Module 18: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

After working through this module, you will be able to:

• Describe asset-based pedagogical approaches including Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP).
• Assess the extent to which lesson plans, teaching practices, and schools incorporate CRP/CSP.

Introduction

The graphic below compares deficit, difference, and asset-based approaches:

Watch

Culturally sustaining pedagogy has been described as “culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0.” Watch this video to learn more about culturally relevant and culturally responsive pedagogies.

As you watch, consider these questions:

• What is the primary premise of culturally relevant pedagogy?
• How is culturally relevant pedagogy compatible with what we know about good teaching?
• What dilemma is culturally relevant pedagogy designed to address? How does it address this dilemma?

Click or tap the arrow to the left of each question below to read our answers to the questions we asked you to consider.

• What is the primary premise of culturally relevant pedagogy?
  Teachers make connections between students’ everyday lived experience and the curriculum.
• How is culturally relevant pedagogy compatible with what we know about good teaching?
  It builds on students’ existing knowledge. We often design instruction to build on students’ existing academic knowledge; CRP also builds on students’ existing cultural knowledge.
• What dilemma is culturally relevant pedagogy designed to address? How does it address this dilemma?
  Culturally Relevant Pedagogy addresses an incompatibility between the school’s cultural filters and BIPOC students’ cultural filters by requiring the school to adapt to students rather than requiring students to adapt to the school.

Read

• For a more in-depth exploration of culturally relevant pedagogy, read this article from Learning for Justice.
• To read more ideas about how to implement culturally relevant pedagogy in a library specific setting, read this article by Julia E. Torres and Valeria Tagoe.

Click or tap the arrow to the left of each question below to read our answers to the questions we asked you to consider.

• What is the goal of culturally sustaining pedagogy?
  To perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a necessary response to demographic and social change.
• What should we ask ourselves when we’re taking on a culturally sustaining approach?
  What is it we’re seeking to sustain through classroom learning?
• How do we address this question?
  Think about what are the valued practices, languages, literacies, and cultural ways of young people and work them into our instruction. Center the histories, literatures, literacies, and cherished ways of our BIPOC students.
• What is the difference between culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy?
  CRP and earlier pedagogies invite students’ cultural ways into the classroom primarily as a bridge to “better” mainstream practices. CSP seeks not only for students to maintain their own practices, but also to grow more critically engaged with them, seeing them as worthy of study themselves, rather than only seeing them as a bridge.
• What can educators do to move toward culturally sustaining pedagogy?
  Think about who your students are and what language varieties and languages they use in their communities and at school and start thinking about ways to bring those meaningfully into the classroom. Ask students what it is they care about and not only bring it into the classroom, but also join in it yourself.

Here are some points to remember about culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies:

• Culture is “dynamic, shifting, and ever-changing” (Paris, 2012, p. 95).
• Take care not to essentialize students’ cultures or be overdeterministic in linking cultural practices to racial and ethnic groups.
• Value both traditional, heritage practices and current, community practices.
• Invite students to critique cultural texts and practices, considering how they can promote inequity or be exclusionary.
• “…learners can be sources and resources of knowledge and skills…” (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 79)

CSP is not a teaching guide or a set of lesson plans. It’s an approach to the craft of teaching.

– Lorena Germán

Images of Practice

Read these blog posts [PDF] to learn how six different teachers implement culturally sustaining pedagogy in their classrooms. As you read, consider these four elements of culturally sustaining pedagogy:

1. key beliefs and values
2. instructional strategies
3. activities
4. environmental elements

Explore

It’s a little easier to imagine implementing elements of culturally sustaining pedagogy in a school library setting since we often think of pedagogy as standing in front of a classroom and teaching a group of students. However, it’s equally important to value and celebrate patrons’ cultural practices in public libraries.  The Equitable Futures Innovation Network (EFIN)’s Race Grounded Career Advising Framework is a great example of how CSP can be used to inform career centered programming in public libraries. Learn about the framework here.  

This framework was created with career advising in mind, but what other topics could it be used for? How might you use it in your own library? 

respond

In your journal, respond to these questions:

• What messages did you receive from school about your own heritage and community cultural practices?
• How do you view your students’ heritage and community cultural practices? How does that impact your instruction?

Act

In your journal, brainstorm what you can do in your library or classroom to incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy into your instruction.

When you’re done,click here to see our ideas.

Select one change you want to make in your library or classroom to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy. Make a plan, then implement it.

To take your learning about culturally sustaining pedagogy to the next level, work through the 10 sessions shared in the EduColor & NYU Metro Center’s CRSE Facilitators Guide. Consider gathering a group at your school or library to work through this guide together!

BUT WAIT!

In this section, we address common questions and concerns related to the material presented in each module. You may have these questions yourself, or someone you’re sharing this information with might raise them. We recommend that for each question below, you spend a few minutes thinking about your own response before clicking the arrow to the left of the question to see our response.

• Why is culturally sustaining pedagogy important?
  Culturally sustaining pedagogy demonstrates to BIYOC that their cultural and linguistic practices, and by extension they themselves, are of value.  When they believe their own forms of expertise are valued, they are more likely to succeed (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Culturally sustaining pedagogy, then, has the potential not only to show students that we think their cultural and linguistic practices are important, but also to contribute to their academic success. Further,  “multilingualism and multiculturalism are increasingly linked to access and power in U.S. and global contexts” (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 87). Perpetuating and fostering pluralistic cultural and linguistic practices helps students gain access and power.

• Youth culture moves so fast. How can I keep up?
  You don’t need to keep up. Allow your students to be the youth culture experts in your library or classroom. Find ways for them to bring their own cultural expertise into the space and their academic work, both by demonstrating its value as a subject of study and by asking them to critique it.

• Isn't it racist to assume that all people from the same race share the same culture?
  As we discussed in Module 7, culture is not race-dependent or race-determined and “it is important that we do not essentialize and are not overdeterministic in our linkages of language and other cultural practices to certain racial and ethnic groups in approaching what it is we are seeking to sustain”(Paris, 2012, p. 95). Culturally sustaining pedagogy does not ask educators to make assumptions about students’ culture; instead, it asks them to invite that culture into the classroom based on students’ own articulation of their cultural and linguistic practices. It asks educators to center those practices, rather than insisting that students only approach knowledge creation from a dominant, white, monocultural paradigm.

• In the public library, we often celebrate culture in a superficial way through book displays on a specific holiday or cultural holiday celebration like Dia de los Muertos. How can we use culturally sustaining pedagogy in book displays and library programs?
  Invite families and youth to help plan programs, events, and book displays. Think about ways you could extend a cultural program such as Dia de los Muertos using culturally sustaining pedagogy. Create displays that celebrate the ethnicity, languages, and culture in your branch throughout the year, not just on specific holidays. Make sure to show the deep and nuanced aspects of culture, ethnicity, and language, rather than just the concrete aspects like food and music. Revisit Module 7 for additional ideas.

Additional Resources

Paris, Django and H. Samy Alim, Eds. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press.

References and Image Credits

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2012). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: AKA the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85–100,134,136–137.