Webinar Recording: https://youtu.be/7TwOfWTTYN0

Webinar Slides:  https://bit.ly/3aBRsIW

In this webinar, Dr. Melissa L. Salazar, CEO of ESCALA Educational Services, familiarizes faculty and administrators with the concept of culturally responsive instruction as applied to the specific context of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). Dr. Salazar draws on her organization’s work with more than 300 HSI faculty and staff over the past 7 years to show how culturally responsive instruction can close achievement gaps for Latinx students. Dr. Salazar describes the principles that underlie culturally responsive instruction, and uses these principles to explain why certain instructional strategies are more important than others in HSIs. 

She also provides faculty with a student survey tool that can help faculty hone in on what students need, and help them to create a learning environment that is both academically rigorous and culturally balanced. Concrete examples of how STEM faculty in ESCALA’s programs have used results of their student surveys to adapt their course to be more culturally responsive are also included. Additionally, Dr. Elena Ortiz, Biology faculty from Phoenix College will share how she has implemented an ESCALA-based practice and the impacts to her classroom. Bobby Alvarado, Welding Instructor from Arizona Western College (AWC), will present practices he uses at AWC to help his students feel welcome, respectful of each other's culture and backgrounds, engaged with STEM, and/or prepared for the cultures they may encounter as they transition to the workforce.  

This webinar is brought to you by the NSF funded HSI ATE Hub Project, a collaborative program with HSI KickStarter (Science Foundation Arizona Center for STEM at Arizona State University) and Mentor-Connect (Florence Darlington Technical College).  Providing culturally competent practices and resources that are critical to the success of underrepresented college students in advanced technological education programs is a strong emphasis of the HSI ATE Hub.  The collaborative implements a two-step intervention for HSIs: Colleges that have developed STEM program improvement plans through Kickstarter’s comprehensive technical assistance process transfer to Mentor-Connect when they identify ATE as their program of choice. Mentor-Connect then provides mentoring and technical support to guide HSI faculty and staff members through the ATE grant development funding process.

Keywords: Culturally responsive teaching, CAT, Culturally inclusive, cultural competence, HSI, ESCALA, individualistic cultural frameworks, low context, collectivistic cultural frameworks, high context, atmosphere of academic validation, Improving Practice and Transparency in Learning Content, Students’ Cultural Wealth, disaggregated data