Live From Summit 2017: Honoring Cultural Relevance to Promote Student Engagement

May 16, 2017

This thought-provoking Community of Practice session was led by Samir Bolar from Mastery Design Collaborative and Nick Monzi from Learn Fresh. Joining them as participants were Katherine Song from Goalbook, Rebekah Bergman from Flocabulary, Manjula Raman from ReadWorks, Emily Moore from PhET and Elisabeth Nouber from VocaliD. This small-group discussion took a closer look at how edtech developers can apply cultural relevance within their own product and business strategies.

Some key takeaways were:

  • Cultural relevance is a big part of personalized learning, even if it’s not as widely talked about.
  • In personalized learning, the student is the personalizer, and technology is what helps the teacher be more dynamic to address the range of different needs.
  • It’s important to think about how to maintain the integrity of your product while also making it flexible enough to be applicable to a diverse set of users.