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Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students
Adopting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Though creating an equitable classroom begins with cultural competence, it doesn’t end there. Justice-driven pedagogy calls educators to transcend competence, appropriateness, relevance, and responsiveness—ultimately, to strive for culturally sustaining teaching. The California Department of Education (2020b) describes culturally sustaining pedagogy as follows:
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy promotes equality across racial and ethnic communities and seeks to ensure access and opportunity. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy also supports students to critique and question dominant power structures in societies.
Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to extend culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies by ensuring that students’ cultures are sustained and further developed in the classroom environment to strengthen generational ties to all forms of culture across race, ability, ethnicities, gender, sexuality, and age (Alim & Paris, 2017; Paris, 2012; Waitoller & Thorius, 2016). When Django Paris (2012), professor of multicultural education at the University of Washington, introduced the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy, the emphasis was on sustaining multilingualism and multiculturalism that discussed both in-culture and transcultural practices. With multilingual and multicultural practices, students learn and use varied languages and various aspects within their cultures to engage in learning. Through the sustaining of multiple languages and cultures in the classroom, students create relationships with those similar to their languages and cultures, while engaging in transcultural sharing in which they learn about diverse cultures in respectful and collaborative ways. The origins of this theory also stress the importance of viewing culture as dynamic, always changing to meet the population’s needs within that culture (Paris, 2012). For educators, this means seeing students as purveyors of information who educate others as well as receive education.
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy builds on decades of asset-based pedagogical research including Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings) and Culturally Responsive (Gay and Hammond). . . . [It] affirms and respects the key components of the Asset-Based Pedagogies that preceded it, but also takes them to the next level. Instead of just accepting or affirming the backgrounds of students of color as seen in Culturally Relevant Pedagogy; or connecting to students’ cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and frames of reference as we see in Culturally Responsive Pedagogy; Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy views schools as places where the cultural ways of being in communities of color are sustained, rather than eradicated.
