classroom we will appreciate the knowledge and background each person brings into the room. I sometimes present data that can help them see their language in a broader context, such as the data in Figure 2. Typically, those for whom English is not a first language will voluntarily add to the conversation. If they don’t, however, I don’t ask them to, as I do not want to call out anyone out as being “different.” Bringing this type of awareness to all students has helped me to create a classroom culture where English learners are less resistant to speaking out loud.

Some other successful strategies I have used to support all students with English vocabulary are summarized in Table 2.

Use diverse examples for diverse connections

As a naturalized American, I like to share some cultural experiences with my students that may not be common for those having grown up in America. For example, I am happy to have reliable, 24-hour electricity where I now live, but I know that electrical generators can be a lifeline in many households in other areas where electricity is intermittent, or even non-existent.

When I teach electromagnetism in my 8^th grade physical science classes, I teach the basic mechanisms of how electric generators work. Along with using camping and food trucks as examples, I also reference my own personal experience growing up in my home country, when we would occasionally rely upon generators when the power was cut off. Sometimes students will share similar experiences from before they relocated to the United States, or from when they visit their heritage countries. I’ve learned that this practice brings more than just culturally relevant connections. It also provides an opportunity to share and embrace the cultural differences of students by inviting their own stories, without asking any person to be the “token expert.”

I believe that lessons we already teach provide many opportunities for culturally responsive practices to be infused. For example, when addressing forms and sources of energy, or methods of heat transfer, consider asking your students to discuss what they’ve seen, heard of, or experienced in the ways people in different countries and regions harness and use energy. Challenging students to work in small groups to come up with the greatest number of examples can help attach value to bringing a variety of experiences the students might be willing to share.

Students could be prompted to think about how food gets cooked, how people stay warm, or different ways people might get hot water for bathing. Students who might just say, “I turn on the stove,” can be encouraged to consider how the gas or electricity gets to that stove. This type of prompt can elicit related ideas and topics, such as solar thermal energy, cooking with charcoal, using fire to heat water for bathing, and even the apparent magic of an entire infrastructure that makes the production of energy seem simple.

The lessons do not have to become a study of different cultures, but allowing each student to find their own connections, while hearing examples that may previously have been unfamiliar, can increase the connections every student can make to the content they are learning.

Final thoughts

To practice culturally responsive teaching, a teacher doesn’t need to travel on a Fulbright scholarship, visit other countries, or even learn about every country or type of culture that might be in a student’s background. Rather, it simply takes a willingness to realize that different people have different experiences, and that small changes in teaching practices can lead to unexpected and amazing differences in the way students learn and behave in a classroom setting.

Additional resources on culturally responsive teaching:

• Vigil, K. (n.d.). What Is Culturally Responsive Teaching? Available at https://www.understood.org/en/articles/what-is-culturally-responsive-teaching.
• Pinto, L. From Discipline to Culturally Responsive Engagement: 45 Classroom Management Strategies; Corwin Press: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2013.

References

¹Harrisonburg City Public Schools student demographic data (as of Oct 15, 2025). Available at https://www.harrisonburg.k12.v...https://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/files/user/1/file/HCPS-Student-Birth-Country-&-Home-Language-2025.pdf.

²Geneva, G. Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3^rd Edition; Teachers’ College Press: New York, 2018.