Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Simple Strategies to Create a Safe Class Environment for BIPOC Students

Posted by anne.grey | Start the discussion

Presenter: Hugo Nava-Sanchez

Summary

In this presentation, Hugo Nava-Sanchez shares practical strategies for creating classroom environments where BIPOC students feel respected, represented, and comfortable bringing more of themselves into the learning experience. Drawing from his teaching experience and work with the Grow Your Own educator program, he emphasizes that students enter the classroom with different cultural backgrounds, responsibilities, experiences, and levels of stress.

The session begins with the importance of checking in with students and creating opportunities to slow down, connect, and enjoy learning. Nava-Sanchez demonstrates activities that help students share their interests, memories, cultures, and identities in low-pressure ways. Food, personal objects, stories, and other familiar experiences can become starting points for meaningful conversations and help students see their lives reflected in the classroom.

Representation is another central theme. Instructors are encouraged to use images, examples, readings, and activities that reflect people from many racial and cultural backgrounds without relying on stereotypes. Nava-Sanchez also encourages educators to talk openly about race and culture rather than treating them as subjects to avoid. Listening to students’ stories and allowing them to define their own experiences can help build trust and stronger relationships.

The presentation also considers flexibility as part of a supportive learning environment. Students may be balancing work, parenting, housing concerns, transportation, health, and other responsibilities alongside school. Nava-Sanchez encourages instructors to listen first, communicate regularly, and look for reasonable ways to help students continue learning when challenges arise. Flexibility is presented not as lowering expectations, but as finding pathways that help students remain engaged and work toward success.

The session closes with simple but meaningful practices that communicate belonging, including learning how to pronounce students’ names correctly, inviting students to share parts of their identities, establishing respectful communication expectations, and recognizing one’s own cultural framework and biases. Together, these approaches can help create classrooms where students feel heard, valued, and more comfortable participating authentically.

Presentation Outcomes

• Understand how students’ cultural backgrounds and lived experiences can influence their daily lives and classroom experiences.
• Use communication strategies that encourage students to share their perspectives, experiences, and needs in a respectful learning environment.
• Build stronger connections and a greater sense of community among BIPOC students through relationship-centered classroom practices.
• Reflect on how an instructor’s own cultural framework, assumptions, and implicit biases can influence teaching and communication.
• Use authentic and varied cultural representation in course images, examples, activities, and discussions without relying on stereotypes.
• Create opportunities for students to share personal interests, cultural experiences, stories, and meaningful objects as a way to strengthen connection and belonging.
• Use appropriate flexibility and regular communication to support students managing responsibilities or challenges outside the classroom.
• Recognize the importance of learning and correctly pronouncing students’ names as a simple but meaningful practice of inclusion and respect.

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