Minicourse Module 17: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Approx time: 25 min

This minicourse module is an abridged version of Project READY’s Module 18: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. Follow the link to access the full module.

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).
Apply these concepts from the field of education to your work in libraries.

INTRODUCTION

Historically, schools have seen the home cultures of students of color and English-language learners as deficits to be overcome or resources to be treated as a bridge to preferable, dominant practices. Current pedagogies, including culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies, take an asset-based approach, viewing students’ home and community cultural practices as resources “to honor, explore, and extend” (Paris 2012, p. 94). In this module, we will explore this asset-based approach to students’ home and community cultural practices.

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

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

CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY

The most well-known asset-based approach is culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP).

CRP’s goals:

Students achieve academically.
Students demonstrate cultural competence (maintaining their own heritage and community practices while gaining access to dominant practices).
Students understand and critique the existing social order. (Ladson-Billings, 1994)

Read this article from Learning for Justice, which provides a more in-depth exploration of culturally relevant pedagogy. Then, consider the following questions and come up with your own responses. When you’re ready, click “Show more” to see our answers.

What is the primary premise of culturally relevant pedagogy?

How is culturally relevant pedagogy compatible with what we know about high quality instruction?

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. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy addresses an incompatibility between a school’s cultural filters and BIPIC students’ cultural filters by requiring the school to adapt to students rather than requiring students to adapt to the school.

Who is… Dr. Gloria-Ladson Billings

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings is a pedagogical theorist and teacher educator whose research focuses on culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory.

Optional: To learn more about Dr. Ladson-Billings and her work, watch Successful Teachers of African-American Children¹ or read one of Dr. Ladson-Billings’s texts.

CULTURALLY SUSTAINING PEDAGOGY

Compared with culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy retains these same goals but goes a step farther. In addition to ensuring BIPOC students maintain their own heritage and community practices while gaining access to dominant practices, culturally sustaining pedagogy engages with students’ youth culture practices and recognizes that youth are producers of culture as well as consumers. Culturally relevant pedagogy sees BIPOC students’ heritage and community cultural practices as resources to honor and explore; culturally sustaining pedagogy sees them as resources to honor, explore, and extend.

View this infographic from the Institute of Education Sciences for more information about and examples of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Then, consider the following questions and come up with your own responses. When you’re ready, click “Show more” to see our answers.

What is the goal of culturally sustaining pedagogy?

What should we ask ourselves when we’re taking on a culturally sustaining approach?

What is the difference between culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy?

What can educators do to move toward culturally sustaining pedagogy?

Who is… Dr. Django Paris

Dr. Django Paris is a professor of multicultural education and researcher whose research and teaching focus on understanding and sustaining languages, literacies, and lifeways among youth of color in the context of demographic and social change.

To learn more about Dr. Paris and his work, read the book he co-edited with Dr. H. Samy Alim, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World².

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 the following two blog posts from What Does Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Look Like? to learn how different teachers implement culturally sustaining pedagogy in their classrooms.

“Exploring & Sustaining Conceptions of ‘Respect’ across Cultural Difference” by Matt Knieling (PDF page 3)
“The Power of Language in the Classroom” -by Cyrene Crooms ( PDF page 6)

As you read, consider these four elements of culturally sustaining pedagogy:

key beliefs and values
instructional strategies
activities
environmental elements

REFLECT

Consider your responses to these questions:

What messages did you receive in school about your own heritage and community cultural practices?
How do you view the heritage and community cultural practices of BIYOC in your library? How does that impact your professional practice?

ACT

Brainstorm what you can do in your library to incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy. When you’re done, click “Show more” to see our ideas.

Work with youth as co-creators of services and programming:
– Invite youth to participate in the selection of materials for your library.
– Have youth choose from a menu of different products to use to demonstrate how they engage with instructional or library resources.
– Have youth create their own questions to ask as writing prompts.
– Invite youth to share their own stories.
– Include youths’ out-of-library experiences as reference points in discussions.

Bring youth culture into the library:
– Use popular media (movies, comics, video games, music, more) and non-traditional texts (street art, tattoos, more) that youth identify as personally resonant as texts to engage with and critique.
– Use these same media as ways for youth to demonstrate understanding.

Connect with the community:
-Bring in guest speakers. It is critical that guest speakers reflect the racial diversity of your community. BIYOC should have opportunities to hear from community leaders who look like them and share their culture and some of their experiences.

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

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 “Show more” 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?

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 librarians to make assumptions about the cultures of the youth in their communities; instead, it asks them to invite that culture into the library based on BIYOC’s own articulation of their cultural and linguistic practices. It asks librarians to center those practices, rather than insisting that youth 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.

Go Back: Module 16b – Building Relationships with the Community

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