A Conceptual Exploration

Listen or Read

A cultural learning community can be built in any space—physical or digital—that invites students to share aspects of their identities and learn from one another in a respectful, collaborative environment. What matters is not the platform itself, but the openness, structure, and safety that support meaningful cultural exchange. Schools can offer multiple spaces where students create, display, and interact with cultural contributions, each providing unique benefits for participation and learning.

Physical Spaces for Cultural Expression

One accessible option is a physical mural located in a common school area. Students can add drawings, photos, artifacts, short texts, or symbolic representations connected to their cultural backgrounds. A mural becomes a constantly growing visual archive that celebrates diversity and reinforces collective belonging. Its physical presence encourages students to pause, observe, and appreciate perspectives different from their own. Research on culturally responsive environments demonstrates that when students see their cultural identities reflected in physical school spaces, they develop a stronger sense of belonging and engagement (Gay, 2018). This type of space works best when it is visible, inclusive, and designed so that every contribution has a place without hierarchy or comparison.

The BC curriculum’s emphasis on Positive Personal and Cultural Identity supports the creation of spaces where students can represent aspects of their cultural contexts through words and images, describing ways they participate in or are connected to their communities (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2023).

Digital Platforms for Cultural Wikis

A second option is a digital cultural wiki, created using platforms such as:

• Google Sites (https://sites.google.com) – A free, user-friendly platform that allows collaborative website creation with multimedia embedding, accessible through Google Workspace for Education accounts commonly used in BC schools.
• WordPress (https://wordpress.com) – An open-source content management system offering both free and premium options, with extensive customization capabilities for educational projects.
• Notion (https://www.notion.so) – A flexible workspace platform that combines wiki features, databases, and collaborative pages, with free educational plans available for students and teachers.
• Google Classroom (https://classroom.google.com) – While primarily a learning management system, its Pages feature allows for collaborative content creation and is already integrated into many BC school districts’ digital infrastructure.
• Microsoft Teams (https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-teams/education) – A comprehensive educational platform that combines chat, video conferencing, file storage, and collaborative workspaces, widely adopted in Canadian school districts with integrated cultural sharing capabilities.
• Edmodo (https://www.edmodo.com) – A learning platform specifically designed for K-12 education that facilitates student collaboration, content sharing, and family engagement through a safe, moderated environment.

In this space, students upload videos, audio clips, stories, recipes, maps, or family memories in a format that suits their preferred mode of expression. Digital communities expand participation because students can contribute asynchronously, revise their work, and explore others’ posts at their own pace. Educational research confirms that multimodal digital platforms enable students to express their cultural knowledge in ways that align with their linguistic resources and preferred communication modes (Early & Marshall, 2008). These platforms also allow families and community members to participate, offering additional voices and perspectives that enrich the learning experience.

Research on technology integration in Canadian multicultural education demonstrates that when digital tools like collaborative platforms and digital storytelling tools are used intentionally and aligned with inclusive pedagogical goals, they enhance student participation, cultural expression, and intercultural dialogue, particularly among English Language Learners and students from culturally diverse backgrounds (Cummins, 2021).

Interactive Digital Boards and Collaboration Tools

Another possibility is a classroom-hosted digital board or collaborative workspace, such as:

• Padlet (https://padlet.com) – An interactive bulletin board platform supporting text, images, videos, links, and voice recordings, with moderation features and privacy controls suitable for educational settings.
• Wakelet (https://wakelet.com) – A content curation and collaboration platform designed for education, offering free accounts for teachers and students to create collections of multimedia resources.
• Miro (https://miro.com) – A collaborative online whiteboard platform with free educational plans, supporting visual collaboration and multimedia content organization.
• Trello (https://trello.com) – A visual project management platform that uses cards and boards to organize cultural contributions, allowing students to create, categorize, and collaboratively build cultural collections in an intuitive, visual format.
• Seesaw (https://seesaw.com) – A comprehensive PreK-6 learning platform designed specifically for elementary education, offering multimodal tools (drawing, voice, video, photos, text) that enable students to document and share their cultural learning through digital portfolios, with built-in family engagement features supporting communication in over 100 languages.

These tools support multimedia contributions and transform the classroom environment into a living cultural repository. Students can react to entries by leaving comments, questions, or connections, fostering active interaction. This option encourages ongoing dialogue and is particularly beneficial for students who express themselves more effectively through audio-visual formats. The BC framework emphasizes that students develop Core Competencies when engaged in collaborative learning experiences, and discussing cultural knowledge with peers deepens understanding while helping students identify personal strengths and establish connections (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2023).

Indigenous educational practices demonstrate that learning spaces incorporating storytelling in varied forms—whether through digital media, visual arts, or oral traditions—create climates responsive to individual needs while fostering meaningful and transformative learning (Empowering the Spirit, 2022).

Creating Safe and Inclusive Environments

Regardless of the platform, the space—physical or digital—needs to be open enough to welcome diverse cultural expressions and structured enough to remain respectful and safe. Clear community agreements help set expectations: students share only what they feel comfortable disclosing, contributions are treated with care, and interactions focus on curiosity rather than judgment. For digital environments, privacy settings, moderated posting, and supportive comment guidelines help ensure safety. In physical spaces, supervision and shared norms promote a climate of trust and inclusion.

The BC framework for diversity in schools emphasizes that inclusive education requires creating learning environments where all students see themselves reflected and valued, and where schools develop cultures that value diversity and respond to the diverse social and academic needs of individual students (British Columbia Ministry of Education & Child Care, 2024). Culturally sustaining pedagogy recognizes that educational spaces must actively sustain and validate the cultural practices and ways of being of diverse communities, moving beyond simple tolerance to genuine celebration of difference (Paris & Alim, 2017).

The Power of Collaborative Cultural Exchange

What all these options share is their ability to transform learning into a collaborative cultural exchange. Whether students contribute to a hallway mural, an online wiki, or a classroom digital board, the space becomes a collective creation shaped by their identities, stories, and voices. Research demonstrates that culturally responsive teaching must be situated within particular contexts that are meaningful to members of the learning community, where students’ cultural knowledge and lived experiences become central to the learning process (Gay, 2018). A cultural learning community thrives wherever students feel invited, heard, and protected as they share who they are.

Check the knowledge

Week Outcome

Week 5 invites students to think critically about where a Cultural Learning Community can live—physically, digitally, or both. Students explore potential spaces in the school and online platforms, compare their advantages, and collaboratively design a space that is welcoming, respectful, and secure. The activities help students articulate what makes a community space culturally responsive and safe, and they begin shaping the design of the final platform. This week transitions students from content creation to community-building, as they decide how their collective knowledge will be shared, displayed, and accessed.