Culturally Sustaining Content Area Instruction for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students with Learning Disabilities

• Freeman et al. (2021) explain that culturally sustaining pedagogy, an updated approach to Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy (1995), encourages teachers to view students’ cultures as valuable sources of knowledge and resources. Building on Ladson-Billings’ earlier work (2009), this approach not only incorporates students’ cultures into learning but also connects instruction to the sociopolitical realities of CLD students’ lived experiences.

• Culturally sustaining pedagogy fosters critical thinking about social phenomena and equips students to address injustices and challenge societal norms that privilege certain groups. Instruction, curriculum, and programming are informed by students' cultures, strengths, and experiences, rather than relegating culture to extracurricular activities. Given that culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students are increasingly present in classrooms, this approach is particularly relevant (Freeman-Green et al, 2021).

• Culturally sustaining texts enable readers to connect with content by drawing upon their background knowledge and experiences to construct meaning. Research indicates that culturally and linguistically diverse students with learning disabilities demonstrate improved reading performance when engaging with culturally sustaining texts, as these materials allow them to utilize their existing background knowledge (Freeman-Green et al,  2021).
• Culturally diverse students exhibit increased motivation during reading tasks. When reading materials incorporate familiar experiences, these tasks become more personally meaningful, possess greater utility value, and are learned more efficiently and comprehensively. Furthermore, culturally sustaining materials help to counteract negative stereotypes (Freeman-Green et al 2021).

• Reading comprehension strategies are explicitly taught to the entire class through modeling, role-playing, and teacher think-alouds (Freeman-Green, 2021).

Characteristics of Quality Teaching for Diverse Student Populations in Educational Settings:

• Focuses on student achievement, including social outcomes, and facilitates high standards of outcomes for heterogeneous student groups.
• Employs pedagogical practices that foster caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning communities within classes or other groupings.
• Establishes effective connections between school and the various cultural contexts in which students are socialized, thereby facilitating learning and responding to diverse learning processes.
• Provides effective and sufficient learning opportunities, incorporating multiple task contexts to support ongoing learning cycles.
• Scaffolds learning and offers appropriate feedback on student task engagement, while promoting learning orientations, self-regulation, and metacognitive strategies (Lyu & Hyde, 2025).