Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy

High standards, high support: tough on ideas and kind to people.

Culturally inclusive pedagogy is the ongoing practice of creating learning environments in which students are treated as full participants: intellectually capable, culturally situated, differently experienced, and worthy of both challenge and care. Students should be able to encounter demanding ideas without having to overcome avoidable barriers to belonging, access, or participation.

This is not an “add-on” to good teaching. It is part of good teaching. Nor is it a checklist that can be completed once. Inclusive pedagogy requires reflection, relationship, responsive course design, and a willingness to change our practices when we learn that they are not serving students as intended.

My approach also connects culturally inclusive teaching to a wider biospheric curriculum. Students enter classrooms with cultural identities and lived histories, but they also enter as beings embedded in places, ecosystems, communities, and relationships with the more-than-human world. Inclusive environmental education should help students see themselves as belonging both in the learning community and within the living systems they study.

Why Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy?

Students deserve teaching that recognizes their humanity, respects difference, and gives them meaningful opportunities to learn. They also learn more when courses offer clear expectations, relevant and well-structured material, active practice, useful feedback, and a genuine sense that their presence and contributions matter.

Learning is not governed by one simple pathway through the brain. It emerges through interactions among attention, emotion, prior knowledge, motivation, practice, feedback, metacognition, social context, and the design of the learning environment. Belonging and trust help students take intellectual risks; relevance helps them connect new ideas to existing knowledge; active engagement and repeated practice help them build and reorganize understanding.

Inclusive teaching does not mean lowering academic standards, avoiding difficult subjects, or protecting students from all discomfort. Learning often involves uncertainty, disagreement, error, and revision. Our responsibility is to distinguish productive intellectual challenge from unnecessary exclusion—and to pair demanding work with the structure and support students need to grow.

For a longer guide, see How to Create a Culturally Inclusive Syllabus & Course.

What Does Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy Look Like?

The following six commitments overlap and reinforce one another.

1. Build belonging, trust, and relationship

Learn and use students’ names and preferred forms of address.
Invite students to share pronouns if they wish, but do not require public disclosure.
Use a pre-course survey to learn about students’ backgrounds, goals, prior experience, access needs, and concerns.
Greet students, make room for informal conversation, and communicate that their presence matters.
Use a warm, direct syllabus tone that conveys both confidence in students and a willingness to help them succeed.
Explain how and when students can seek help. Make office hours feel like an ordinary part of learning rather than a place students go only when they are failing.
Ask for feedback during the course, including anonymous feedback, and close the loop by telling students what you heard, what you will change, and what you cannot change.
Repair mistakes. An educator’s willingness to acknowledge harm, correct an error, or revisit a decision can strengthen rather than diminish trust.

Belonging is not something students should have to earn through conformity. It is something a learning community extends by making clear that students are recognized, needed, and able to contribute. At the same time, relational teaching does not require unlimited instructor availability or the abandonment of healthy boundaries. Care can be warm, dependable, and sustainable.

2. Design for access and difference from the beginning

Provide course materials in accessible formats and make them available early enough for students to plan and prepare.
Use readable document structures, descriptive links, captions, alternative text, and sufficient color contrast.
Clarify unfamiliar language, disciplinary conventions, and the “hidden curriculum” rather than assuming all students already know them.
Offer more than one meaningful way to engage with material—for example, speaking, writing, drawing, mapping, observing, or working with data—when the learning objective permits.
Provide multiple ways to participate. Fast, public speaking should not be the only route into a classroom conversation.
Anticipate sensory, mobility, health, transportation, financial, caregiving, religious, and technological barriers, particularly in field and experiential courses.
Build flexibility into course systems where possible rather than requiring students to disclose private or painful details to receive humane treatment.
Connect students with formal accessibility resources while recognizing that legal accommodation is a floor, not the full extent of inclusive design.

The CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines offer a useful framework: provide multiple means of engagement, representation, and action or expression while preserving meaningful intellectual goals. Choice should support agency and access, not create a maze of disconnected options.

3. Make learning relevant, situated, and connected

Explain why the course, unit, reading, method, or assignment matters.
Connect new ideas to students’ prior knowledge without assuming that everyone shares the same experiences.
Use cases and examples drawn from more than one region, community, or cultural context.
Ask students to connect course concepts to questions that matter in their communities and future work.
Teach topics in their historical, institutional, ecological, and political contexts rather than presenting knowledge as if it emerged from nowhere.
Move among individual, community, landscape, and planetary scales.
Revisit central questions across the semester so that learning accumulates rather than becoming a sequence of isolated tasks.

In environmental courses, relevance should not mean treating nature only as a source of examples for human concerns. Place-based learning can show how culture, history, geology, organisms, land use, and environmental change shape one another. My Sense of Place site offers field notes and essays that model this movement among close observation, natural history, culture, memory, and belonging.

4. Expand whose knowledge and voice count

Assign work by scholars, practitioners, writers, and knowledge holders with varied identities, locations, and intellectual traditions.
Move beyond representation alone: examine which questions are asked, which methods are legitimized, who is cited, and who has authority to interpret or apply knowledge.
Treat people and communities as thinkers and knowledge makers, not merely as case studies or examples of harm.
Include contemporary work by Indigenous, Black, diasporic, disabled, queer, working-class, and other communities marginalized by institutions and systems.
Place scholarship in context. Do not ask one author, speaker, or student to represent an entire group.
Invite guest speakers and community partners only when their participation is purposeful, respectful, and appropriately compensated.
Let students bring in relevant materials and experiences without expecting them to educate the class about an identity they hold.
Attend to permission, attribution, cultural protocols, data sovereignty, and the downstream consequences of sharing knowledge.

Indigenous sciences and knowledge systems should never be presented as a single, interchangeable alternative to Western science. Whenever possible, identify the particular Nation, community, language, place, and intellectual tradition involved. The principle of Two-Eyed Seeing offers one model for bringing Mi’kmaw and Western knowledges into relationship without collapsing one into the other. My related idea of multi-eyed seeing invites students to approach a question through multiple disciplined forms of attention—scientific, historical, cultural, sensory, artistic, intuitive, and ethical—while still asking how claims are supported and who has the authority to share them.

5. Structure active learning and collaboration equitably

Use activities that require students to retrieve, apply, explain, compare, interpret, create, or revise—not simply listen.
Pair active learning with metacognitive reflection: What did students notice? How did their thinking change? Where are they uncertain?
Give students time to think or write before asking them to speak.
Use small groups strategically, with clear tasks, adequate time, and roles that distribute participation and responsibility.
Rotate group roles so that leadership, note-taking, technical work, and public speaking do not repeatedly fall to the same people.
Monitor group dynamics. Collaboration is not automatically equitable simply because students have been placed together.
Invite students to help shape discussion agreements, examples, or selected elements of course process while retaining the instructor’s responsibility for learning, access, and safety.
Develop student leadership through facilitation, peer teaching, field-team roles, or synthesis activities.
Ask students to explain important ideas to one another, while ensuring that peers are not expected to replace the instructor’s teaching.

Active learning is most effective when it is purposeful, structured, and connected to a learning goal. It should increase access to thinking, not merely reward students who are already comfortable speaking quickly or taking social risks.

6. Cultivate rigor, agency, feedback, and growth

State learning goals clearly and explain how activities and assessments support them.
Make assignment purposes, tasks, and evaluation criteria transparent.
Provide models or annotated examples when they will help students understand unfamiliar genres.
Use low-stakes practice before high-stakes evaluation.
Give feedback that is timely, specific, respectful, and oriented toward a next step.
Build in revision when revision is part of the intellectual work you want students to learn.
Use assessment methods that measure the intended learning rather than unrelated familiarity with academic conventions.
Incorporate self-assessment and reflection so students can monitor their learning and identify effective strategies.
Communicate that expertise develops through practice, feedback, and sustained engagement—but do not use “growth mindset” language to imply that structural barriers can be overcome by attitude alone.
Maintain high standards while offering multiple forms of support for reaching them.

Diversity Statements, Pronouns, and Land Acknowledgments

Statements matter only when course practices make them credible. A diversity or inclusion statement can clarify an educator’s commitments, but students will evaluate those commitments through daily choices: whose contributions are recognized, how conflict is handled, whether access needs are taken seriously, how grading works, and whether feedback results in change.

Similarly, adding pronouns to a syllabus or introduction can help normalize respectful forms of address, but students should not be compelled to disclose information about gender publicly. Invite rather than require, provide ways to update information privately, and be prepared to correct mistakes without turning the correction into a performance.

A land acknowledgment should be more than ceremonial language. It should emerge from careful research, name Indigenous Peoples and Nations accurately, recognize their continuing presence and sovereignty, and connect acknowledgment to relationship and action. Consider:

Why am I offering this acknowledgment in this course or setting?
Whose land and histories am I discussing, and how do I know?
Have I used present and future tenses as well as the past?
Does the course return to these histories and relationships, or mention them only once?
What concrete action, resource commitment, partnership, or change in practice accompanies the words?
Am I asking Indigenous people to provide uncompensated labor that I could first undertake myself?

My Land Acknowledgments page includes Duke- and Durham-specific history, guidance, examples, and resources. The Native Governance Center’s Beyond Land Acknowledgment guide is particularly useful for shifting attention from wording alone to accountable action.

Maps such as Native Land Digital can be starting points, not final authorities. Colonial displacement, changing boundaries, overlapping relationships, and limitations in available data make any map incomplete. Whenever possible, learn directly from the public resources of the relevant Nations and from relationships developed respectfully over time.

Teaching Histories of Colonialism, Racism, and Environmental Power

Culturally inclusive teaching asks educators to examine the history of the discipline itself. Which people, places, and practices made its knowledge possible? Whose work was erased or extracted? Which assumptions were treated as universal? How have scientific, academic, legal, or conservation institutions contributed to dispossession and exclusion?

Educators do not need to possess perfect answers before opening these questions. We do need to prepare, engage relevant scholarship, frame conversations carefully, and avoid asking marginalized students to carry the discussion. The goal is not to add a brief “dark history” before returning to business as usual. It is to help students understand how historical power continues to shape present methods, institutions, landscapes, and environmental outcomes.

Language also matters. Decolonization should not be used as a loose metaphor for any form of curricular improvement. In settler-colonial contexts it raises material questions of land, sovereignty, and Indigenous life. Often, diversifying, globalizing, culturally sustaining, or anti-colonial more accurately describes the educational work being undertaken. I discuss these distinctions and their relationship to place, the biosphere, and more-than-human ethics on my page Toward a Biospheric Curriculum.

Inclusive Environmental and Field Education

Environmental fields have their own cultures. Students may be asked to adopt particular ways of dressing, speaking, moving outdoors, tolerating discomfort, or displaying expertise. Nature is sometimes presented as culturally neutral even though landscapes hold histories of Indigenous sovereignty, racialized violence, labor, exclusion, recreation, management, and belonging.

Inclusive environmental teaching therefore asks us to:

Treat field skills as learnable rather than as evidence that some students naturally “belong outdoors.”
Explain equipment, clothing, transportation, physical demands, safety risks, and costs in advance.
Provide gear or low-cost alternatives whenever possible.
Offer accessible or equivalent ways to meet learning goals when terrain, weather, health, disability, caregiving, or transportation creates barriers.
Avoid assuming that forests, farms, waterways, or rural places feel safe and welcoming to everyone.
Teach the ecological and cultural histories of field sites together.
Recognize the living world as more than scenery or a collection of objects to measure.
Invite sensory attention, observation, reflection, and wonder alongside technical practice.
Ask what responsibilities follow from studying a place or organism and how students might give something back.

This is one place where culturally inclusive and biospheric pedagogy meet. Students should be able to see themselves as legitimate participants in environmental work while also learning to understand humans as participants—not masters—in ecological relationships.

Reflection: The Continuing Work of an Educator

Reflection is essential, but reflection that never alters practice is incomplete. Cultural humility asks us to remain teachable: to examine our assumptions, notice patterns in who participates and succeeds, seek feedback, repair mistakes, and revise course structures.

Useful questions include:

What do I assume students already know about how to succeed in this course?
Whose comfort, communication style, or prior experience is treated as the norm?
Which students receive my attention, encouragement, flexibility, or benefit of the doubt?
Whose knowledge appears in the course, and in what role?
Which barriers are essential to the learning goal, and which are simply inherited habits?
Who speaks, who is interrupted, who performs invisible group labor, and whose ideas are credited?
How do my assessments reward or penalize familiarity with unspoken academic conventions?
What feedback have students given me, and what evidence would show that I responded?
What relationships does this course sustain or interrupt?
What responsibilities follow from what we teach and learn?

Mindfulness, contemplative practices, journaling, reading groups, caucus groups, workshops, and coaching can all support self-awareness. They are tools, not substitutes for structural change. The work becomes meaningful when reflection shapes materials, policies, relationships, assessments, resource distribution, and institutional action.

A Quick Course-Design Checklist

Before the course

Review the representation, authority, and context of assigned voices.
Identify access barriers in materials, activities, fieldwork, and assessments.
Clarify learning goals, assignment purposes, criteria, and routes to support.
Create a pre-course survey and a plan for using what students share.
Research the ecological, cultural, and political histories of the places used in the course.
Decide how stated commitments will appear in actual course practices.

During the course

Learn names and establish respectful communication practices.
Explain the purpose of activities and connect them to prior and future learning.
Use structured, varied forms of participation.
Observe whose voices and labor shape discussions and group work.
Offer low-stakes practice, actionable feedback, and opportunities for reflection or revision.
Ask for feedback early enough to make meaningful changes.

After the course

Examine patterns in participation, outcomes, feedback, and student work.
Identify where students encountered productive challenge and where they encountered avoidable friction.
Record changes to make while the evidence is still fresh.
Consider what the course gave back to the people, communities, partners, places, or living systems involved.

Selected Resources

Selected Reading on Race, Nature, and Environmental Fields

William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground (1995)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014)
Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (2019)
Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces (2014)
Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement (2016)
Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness (1999)
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012)
Kyle Powys Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now” and related work on Indigenous climate justice
Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018)

References

CAST. (2024). CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, version 3.0.

Dewsbury, B., & Brame, C. J. (2019). Inclusive teaching. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2), fe2. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-01-0021

Emdin, C. (2016). For white folks who teach in the hood . . . and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Beacon Press.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How people learn II: Learners, contexts, and cultures. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24783

Native Governance Center. (n.d.). Beyond land acknowledgment: A guide.

Nunn, L. M. (2021). College belonging: How first-year and first-generation students navigate campus life. Rutgers University Press.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244

Tanner, K. D. (2013). Structure matters: Twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 12(3), 322–331. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-06-0115

Theobald, E. J., et al. (2020). Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(12), 6476–6483. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916903117

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Citation

Recommended citation: Cagle, N. L. (2026). Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy: Belonging, Relationship, and Care. Available at https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/nicolettecagle/diversity-work/culturally-inclusive-pedagogy/.

Last updated September 2026.