Using AI As a Cultural Competence Coach
My childhood obsession with National Geographic maps led to a lifelong interest in geography and helped power a career in education that allowed me to enjoy classroom experiences on six continents.
My ongoing 'graduate-level education' in cultural competence comes through a 30-year marriage to an Asian immigrant, who ushered me into the inclusive embrace of her family.
Not all educators have similar experiences or opportunities yet they face the daily challenge of teaching learners from countries they may not even be able to locate on a map.
If you've read my earlier work, you might expect me to connect this process to AI-powered technology, and you'd be right. Before I do that, though, let’s examine key frameworks and theories that undergird the educational understanding of cultural and global competence. As I’ve written before, cultural competence focuses on navigating diversity within one's own society, while global competence involves understanding and engaging across global contexts. The two intersect but are not identical.
Cultural and Global Competence Frameworks
When I received my first teaching credential in California I was required post-graduation to complete additional coursework and tests in order to “clear” that credential and qualify for an add-on called “Language Development Specialist.” The LDS has been replaced by the Crosscultural Language and Academic Development certificate via the California Teacher of English Learners (CTEL) exam. In either case, learners are exposed to a great deal of content on cultural competence.
Several of these frameworks continue to be widely respected and influential in education:
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) was developed in the mid-1990s by Gloria Ladson-Billings, now a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin. Among its core components is the idea of cultural competence, which to Ladson-Billings requires educators to affirm students’ cultural identities while helping them develop fluency in at least one other culture.
Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), closely related to CRP, focuses on using students’ cultural backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences as assets for learning.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) builds on CRP by aiming not just to affirm but to sustain students’ cultural and linguistic practices in the classroom. It emphasizes ongoing support for students’ cultural identities and community practices as part of academic success.
Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework (CR-S), developed by the New York State Education Department in 2018 , is designed to create student-centered environments that affirm cultural identities
Asset-Based Pedagogies is an umbrella term that includes CRP, CRT, and CSP, and refers to teaching methods that recognize and leverage students’ cultural identities and lived experiences as strengths, rather than deficits.
National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) originally were developed for healthcare but have come to influence educational frameworks by emphasizing the importance of providing services that are respectful of and responsive to cultural and linguistic needs.
Villegas & Lucas Framework for Preparing Culturally Responsive Teachers (2002) focuses on developing teachers’ sociocultural consciousness and affirming positive attitudes toward diverse students.
There are numerous other organizations in the U.S. and abroad that have published related frameworks. The most important of these is the OECD, which began testing global competence via the PISA exam in 2018. According to the OECD, global competence can be defined as “a multi-dimensional construct that requires a combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values successfully applied to global issues or intercultural situations. Global issues refer to those that affect all people, and have deep implications for current and future generations. Intercultural situations refer to face-to-face, virtual or mediated encounters with people who are perceived to be from a different cultural background.”
The OECD believes that developing global competence is a lifelong process for both teacher and students. I can attest to this claim, and that’s part of the reason I so strongly advocate using generative AI to assist.
Classroom Activities to Build Cultural Competence
These activities can be self-directed or used in your classroom to build cultural and global competence. Brackets [ ] are an indication for you to enter languages, cultures, and nationalities important to your teaching context.
AI-Curated Cultural Snapshot Portfolios
Goal: Learn about your students’ cultures through quick, digestible formats. Activity: Prompt AI to generate one-page cultural overviews (history, language, holidays, family values, education practices) for each of the [number] cultures represented in your classroom. Prompt: “Give me a one-page overview of [culture], including education values, family structures, and classroom behavior norms.”
Personalized Communication Strategies
Goal: Improve home-school communication. Activity: Use AI to translate newsletters, behavior reports, and curriculum outlines into families' home languages, along with tone-sensitive versions that reflect cultural preferences. Prompt: “Translate this classroom update into [language] using a tone that’s warm and respectful for parents from [culture].”
Culturally Relevant Scenarios for Role Play
Goal: Practice empathy and situational awareness. Activity: Ask AI to create classroom dilemmas involving cross-cultural misunderstandings. Role-play or journal your responses and solutions. Prompt: “Create a realistic classroom conflict scenario involving a cultural misunderstanding between students from [culture A] and [culture B].”
AI-Coached Reflection on Bias
Goal: Uncover and examine implicit bias. Activity: Use AI as a journaling partner. Reflect on situations where your cultural lens shaped your response, and ask AI for perspective shifts. Prompt: “Here is a situation that happened in class today. Help me reflect on how cultural bias might have played a role in my interpretation or response.”
Design Inclusive Curriculum Units
Goal: Make your units more inclusive and global. Activity: Collaborate with AI to adapt a unit (e.g., ancient civilizations, geography, human rights) so it includes global perspectives aligned with your students’ backgrounds. Prompt: “Help me revise a sixth-grade unit on [topic] to include perspectives and content relevant to students from [cultures].”
Simulate Cross-Cultural Parent Conferences
Goal: Build skill in culturally sensitive conversation. Activity: Role-play with AI a simulated parent-teacher conference with a parent from a particular background. Ask for feedback on your word choices and tone. Prompt: “Pretend you are a parent from [culture]. Let’s have a 5-minute parent-teacher conference. Then, give me feedback on how I handled it.”
Create Culturally Diverse Read-Alouds
Goal: Diversify literature and classroom discourse. Activity: Use AI to recommend age-appropriate short stories, legends, or biographies from your students' cultures. You can even ask the LLM to write original stories. Prompt: “Write a culturally authentic short story for sixth graders based on a folk tale from [culture].”
AI-Generated Student Surveys with Cultural Sensitivity
Goal: Learn how students view your teaching through a cultural lens. Activity: Create AI-assisted surveys about classroom inclusion, belonging, and engagement. Translate and adjust them for cultural appropriateness. Prompt: “Help me create a student-friendly survey that checks how culturally included and respected students feel in my classroom.”
Cross-Cultural Digital Pen Pal Projects
Goal: Foster student empathy and global connection. Activity: Use AI to simulate letters from fictional students around the world (modeled on your students’ cultures) to spark curiosity and comparison. Prompt: “Write a letter from a 12-year-old student in [country], describing a typical school day, home life, and a recent celebration.”
Build a Cultural Competence Micro-Course for Yourself
Goal: Systematically deepen your knowledge. Activity: Ask AI to design a 5-day, 15-minute-per-day professional development course on cultural competence in diverse classrooms. Prompt: “Design a 5-day micro-course to help a teacher build cultural competence in a multilingual, multicultural classroom. Include readings, journal prompts, and 1 short activity per day.”
(Note: Contact me to receive access to Google docs that contain additional competence-building classroom activities).
Your Classroom Cultural Competence Coach Chatbot
One of the primary reasons that I use ChatGPT so heavily is that I have become adept at creating customized GPTs that I design specifically to complete repetitive tasks that require intensive focus and specialized knowledge. I train them on content I upload (it’s called a knowledge base) that supplements what the bot can find online or information already in its training data. Accordingly, I created a new chatbot called the Classroom Cultural Competence Coach, which you are free to use.
I designed it for educators who need additional assistance or advice, tips, and strategies that can help them to better interact and serve the diverse learners in their classrooms. I tested it by asking questions about the immigrant group I know best, Filipino-Americans.
One of the standout tips I found to be especially insightful: “Many Filipino students come from educational systems where respect for authority often means being quiet and not speaking unless called on. Gently explain that in your class, participation is valued and welcomed. Create low-stakes ways to participate (think-pair-share, written responses, drawing) to ease that transition.”
I encourage you to put my bot through its paces and use the comment/feedback feature to give me input I can use to improve it.
A Nation of Immigrants
The importance of cultural competence can not be overstated. Look at the data from California, where I have lived for 60 years, including 12 spent as a public school teacher in both Northern and Southern California. Approximately 44% of K-12 students in California public schools come from immigrant households. Additionally, nearly half (46%–50%) of all children in California have at least one immigrant parent, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data and analyses by the Public Policy Institute of California. In some areas, such as parts of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, this percentage can rise as high as 75%.
California is an extreme example, but the numbers nationally reflect the reality that we are a nation of immigrants: About 23% to 25% of all K-12 public school students in the United States come from immigrant families. This share has doubled since 1990, when it was about 11%, and reflects both children who are themselves immigrants and those born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.
If we wish to be prepared to serve the diverse needs of the learners sitting before us we need to maximize every tool available to build our skills and develop effective content. With thoughtful use, AI can be a tireless collaborator in our shared goal of building inclusive, culturally responsive classrooms.