There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.

Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little hard to turn down.

So we scheduled an interview…which would be recorded for transcription. The feedback would be anonymously cited and aggregated in a qualitative research study that would feed into a doctoral dissertation and a “best practices” published paper. The doctoral student himself is using Dr. James A. Banks’ framework http://faculty.washington.edu/jbanks/index.htm and is an administrator at a community college in Washington State.

Some Thoughtful Discussions

I won’t say more about the broadly worded questions or the interview itself except to discuss here some of the ideas raised. As an online instructor, I find that instructional strategies often involve connecting with learners where they’re at. That means understanding something of a person, something of culture, languages, points-of-view, and meanings. In a world that is multi-cultural (even though there’s plenty of denial about such changes), being aware and empathic is about effective teaching.

Learning has to exist in an environment of safety, in part because learning is risk-taking. While some argue that online learning is somehow identity-less because it is in virtual space, people do not leave their actual lives behind when they go online. They bring real life concerns into the virtual world. Not noticing race or gender or identity online doesn’t somehow mean that these factors do not exist or do not affect the learning.

The question then becomes how to teach in a “culturally centered” way. Online, there are fewer channels—both formal and informal—to collect information about students and to learn about them. I’ve seen faculty who’ve built these online channels to collect information and to let students know about the others in the course (through various types of telepresence). For example, there are plenty of opportunities for self-introductions, self-expression, interactivity, group learning, socializing, and providing mutual support.

Instructional activities that reach into the community and broaden learning may have to be done in a localized way for learners in their own circumstances. These may include service learning, with the learning shared among many, through multimedia documentations and personal journals of the work.

The strategy of using emergent curriculums that are co-created by learners (and often co-assessed by learners) often allows for more diverse learning…and closer connections between the learner and applications for individuals at their lived levels. The co-development of an assessment rubric may extend this concept of diverse learning even further.

Hard Sciences Exempt from Diversity Concerns?

How would one approach the commentary that the hard sciences are taught one way and one way only, and that there’s no room for diversity concerns there?

In a way, the best response to that was that most of the hard sciences that I deal with involve professionals who hail from a range of countries and cultures. Some of the highest performers in research and teaching are people from various parts of the world. The cross-fertilization of ideas are often highly productive.

Advice for Online Instructors?

Live fully. Get into scrapes. Travel widely. Learn the technologies really well to create a full learning experience. Create safe learning spaces. Support mutual communications of the learners. Help the individuals in a course give each other respect and develop understandings of each other’s realities. Encourage small group collaborations.

Assignments that Typify Cultural Sensitivities

The interview then came down to assignments that typify cultural sensitivities. I sent in a link to a long-term project that dealt with cultural sensitivities, but it was hard to find discrete examples to send. Rather, there would be whole course curriculums, but isolating a particular stand-alone assignment that showed cultural sensitivities seemed somewhat harder (beyond the simple ones that show empathy).

It was encouraging to see work moving in this direction.