Using Canva to Support English Learners

We teachers look at Canva as a design tool for ourselves in our classrooms—it’s a way we can create slides and worksheets and save time. But how often do we promote student use of Canva and work with our students to utilize its artificial intelligence (AI) features for their own projects in an appropriate and effective way? I’ve had some success doing that by designing assignments with principles from culturally responsive teaching to support the needs of multilingual learners.

Zaretta Hammond describes culturally responsive teaching as a teaching practice that integrates students’ backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. In her book Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, Hammond empowers us as educators to provide a learning environment that promotes productive struggle for diverse students like the multilingual learners I work with to grow their brain power.

Why Canva? It’s more than just a design tool—it can be a powerful aid in scaffolding language. I use it daily, not just in the context of creating slides or handouts but also to give students linguistic support and promote their creativity and critical thinking.

Using Canva As A Language Scaffold

Canva has some amazing AI support that teachers can plan to use with intentionality for language development. There are so many ways that classroom teachers can challenge students to create while still having them build their English language proficiency. The tools described in this section can be used only by students over 13 years old—make sure to review your district policy regarding AI usage before diving into this with students.

Utilizing AI-powered Canva Magic Write: Many of us shy away from AI and are afraid to recommend it to students because we worry they will become too enabled by AI support. The beautiful thing about Canva Magic Write is that it doesn’t do the work for the student. It just makes recommendations.

If you type in “Create an infographic about climate change in Chicago,” Magic Write will generate an outline. In the outline, it will make a recommendation for a layout with statements like “Changes in precipitation: Present data on how rainfall patterns have shifted, leading to more frequent flooding,” in a section called “Key Statistics.” This is a starting point for the student to write an infographic. Using these AI tools can support language development more than we realize.

Canva Magic Media: This aspect of Canva can support students by producing AI-generated images based on commands you give it. For example, students may come across a phrase in a text that they may not understand, like “A woman wearing a lacy frilly dress.” I’ve worked with a student to be able to command Magic Media to “create a picture of a woman wearing a lacy frilly dress.” Multiple images pop up for a person to view.

There are concerns about images popping up that may not be culturally appropriate. If you find an image that looks like a stereotype of a culture or that just isn’t appropriate in general, you can click on the image, then click on the report option. This allows you to give Canva feedback about its image-generation feature. Also, images that Canva has already generated in elements can be reported if they are not seen as appropriate images.

Canva Promotes Rigorous and Authentic Learning Experiences

Tackling passion projects: My students have used Canva to develop tools for their passion projects. Yearly in my English class, students work with me to develop a project on a cause they care about. Usually, I do this work when students are learning how to produce rhetorical statements and ideas. First, they have to use research databases to learn more about the cause, and then they work to create an advocacy plan with an innovation for this cause. Canva comes in as they design presentations, videos, and infographics to support their ideas.

Then they enter a “Shark Tank” composed of my colleagues, who give up their prep periods to hear the presentations. They give students feedback on how they can strengthen their projects, and the students then take that feedback and put more finishing touches on the projects before I grade them.

Finding better ways to begin writing: This year, I took my students, who are majority Latino and Mexican American, to the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, to learn more about how art has told the story of the vibrant Mexican community there. To incorporate students’ cultures, I had them work on their rhetorical analysis skills by analyzing the community’s murals. Students then used the causes and messages of the murals to create their own protest signs for causes the artists wanted viewers to learn about.

Collaboration in real time: We all loved Jamboard, but you can create your own on Canva. If you go to the whiteboard feature on Canva, sticky notes will pop up in the elements. Your name even appears on them. This is a great feature for managing class discussions, content, and group collaboration. 

Canva Supports Community-Building

To help develop their writing ideas, I have students create empathy maps using Canva. Empathy maps are commonly used in the business world to help understand customers and markets, but they also work well in the classroom.

I provide students with a sheet of questions they use to conduct one-on-one interviews with their peers to learn more about each other. Then, in Canva, they create empathy maps about their partners. These maps are divided into four quadrants: What does your partner think and feel? What do they see? What do they say and do? What do they hear? The partner uses the finished map to create their own work. Yes, students are in the process of creation, but they’re also experiencing the benefits of community-building by learning about each other. As a final part of this process, we create a gallery walk so that students can learn about the whole class.

Culturally responsive teaching isn’t just about finding books about holidays that your students may celebrate and then reading them to the class—that’s surface-level work. Canva can be combined with intentional instruction to go deeper and create an enriching classroom experience.