Culturally Responsive Canvas Courses

Highline students come from a broad mix of ages, races, dis(abilities), ethnicities, religious traditions, countries, sexuality/gender presentations, and life experiences; many bring multiple intersections of these cultures to their classes. 

Culturally responsive teaching is “our capacity as teachers to know and connect with the actual lived experience, personhood, and learning modalities of the students who are in our classroom” (Howard, 2006). It is about using the broad range of backgrounds that our students bring to the classroom to empower students and facilitate learning.

There are many small decisions we can make to ensure that how we build our courses in Canvas is responsive to the needs of our students.

  • Ensuring our content reflects the diverse life history of our students,
  • Writing clear instructions for assignments, 
  • Making sure our video materials are captioned and our files are readable by all, or
  • Building an online course based on an active learning, student-centered approach.

While a full exploration of culturally responsive teaching is beyond the scope of this course, rest assured that many of the things you do to create a good Canvas course will help create a culturally responsive course. Throughout this course, we will be identifying approaches that will help. They won't necessarily be called out as such; many will be familiar as good teaching practice.

A good place to start is the 10 Tips for Designing a Culturally Responsive Canvas Course Links to an external site.. Each tip will improve the learning opportunities for all the students, and make your teaching experience better. For instance, tip #5 (captioning videos) makes your material available to the hearing impaired; it also provides text that English language learners can use to study, and gives students the chance to both read and hear the content, improving opportunities for retention. 

We encourage you to explore this topic further (see below).

For Further Reading

10 Tips for Designing a Culturally Responsive Canvas Course Links to an external site.

Culturally Responsive Canvas Courses Links to an external site., Instructurecon 2016 presentation

Culturally Responsive Educators Resources

Accessible Technology Online Course

Howard, Gary R. We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know Links to an external site.. New York, Teacher’s College Press, 2006.

Jaggers, Shanna Smith and Xu, Di. 2013. "Predicting Online Student Outcomes From a Measure of Course Quality. Links to an external site." CCRC Working Paper No. 57. Community College Research Center, Teacher's College, Columbia University, New York, NY.