Andie Francis

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3 Steps to Boost Culturally Informed Literacy Instruction in Your ELA Classroom

By Andie Francis Lenhart, Assistant Teaching Professor, Northern Arizona University

Back-to-school is fast approaching. And let’s be honest–most secondary English teachers don’t look forward to in-service days, except those of us with a penchant for mediocre snack trays and back-to-school-themed PowerPoints (believe it or not, we exist). 

It’s probably one of the most stressful times outside of standardized test season, especially since most of our non-English teacher colleagues look to us, sometimes solely, to teach essential 21st-century literacy skills to our school’s diverse student population. 

Whatever approach you take in your day-to-day practice, research has made it clear that teachers face new challenges when implementing 21st-century literacy instruction that is authentically engaging for students and culturally informed (Kelly & Djonko Moore, 2021).

Kelly and Djonko Moore (2021) argued that culturally informed literacy instruction:

  • affirms students as members of their own cultural communities 
  • helps students achieve high academic standards
  • develops students’ critical consciousness toward social issues

If your school’s professional development sessions have left you hankering for 21st-century literacy instruction strategies that are culturally informed and meet state and schoolwide standards for literacy learning, then read on. 

In this blog, I describe key obstacles others have faced in implementing culturally informed literacy instruction. Next, I argue the importance of culturally informed literacy instruction. Finally, I’ll provide three actionable steps to boost culturally informed literacy instruction in your English classes for students in grades 6-12. 

Additionally, I pair each step with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) / International Reading Association’s (IRA) Standards for English Language Arts. These standards are designed to complement other national and state standards you might be using in your ELA classroom.

Common Obstacles in Implementing Culturally Informed Literacy Instruction

According to Mirra and Garcia (2021), teachers face a few common obstacles in implementing culturally informed literacy instruction. They attributed some of these obstacles to teachers’ unique challenges in the 21st-century classroom. Others were due to teachers’ perceived or actual obstacles in the classroom and their philosophies and values regarding literacy. 

In their review of research conducted in 57 K-12 classroom contexts, Mirra and Garcia (2021) noted the following three obstacles across the majority of their reviewed studies:

  • Teachers’ conception of 21st-century learning, especially concerning the use of digital tools, lacked an overall vision. Most teachers implemented technology use in a surface-level way instead of for interactivity and interconnection.
  • Teachers treated their classrooms as training grounds for the real world rather than an active part. Understandably, teachers were reluctant to connect their students to the outside world due to fear of risk and the protection of their students.
  • Teachers privileged college and career readiness over 21st-century citizenship that explicitly addressed or challenged social dilemmas. 

While many educators shared these obstacles, the three steps mentioned in this blog can help you build upon or improve your culturally-informed literacy instruction.

Why Your Classroom Needs Culturally Informed Literacy Instruction

Ladson-Billings’ (2019) research and my own experience as an educator working in multilingual and multicultural inclusive classrooms have taught me that teachers can effectively implement culturally informed literacy instruction, even if they work with students from racial or cultural backgrounds different from their own (Kelly & Djonko, 2022, p. 569). 

As a teacher, you’re dedicated to your students’ best interests year-round, which doesn’t stop at helping them prepare for 21st-century economic and civic life. Beyond composing with new digital tools, you want your students to grow their critical knowledge and prepare them to engage in complex and often inequitable social contexts (Mirra & Garcia, 2021). 

After all, this knowledge will likely contribute to improved harmony in your classroom throughout the year and to your students’ civic awareness and personal well-being for the rest of their lives (Mirra & Garcia, 2021). 

Since culturally informed literacy greatly benefits your students, learning key ways to implement these practices in your classroom is worthwhile. This is especially true if you’ve “flattened out” (Mirra & Garcia, 2021, p. 489) in your literacy instruction or think you’re out of touch with your students’ everyday literacy practices. 

Why not broaden opportunities for your students and allow them to show and gain their expertise (DePalma & Alexander, 2018)? 

Three Steps to Boost Culturally Informed Literacy Instruction

As an educator who values new literacies, I’m exploring specific ways secondary English teachers can implement culturally informed literacy instruction. In the following section, I’ll discuss the three most common steps I’ve noted through my scholarship and during lessons with my students. 

  1. Orient student composition toward personal, local, and real-world issues (Mirra & Garcia, 2021).
  2. Engage students in public dialogue around common interests or civic concerns (Mirra & Garcia, 2021).
  3. Partner with a community member, local professional, or content expert (DePalma & Alexander, 2018; Mirra & Garcia, 2021). 

I’ve worked with many students over the years. I know strategies that work for some won’t necessarily work for others. I encourage you to use them to support your literacy leadership but adjust them to be used within your teaching practice for your students.

1. Orient Student Composition Toward Personal, Local, and Real-World Issues 

One major step toward culturally informed literacy is to situate classroom learning in a way that acknowledges and addresses the world in which your students live (Mirra & Garcia, 2021). 

In other words, preparing your students to live in a globally connected society starts by helping them pay attention to “the messy reality” (Mirra & Garcia, 2021, p. 490). Your students can make stronger connections between themselves and society by discussing real issues, sometimes messy, and exploring their identities. 

This step can also help you solidify your vision for using digital-composing tools rather than just checking off the box for integrating technology.

For example, Price-Dennis et al. (2015) tasked students with creating comics using digital tools to help their peers understand their life experiences. One student explored her experience as a biracial student with an identified learning disability. 

The students also engaged in a literature circle that helped them shape inquiries to post publicly on social media platforms. This approach aimed to honor students as knowledge producers, particularly students from traditionally minoritized and stigmatized communities (Price-Dennis, 2015).

Further examples from Mirra & Garcia (2021) explain how to engage students in addressing local and real-world issues, including having them: 

  • geo-tag important places (Anne et al., 2012; Hagevik, 2011)
  • address youth disengagement (Shuptrine, 2013) or plastic pollution (Kitagawa et al., 2018)
  • write about places and people that matter to them (Atkinson & Swaggerty, 2011; Chisholm & Trent, 2013; Crafton et al., 2007; Tecet et al., 2018).

NCTE /IRA English Language Arts Standards: 

11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

2. Engage Students in Public Dialogue Around Common Interests or Civic Concerns

On top of prioritizing students’ experiences, implementing public dialogue can be a great way to help students engage as citizens who contribute to matters of public life (Mirra & Garcia, 2021). This step can help you overcome the pitfall of treating your classroom as a training ground for the real world rather than an embodiment of it (Mirra & Garcia, 2021).

One example involved students’ analysis of a front-page news story about an older adult evicted from her home (Crafton et al., 2007). After analyzing the article, the teacher helped students form questions about the situation in their community and engage in an email dialogue with the journalist (Crafton et al., 2007). With the response from the journalist, students developed solutions to support their community member’s needs (Crafton et al., 2007).

Another classroom study detailed how students analyzed inequitable representations of gender on popular websites. These students created counternarrative posters that helped them critically grapple with the issue of gender representation and engage publically through a multimodal project (Kesler, Tinio, & Nolan, 2016).

NCTE /IRA English Language Arts Standard: 

7. Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and non-print texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.

3. Partner With a Community Member, Local Professional, or Content Expert

If I don’t have literacy in a particular area, I call upon my social and professional networks. As in the example mentioned in step two (Crafton et al., 2007), research and experience show that facilitating collaboration with specialists with different expertise levels can help us overcome challenges in implementing culturally informed literacy instruction (De Palma & Alexander, 2017). 

Partnerships with experts can help you avoid solely prioritizing college and career readiness (Mirra & Garcia, 2021). While you’ll introduce students to college and career skills through new partnerships, you can also emphasize helping students achieve high academic standards, a tenant of culturally informed literacy instruction (Mirra & Garcia, 2021).

You’ll also want to consider what learning needs to be in place to support students in collaborative composing and consider forming partnerships to fill in knowledge or skill “gaps” (DePalma & Alexander, 2018; Scane, 2022). 

One published example detailed how students composed collaborative marketing videos for a first-year university writing program using iMovie (DePalma & Alexander, 2018). While this lesson was designed for post-secondary students, it could be translated into a secondary classroom by having students create collaborative marketing videos for literary-oriented clubs or literacy-enrichment programs. 

DePalma and Alexander’s (2018) aim was to help students gain knowledge and experience through hands-on workshops with student and professional experts that their teacher leveraged during the project.

If this inspires you, but you want more real-classroom examples, you can view my partnerships with the Northern Arizona University Cline Library Maker Lab, the Museum of Northern Arizona, and campus radio station KNAU under my website’s “[Teaching]” tab.

NCTE /IRA English Language Arts Standard: 

8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.

Take a First Step Toward Implementing Culturally Informed Literacy Instruction

As secondary English teachers, we strive to create meaningful literacy learning experiences that match our students’ unique cultures and identities. And I promise you; you’re not alone in wondering where to start or how to improve. I wrote this blog to help you take your first steps or boost culturally informed literacy instruction. 

While researchers like Kelly and Djonko (2022) offer many excellent suggestions for implementing the three steps I’ve outlined, the most meaningful I’ve come across is identifying one unit you currently teach that you can transform (p. 573). 

With your unit, consider moving beyond merely using digital tools or the classroom as a training ground, and give your students a chance to engage with one another, their communities, and global society. Consider one of the project examples I mentioned as your springboard. And, remember, I’m rooting for you to learn even more about building the successful, culturally informed classroom you’ve been working towards. 🙌 

If you have a success story, are interested in sharing your unit plan, or want to partner with me to design a culturally informed literacy learning experience, I’d love to hear from you. 

Content in this blog is for general information only and is not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

References

Annetta, L., Burton, E.P., Frazier, W., Cheng, R., & Chmiel, M. (2012). Augmented reality games: Using technology on a budget. Science Scope, 36(3), 54–60.

Atkinson, T., & Swaggerty, E. (2011). Empowering fourth-grade researchers: Reaping the rewards of Web 2.0 student-centered learning. Language Arts, 89(2), 99–112.

Crafton, L.K., Brennan, M., & Silvers, P. (2007). Critical inquiry and multiliteracies in a first-grade classroom. Language Arts, 84(6), 510–518.

Chisholm, J.S., & Trent, B. (2013). Digital storytelling in a place-based composition course. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(4), 307–318. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.244

DePalma, & Alexander, K. P. (2018). Harnessing writers’ potential through distributed collaboration: A pedagogical approach for supporting student learning in multimodal composition. System, 77, 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.01.007

Hagevik, R.A. (2011). Fostering 21st century learning with geospatial technologies: Middle grades students learn content through GPS adventures. Middle School Journal, 43(1), 16–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00940 771.2011.11461789

Kelly, & Djonko-Moore, C. (2022). What does culturally informed literacy instruction look like? The Reading Teacher, 75(5), 567–574. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2068

Kesler, T., Tinio, P.P.L., & Nolan, B.T. (2016). What’s our position? A critical media literacy study of popular culture websites with eighth-grade special education students. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 32(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573 569.2013.857976

Kitagawa, L., Pombo, E., & Davis, T. (2018). Plastic pollution to solution. Science and Children, 55(7), 38–45. https://doi.org/10.2505/4/sc18_055_07_38 

Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: Aka the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84.

Mirra, & Garcia, A. (2021). In search of the meaning and purpose of 21st‐century literacy learning: A critical review of research and practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(3), 463–496. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.313 

National Council of Teachers of English. (2012, November). NCTE / IRA standards for the English language arts. National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/resources/standards/ncte-ira-standards-for-the-english-language-arts/

Biersdorfer, J. D. (2020). Create your own digital comics whether you can draw or not. New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/technology/personaltech/create-your-own-digital-comics-whether-you-can-draw-or-not.html

Price-Dennis, D., Holmes, K.A., & Smith, E. (2015). Exploring digital literacy practices in an inclusive classroom. The Reading Teacher, 69(2), 195–205. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1398 

Scane. (2022). Supporting the work of collaborative multimodal composition. Language Arts, 100(1), 47–49.

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Tecce DeCarlo, M.J., Grant, A., Lee, V.J., & Neuman, D. (2018). Information and digital literacies in a kindergarten classroom: An
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