Sonia Nieto (2017), in her paper titled On Becoming Sociocultural Mediators, emphasizes the importance of educators taking steps to learn about their students and their communities in respectful ways that build trust and relationships. She explains that sociocultural mediators “not only introduce students to other perspectives and experiences, but also that they encourage students to carry who they are along with them” (p. 10). Hammond (2015) urges educators to expose themselves to cultural experiences similar to those of their students in order to “experience alternative ways of doing and being” (p. 62). Consider the following steps that you might take (adapted from Nieto, 2017, and Hammond, 2015): Explore the history of students’ home countries and cultures.Visit students’ families in their homes or communities.Conduct family interviews.Develop family and community surveys.Write letters to students sharing about yourself and ask students to write you back. The questions in 2d might be a good starting place for the type of information you could share with students.Watch movies or television series that can help you step into another culture and that portray that culture in a positive and accurate light. Reflect on patterns of both verbal and nonverbal communication.

While being color-blind in relation to your teaching may seem like an effective way to treat all students fairly and equally, ignoring cultural, racial, and linguistic differences actually undermines the potential of being able to connect with each student based on her or his unique background. Being color-blind inherently denies students an opportunity to share facets of their identity. When individuals profess to be color-blind, they may also overlook the role that implicit bias can play in their interactions with students and families who come from cultures other than their own. Implicit bias is a result of our brain’s work of categorizing and stereotyping as a way to process large amounts of information (Hammond, 2015; Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, 2013). Bias can lead you to make assumptions about others and ignore the inherent inequities that exist in education, such as inequitable access to college preparation and honors courses, greater numbers of disciplinary referrals, lower scores on state achievement tests, and lower graduation rates, among many others.

The role of the teacher may vary between collectivist and individualist cultures. Collectivist cultures are those in which group goals and needs are generally placed above individual needs. In contrast, individualist cultures tend to value individual goals, individual rights, and independence. Students from collectivist cultures (e.g., Mexico, Korea, Somalia) may have been taught that they should show respect for teachers at all times by carefully listening to their teacher and not asking questions or disagreeing (Rothstein-Fisch & Trumbull, 2008). Group harmony is considered most important. In contrast, students from individualist cultures (e.g., Australia, Germany, US) recognize that they will be valued for speaking out for their unique ideas and opinions. They also tend to expect a more student-centered approach to teaching and learning.

Self-awareness is the first step in building cultural competence. As anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1959) explains, “Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own” (p. 30). In order to begin the work of building cultural competence, it is essential that you understand the various beliefs and experiences that shape your cultural identity and recognize the impact your identity has on how you teach and interact with others. Self-awareness requires you to acknowledge personal bias and take opportunities to reflect on this bias and the implications that it has on your interactions with others.

Student-centered learning is not a new concept in the field of education, and there are a variety of approaches that fit under the umbrella of student-centered learning, such as collaborative learning, inquiry-based learning, and project-based learning. Student-centered learning can be defined as an instructional approach in which the students in the classroom shape the content, instructional activities, materials, assessment, and/or pace of the learning. Student-centered learning also focuses on the idea that students are provided with opportunities to learn from one another rather than solely from the teacher.

No matter how you define culture, it is important to remember that everyone is a member of various cultural groups and that even within cultural groups there can be great variability in terms of beliefs, expectations, and behaviors. For this reason, it is important that we don’t put students on the spot and ask them to speak for an entire cultural group. Instead, we can ask them to share their experiences as a member of one or more cultural groups in a way that puts them at ease (e.g., with a partner, in a small group, in writing)—but only if they feel comfortable doing so.

In the book White Fragility, DiAngelo (2018) tells us that, like gender, race is also a social construct with there being no true biological race. External, superficial characteristics that are commonly used to define race (e.g., hair texture, skin color) are actually not reliable indicators of genetic variation between people (Cooper et al., 2003). However, many tend to believe racial differences are biologic. Instead, DiAngelo (2018) imparts us to understand that society was organized along racial lines. She shares that the idea of racial inferiority in the United States was created as the US was being formed to justify unequal treatment of enslaved African people, Native Americans, and Mexicans, among other people.

The takeaway is that MLs aren’t coming to school with the same shared knowledge. Intake forms used when students enroll in a school or district may not catch these differences either. For example, it may not be apparent that a student enrolling from Mexico speaks an indigenous language instead of Spanish as his or her home language.