Culturally Sensitive Teaching in STEM Education

Culturally sensitive pedagogy can be applied in all subjects, benefiting all students. The resources resulting from the project are intended, on the one hand, to be made available to all teachers at the middle school (42), and, on the other hand, to be used in teacher training programs.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) refers to the practice of teachers understanding and recognizing the needs of learners in order to design effective instruction at both the individual and group levels and to foster a positive classroom climate (Emmer & Stough, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1996). This is particularly relevant in STEM education, as culturally diverse female students in these subjects often feel they are not among the educational winners, do not feel welcome, and lose interest in STEM subjects at an early stage (Emdin & Adjapong, 2021). In German-speaking countries, there are still too few resources that support lesson planning for students from diverse cultural backgrounds, reports Glanzer (2023), even though it has been clear to everyone—at least since the pandemic—that educational practices must be rethought so that all students can achieve academic success (Ladson-Billings, 2021). In Austria, the CRP approach in STEM subjects—which has achieved great success in other countries (e.g., New Zealand, Canada)—is largely unknown. Crucially, CRP strategies can benefit all female students. If young people are not asked about the knowledge they bring from home and perceive school as a foreign, unfeeling, and unsafe place where they do not feel they belong, this can manifest in difficult or disruptive behavior (Glynn, Cowie, Otrel-Cass & MacFarlane, 2010). The goal of the project is to present key CRP concepts in a way that is understandable to teachers, with a focus on STEM subjects in lower secondary school. Over a three-month period, concepts and implementation proposals will be developed based on a literature review and then refined through a co-creation process with teachers. The resulting teaching materials will be made available to schools and pre-service teachers as OERs.

Using the GECKO platform, the competency model outlines the skills that teachers can acquire as part of the project.