EDG 705

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Summer II

Professor Roopika Risam

Image of umbrella over identity markers

Welcome!

Welcome to the Canvas site for Professor Roopika Risam's EDC 705! This fully asynchronous online course serves as an introduction to culturally responsive teaching. As student demographics on the North Shore, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and in the United States shift and change, we as educators must be prepared to understand the influence of culture - in its many forms - on our students, on our teaching, and on ourselves.

At our present moment, when anti-Black racism has become part of public discourse, ensuring that we understand the relationship between our own cultural identities and those of our students is as important as ever. This course is designed to help you define culturally responsive teaching, articulate how your own cultural perspectives influence your teaching, identify how your students' cultural perspectives affect their experiences in the classroom and in school, and assess how your colleagues' perspectives and even your school culture influence student learning.

As this is a fully asynchronous course, there are no Zoom sessions required for this course. However, I am more than happy to meet with you individually to discuss your goals, interests, and concerns about the course.

Navigating this Course

To navigate this course, please use the "Modules" link in the lefthand column of the screen. Each module corresponds with a week of our time together.

You can access the course syllabus here . Details of our weekly work together will be available in the module for each week.

Each Monday, you should begin with the welcome note in the module, which gives instructions for our work for the week. Generally, this work includes reading or viewing assigned course material, posting to our discussion board, and reflecting on culturally responsive teaching. At the end of the session, you will also complete a project on culturally responsive teaching.

Field-based Assignments

Because this course requires field-based assignments but is taking place in Summer II during a pandemic, you will be completing several video exercises to look at culturally responsive teaching in practice. A description of assignments is available on the syllabus.