What Is Culturally Responsive Personalized Learning and Why Does It Matter?

By Angel Garcia

August 17, 2023

Introduction

Supporting learners on an individual and personalized basis can be extremely beneficial given the emphasis placed on fitting their unique learning needs. However, providing personalized learning opportunities and culturally relevant or responsive support can be a challenge for teachers, for example, due to large class sizes or lack of training and support.

As a Research Assistant Intern at ETS, I have had the opportunity to work with several ETS researchers, including Blair Lehman, Ph.D. and Teresa Ober, Ph.D., whose team has been developing a framework of culturally responsive personalized learning (CRPL) to tackle these issues. I interviewed them to share insights about the CRPL framework that they are developing; why it is important; and how they envision CRPL being used in classrooms across the United States.

What Is Culturally Responsive Personalized Learning?

Culturally responsive personalized learning (CRPL) is the combination of culturally responsive pedagogy with the power of personalized learning. The idea behind CRPL came in response to methods from personalized learning that focus on mastery of material and thinking about how those same methods could be used and expanded upon to consider students’ social, linguistic, or cultural norms to better serve the United States’ increasingly diverse student population. Accordingly, CRPL is designed to create a new kind of personalized learning which is culturally responsive and more relevant to the needs of all students. In their recent report, Ober, Lehman and their colleagues proposed six principles for designing learning experiences according to CRPL.

Graph illustrating culturally responsive personalized learning through three main components: 1) Flexible student-centered learning, 2) Relevant content and practice and 3) Meaningful community interaction.

They also explained that though personalized learning is not new to education, the approach tends to focus on what kind of prior knowledge the learner has attained (e.g., mastery of a math concept). In contrast, CRPL can use technologies like intelligent tutoring systems or other innovative technologies powered by AI to support teachers in providing students with personalization in a culturally responsive way (e.g., by training technology to respond to student characteristics). Lehman explained that CRPL aims to adapt beyond using only prior knowledge when supporting students. As Lehman put it, CRPL is trying “to leverage the affordances of digital technology to support teachers and provide students with those individualized experiences that they may need at various points.” For example, a digital learning platform designed along the principles of CRPL might adapt a student’s learning experience based not only on that learner’s past performances, but also based on other factors such as language, geographic references, or cultural background (Dynamic Adaptation). Lehman expressed hope that, by having more personalization based on cultural factors, CRPL can enable culturally responsive and sustainable pedagogy — recognizing, valuing and building on the unique cultural contexts of every learner.

Why Is Culturally Responsive Personalized Learning important?

Recent technological innovations such as machine learning have made large-scale personalized learning more easily accessible. As Ober pointed out, “the shift toward hybrid online friendly learning formats ... [and] AI and machine learning” has allowed “digitally mediated personalization to be much more possible.” However, Ober noted it is “important to realize that even though these technologies are available now, there’s still many open questions about how to make sure that they are appropriate for our context. That they’re not disadvantaging certain learners. That they are considering the more nuanced human aspects of learning.” In the case of CRPL, this means considering the broader contexts and characteristics of a learner.

These broader contexts may consider things like the social and cultural factors of the environments we live in and how those factors connect to the learning experience (Connection to Lived Experiences). This is especially important since, as Lehman pointed out, the U.S. student population is becoming increasingly more diverse, while our teacher population has not caught up. Because of this, Lehman sees CRPL as the start to creating an education system which allows teachers to “think about culturally relevant teaching practices as an ongoing process where they are constantly improving their understanding and the practices they are using ... to meet students where they are and connect with them.”

The Challenges of Implementing Culturally Responsive Personalized Learning

Though Lehman and Ober expressed confidence in the potential of CRPL, they also acknowledged some of the challenges of implementing CRPL, primarily in the complexity of different contexts surrounding education systems and student learning. As Ober pointed out, “there's not one sort of context, or even a small subset of contexts. There are often many overlapping contexts that are occurring that are related to students' culture and cultural identities.”

She further pointed out that this challenge does not disappear at a regional level either, “even if you’re looking into just one specific region, people may have vastly different experiences and have vastly different backgrounds.” They noted that there remains a question about whether teachers can implement CRPL effectively. Ober further talked about this challenge by noting that teachers may need to consider how they can “implement CRPL in a way that stays true to the discipline, to the content that they are trying to teach, and themselves, but also in a way that is effective, supportive, [and] nurturing for the student.”

Beyond these practical challenges, Lehman talked about some of the theoretical challenges related to CRPL. She pointed out that knowing what is culturally responsive can itself come with difficulty, even commenting “that's a challenge to figure out when we're saying something is culturally responsive exactly what are we responding to and making sure that we're doing that in ways that don't treat any group of students as a kind of monolithic group. To understand that even within a particular group, there is lots of variation.”

For CRPL to be truly effective, Lehman and Ober believe it must be flexibly designed with students, teachers, and other stakeholders (e.g., parents, community members) in mind. As Lehman noted, this means working with teachers and students, and getting their feedback to figure out what works. This will help them account for all the nuances and different kinds of variations needed to properly implement CRPL.

The Future of Culturally Responsive Personalized Learning

As we ended the interview, Lehman and Ober talked about the current and future work they have planned around CRPL. Ober explained that they have “administered a survey to a nationally representative sample of U.S. teachers to get their impressions on culturally responsive personalized learning practices." In addition, Lehman talked about how they have conducted focus groups to see what teachers think about the idea of CRPL or even whether they are already using CRPL in their own classrooms. In the future, Lehman and Ober hope to continue this line of research, given CRPL’s potential to positively change our education system.

As a member of the research team, I am incredibly optimistic for the future of CRPL. The experience of investigating and learning about CRPL has shaped my thinking about educational research, and makes me want to learn more about it in the future. While I have done diversity research in the past, this internship was my first experience with traditional education research. By looking through the lens of CRPL, I feel that we have been able to accurately merge diversity research and the efforts of past educational research to form an effective framework. I believe that CRPL can allow teachers to more easily connect with their students on a cultural level. Though the challenges of CRPL might be difficult to overcome, I am confident that with more research this sort of initiative can be incredibly beneficial to an increasingly diverse K–12 education system and help support students in new ways. In the future, I would love to continue doing this type of work either in my academic research in a future Ph.D. program or through further work at an institution such as ETS.

To learn more about CRPL, read the full paper on creating a framework for CRPL.

Additional resources on culturally responsive teaching and personalized learning are available below:

About the Author

Angel Garcia is a Research Assistant Intern at ETS. He is an undergraduate student studying psychology and philosophy at Elmhurst University. Garcia aspires to attend a Ph.D. program after graduating and plans to study the philosophy of science, critical theory and equity in higher education.