Culturally Responsive Practices: A Sociocultural Framework for Community-Engaged Learning

• In Event: Centering Learners, Culture, and Care: Enacting Culturally Responsive Practices through University-Community Engagement

Abstract

This presentation introduces a sociocultural framework for culturally responsive practices in community-engaged after-school environments. Though culturally responsive practices have been studied in K-12 classrooms, its application in after-school activities remains under-theorized and inconsistently implemented. This work responds to that gap by conceptualizing how culturally responsive practices can be understood and enacted within after-school activities, particularly those shaped by community engagement and experiential education. The primary objective of this study is to develop a framework for culturally responsive practices in after-school activities. The framework draws on sociocultural theories of learning (e.g., Cole, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978) and critical pedagogies (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2021; Gay, 2018), positioning culture not as an add-on but as foundational to how participants learn, and engage, and experience belonging.

This presentation draws on a multi-year, mixed-methods research project. Methods include a systematic review of the literature on culturally responsive practices in after-school activities, complemented by semi-structured qualitative interviews with 26 middle school youth and 15 undergraduate mentors participating in a UC Links university-community after-school math enrichment activity, Math CEO. Youth participants were predominantly Latine students from a historically underserved community in Southern California. Mentors were undergraduate students attending a public research university in the same region, many of whom also identified as Latine, Asian, or Asian American.

In this presentation, we present the emerging framework for culturally responsive practices in after-school activities (see Figure 1), synthesizing our initial comparisons of pioneering theories in the field (see Table 1) with findings from the systematic review. We then use qualitative data from Math CEO to focus on three key dimensions: (1) demonstrating an ethic of caring, (2) centering students’ knowledge and ways of doing things, and (3) promoting cultural knowledge and appreciation. As shown in Table 2, mentors demonstrated an ethic of caring through consistent emotional support, personalized encouragement, and attentiveness to students’ overall well-being. Centering students’ knowledge was reflected in the way mentors built on students’ lived experiences and problem-solving strategies during math activities to help them understand new concepts. And cultural knowledge and appreciation emerged through both structured and unstructured moments, such as when students were invited to share personal stories, cultural practices, or linguistic insights that were welcomed and woven into the groups’ learning experiences. These findings highlight how culturally responsive practices can be enacted in meaningful and context-specific ways through community-engaged partnerships. Overall, this framework serves as a concrete entry point for designing and evaluating culturally responsive programming in community engaged spaces.

This work contributes to growing scholarship at the intersection of equity, community engagement, and after-school learning by providing a theoretically grounded framework for culturally responsive practices that is informed by lessons from a university-community partnership. It offers tools for researchers, educators, and practitioners to better recognize and support the cultural assets participants bring to after-school experiential learning environments. By centering participant perspectives and grounding culturally responsive practices within the realities of community-based programs, this framework offers a pathway towards more responsive, empowering, and relationally rich learning experiences.

Authors

• Taylor Michelle Wycoff, University of California - Irvine

• Sandra D. Simpkins, University of California - Irvine