Culturally Responsive Teaching and Humanizing the Student Experience In the Age of AI

In an era marked by rapid technological advances and the increasing influence of artificial intelligence, educators are faced with the challenge of adapting their teaching methodologies to meet the diverse needs of students. The powerful synergy between culturally responsive teaching and humanizing the student experience can significantly enhance student outcomes.

Culturally responsive teaching at its best identifies actionable strategies to create a classroom culture that celebrates diversity, maximizes student potential, and makes meaning out of the evolving educational landscape. Culturally responsive teaching emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing students’ backgrounds, experiences, and identities in the learning process. By incorporating students’ cultural references, perspectives, and lived experiences into the curriculum, educators can create a more inclusive and empowering learning environment.

Humanizing the student experience goes beyond academics to focus on building meaningful relationships, fostering empathy, and supporting students’ social-emotional well-being. When students feel seen, heard, and valued as individuals, they are more likely to engage in learning, take risks, and persist in the face of challenges.

The intersection of culturally responsive teaching, humanizing the student experience, and AI integration can unlock the full potential of every learner. This approach not only enhances academic achievement but also contributes to students’ overall growth and development.

Culture and connection

Accounting for students’ lived experiences does not mean making assumptions about them. It requires inviting them to contribute in meaningful ways and creating a learning environment that makes them feel welcome to do so. It means asking them questions, getting to know them and learning from them. It means using what they shared and incorporating it into the course in meaningful ways.

Zaretta Hammond defines culturally responsive teaching as:

An educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the student in order to create a safe space for learning.”

The key concepts to keep in mind from this while selecting and implementing AI are:

• Relationship building
• Creating connection
• Creating a safe space for learning

Teaching inclusively means embracing student diversity in all kinds of personal characteristics — race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socioeconomic background, ideology, and even personality traits like introversion — as assets. It means designing and teaching courses in ways that foster talent in all students, but especially those who come from groups traditionally excluded in higher education.

To apply culturally responsive teaching to your courses:

• Reflect on culture as a cognitive tool
• Analyze how culture and diversity are portrayed and positioned in the curriculum
• Examine how students’ cultures and lived experiences are positioned in the curriculum.

Rockford Aguilar-Valdez (2015) developed a Rubric for Culturally Responsive Lessons/Assignments that serves as a guide to assessing an assignment on a few key dimensions of culturally responsive pedagogy. The instrument includes criteria for voice, differentiation, access, connection, higher-order thinking, social justice, and equity/decolonization.

Caring for the whole student

Students today face major challenges that compound as they traverse their degree programs toward an uncertain tomorrow. Not only do they have to learn how to navigate life as new adults and manage competing deadlines without the level of support offered throughout high school. They also must think about major global issues, including climate change, and about stagnating wages combined with rising costs. This often leads to heightened stress and anxiety.

As the Tyton Partners occasional Listening to Learners survey showed in 2024, some critical areas where students’ needs aren’t being fully met include:

• Basic Needs: Addressing safety and affordable access to education
• Psychological Needs: Cultivating belonging and awareness of student support services
• Self-fulfillment Needs: Unlocking a learner’s full potential with technology and supporting agency in learning

Faculty might respond to these student needs by assuming that support services across campus will handle them. But the students sitting in your course may not be aware of or using those resources.

For example, another survey from Tyton Partners in 2023 showed a 60 percent gap in the awareness of campus resources between faculty and students, with the former far more likely to say that resources were available on their campus. There is a clear disconnect, so what can faculty do to humanize the college experience for their students who may be struggling with significant needs?

1. Take pulse checks in your classroom. Ask students how they’re doing, regularly.
2. Remind students of the support services, regularly.
3. Encourage students to reach out privately, regularly.

Every Learner Everywhere and its partners have published many practical resources on this subject, including:

• The Caring for Students Playbook
• The Power of Student-Centered Learning: How Listening to Students Can Improve Higher Education
• The Impact of Digital Learning on Minoritized and Poverty-Affected College Students: A Literature Review
• What Our Best College Instructors Do: Reflections by students about meaningful learning experiences

A college course is a group of human beings working together for up to 15 weeks on a mutual enterprise. Establishing a sense of community in the classroom helps predict whether your students will participate in class discussions, have high or low levels of anxiety, and even have better grades:

Engaging students using a variety of methods to attract their interest doesn’t mean you are taking on the work of learning for them or somehow cheapening your material.

Instead, it is an invitation — to take the initiative, to apply effort, to risk the daunting possibility of failure.

Engage students using a variety of methods to attract their interest and to excite them.

• Learn their names.
• Make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute.
• Work as a class on a shared project.
• Diversify your curriculum and your teaching strategies.
• Build community in small ways.
• Consider jumping off your learning-management system.

Humanizing the AI experience for students

According to the 2024 Tyton Time for Class report, 59 percent of students are regular users (monthly or more) compared to around 40 percent of instructors and administrators. It argues that administrators and instructors must align on academic integrity policies and expanding access to generative AI tools and training to balance their innovative potential to improve learning outcomes with the ethical, pedagogical, and practical challenges they present.

As some students struggle with access to basic technology, they are simultaneously faced with unprecedented digital advancements with the integration of generative AI tools into higher education. This has surged since ChatGPT was released, impacting policies, changing pedagogy, and shifting perceptions of academic integrity. We’ve also heard from students an overwhelming concern for clarity on AI policies.

As generative AI becomes embedded in education and the workplace, institutions must adapt to increase the value of students’ education. Administrators and instructors must balance the innovative potential of AI tools with the ethical, pedagogical, and practical challenges they present. Developing clear and inclusive policies, providing robust training programs for instructors and students, and fostering expanded access to the tools themselves will be crucial for harnessing the benefits of AI while maintaining academic integrity and quality of education.

One helpful tool is an AI-Assisted Learning Template developed by Mark Watkins, which guides students in evaluating their own AI use on a particular assignment. As he explains in an essay on Making AI Part of the Assignment, the template asks them to consider and evaluate:

• Idea generation and critical thinking
• Research and information
• Planning and organization
• Content development
• Editing and refinement

At Every Learner we’ve written that when it comes to AI and education — indeed, about all digital learning — some things remain evergreen whatever technology emerges. For example, “We will always want students to know how to use their voice and how to evaluate.”

Culturally relevant pedagogy and centering students are key parts of incorporating AI. These principles are how educators connect academic work to students’ lives, which increasingly are carried out in digital spaces.

Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from a presentation at the WCET Annual Meeting on October 9, 2024 by Emilie Cook, Manager, Digital Marketing and Communications, and Norma Hollebeke, Senior Manager, Network Programs and Services.