“Find ways to legitimize a student’s home language and culture, their ethno-linguistic worlds. Provide tools that support them in shifting from a deficit mindset about their difference to a mindset whereby their difference is a valuable resource” (Venegas et al., 2017). 

Strategies:

• Reflect on these teacher competencies that promote culturally responsive teaching.  
• Encourage students to brainstorm and draft their assignments in the language(s) they are most comfortable with. Validate the benefits of using their entire linguistic repertoires throughout the meaning-making process. 

“Read student writing to gain a sense of how they think, how they engage with ideas and emphasize the potential there instead of focusing feedback on language error and correction” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategies:

• Have no more than 10% of your grade be related to language error or correction. Focus on assessing students on the concepts and criteria you have covered in class rather than the skills you expect them to enter your course with.  

Have students create their own self-reflections as comments within the paper so you can respond to them like a dialogue. Here is an example.

“Support students to see course readings as conversations in which they participate. Help students become active participants in and owners of their education—rather than conceiving of their role as observing from the sidelines” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategy:

• Have students develop reading questions and/or reflect on readings and how they relate to personal or professional goals. 
• For long and more theoretical pieces, designate student groups to translate a section of the reading into their own words and to create a discussion question for the class.

“Create an environment where students have opportunities to use the reading, writing, thinking skills they are gaining to reflect on and examine their own educational histories, family histories, background experiences (i.e. what they bring into the classroom). In other words, find ways to legitimize students’ socio-historical experiences; the idea is that culturally responsive teaching is emancipatory/liberating” (Venegas et al., 2017).  

Strategy:

• Help students interrogate whose perspectives are being prioritized in class readings, sample texts, and/or disciplinary norms and conventions. Discuss what would be gained by bringing in other perspectives, especially ones that mirror the students’ own communities and lived experiences.

Provide activities, discussions, or sustained research projects that invite students to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems of their home communities. Students can start by reflecting on real-word issues from their communities and sharing these issues in a discussion or online post. Students can then connect the materials of your class to understanding, analyzing, or even solving some of these persistent issues. See What Is Culturally Responsive Teaching for more information. 

“Connect the content of the class (in English it is their reading/writing) to their real world, make the work of the class directly ‘useful’ and relevant to their day to day lived realities” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategy:

• Have students reflect at the beginning of the course on their personal and/or professional learning goals. Throughout the course (for example, at the end of each unit), ask students to return to their initial reflection and write about their progress/growth and how it will transfer to other situations that relate to the goals they set. Ask students to reflect on their previous knowledge and how it informed their ability to achieve the assignment/unit goals.

"Work with students who experience marginalization (at the university, in the larger political climate) to move from a position of silence to a position of voice. To what extent or in what ways should we interpret or see our classes (the reading, the thinking, the writing) as spaces for students to enact political and social empowerment, especially for those coming from positions of silence?” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategies:

• Offer opportunities for students to apply what they are learning and writing about to their own communities. Allow students to choose their community as their audience in their writing and/or have them reflect on what they think is most important for their community in the course materials. 
• Assign readings that illustrate examples of writing with diverse community voices. Discuss the idea of students bringing their authentic selves and voices to their writing and what positive effects this can have on their message and what it is able to accomplish. Empower students to make their own choices in their writing and value their voices. 

“Create a learning community in the classroom where students feel safe, where there is mutual respect (where each student knows her writing will be taken seriously)” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategies:

• Explicitly discuss and collaboratively decide on guidelines for classroom conversations, responses to online discussion forums, and peer feedback that help students build each other up, acknowledge and listen to different perspectives, and offer helpful suggestions respectfully. Here are some example guidelines.
• Establish consistent student groups in your course where students are encouraged to support and learn from one another, discuss their course and writing goals, and give each other feedback throughout the semester. For in-person courses, offer dedicated class time for group meetings. In online courses, consider establishing D2L discussion groups and/or encouraging group meetings via Zoom or another tool. Along with discussion prompts related to assignments or course materials, provide opportunities for the group members to get to know one another as people (their interests, backgrounds, personal goals, etc.). 

“Understand in writing and other seminar classes the need to pay attention to students’ affective needs—what is going on emotionally and psychologically—as we are trying to teach writing we understand the need to teach students how to use writing as a tool to improve their sense of self-efficacy; reading and writing as tools to increase their confidence in their ability to improve, to succeed” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategies: 

• Have students comment on what they are proud of in their writing and/or work. When collecting an assignment, have them respond to the following:
  • 1) What is something you are proud of?
  • 2) What is something you want to grow from?
  • 3) What are you planning to apply to the next assignment?
• When collecting a major writing assignment, ask students to describe what they would like feedback on and what types of feedback would be most helpful. Use this insight to guide your comments and consider alternative modalities (audio, video, and/or text feedback) that could be more accessible for some students.

“Teach rhetorical metacognition: students should become aware of different rhetorical reading/writing strategies and critical/analytical habits of thought. Likewise, they should engage in conversations as to consider how the work of the university differs from that of high school. We ask them to develop dialogs and conversations with textual materials—we push them to move beyond memorization” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategies: 

• Discuss explicitly why you are doing certain writing assignments (including reflection) and how they relate to the goals of your course and/or the values of your discipline.
• Make reflection a habit for students throughout the course. Here are some examples of reflection activities. 

“Be accessible—teacher accessibility is more an attitude than the number of posted office hours. Students sense if you really want to meet with them. If possible, respond to at least one set of papers in conferences or writing groups, preferably early in the quarter. Make visiting the instructor a comfortable, collaborative experience designed to help students elucidate and present their own ideas” (Venegas et al., 2017). 

Strategies:

• Ask students to prepare for the conference by establishing key discussion points and/or questions ahead of time and center their needs (rather than only your priorities) throughout the meeting. Let them guide the discussion as much as possible. 
• If you offer in-person office hours, consider being available over Zoom or another platform to encourage attendance from students who might not have the time/resources to come to campus for a meeting. 

“Understand that family trumps school, always. Avoid interpreting a student’s absence/tardiness as lack of commitment to class and/or other university obligations. Because of socio-economic circumstances, family emergencies may occur more often” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategies:

• Look at your syllabus, see what your attendance policy communicates to students. Does it leave space for students to come to you and find ways to succeed in the course even when experiencing challenges?

Have students complete a pre-semester survey where they can outline potential responsibilities outside of class. Here is an example.

“Develop a variety of writing assignments that speak to learning orientations and that provide students opportunities to critically analyze their educational, family, political, and community histories” (Venegas et al., 2017).

Strategy: 

• Include low-stakes writing activities that ask students to apply course content and discussions to their experiences, backgrounds, and communities. Evaluate these assignments based on completion and encourage students to explore multiple sides of ideas without worrying about having the ‘right’ answer or sounding ‘academic.’