Five Steps Toward Successful Culturally Relevant Text Selection and Integration

Given the increasing diversity in U.S. schools and the impact of texts that reflect students’ identities and experiences in the world, it has become imperative for teachers to be able to effectively integrate culturally relevant texts. In this article, the authors show how to do this using five steps to guide the process. First, teachers need to recognize the need for culturally responsive instruction. Second, they need to know more about their students’ lives; the authors present three methods for discovering this. Third, teachers need ways to search for culturally relevant texts, such as using multicultural booklists and Google searches to learn more about authors. Fourth, the authors provide a construct for selecting a text that will likely be culturally relevant for a specific student. Fifth, the authors provide an example of critical questions and personal response opportunities for using these texts within instruction.