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 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.

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.

Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to dismantle teaching methods that seem to render students incapable by providing students with a sociopolitical platform to lead the charge against their oppression (Alim & Paris, 2017). To begin engaging in a culturally sustaining pedagogical approach, teachers must ask what they are attempting to sustain (Alim & Paris, 2017). They should look to this question to guide their curriculum choices, instructional strategies, and assessment development. By using this question as a guide, teachers can see their biases, check them, and work toward removing them, not just from their classroom but their interactions outside the classroom as well.

Let’s consider an imaginary classroom with twenty-three students. Twelve students are considered English learners because English is not their first language. The various languages represented in the class are Haitian Creole, Spanish, Vietnamese, and English. In a typical status quo classroom, students must use English because the high-stakes standardized test is in English. There is no transcultural sharing, there is no sustaining of diverse culture and language. In the culturally sustaining classroom, the teacher promotes the use of native languages by allowing students to read books in their native language, record presentations in their native languages (providing the recording for transcription), and work with peers of similar culture and language. In the culturally sustaining classroom, students work in collaborative groups of diverse cultures and languages to create assignments that foster transcultural sharing. These assignments might include music, play, storytelling, familial traditions, and project-based learning that seeks to solve global real-world issues.

Educators embody one of the most important roles in society by preparing students to become active, knowledgeable, and successful world citizens. As teachers, we are responsible for ensuring our students engage, understand, synthesize, and utilize the information and strategies we give them as we transform standards from abstract ideas to accessible and concrete concepts. Students are in the educational system for a minimum of thirteen years with over thirty-thousand hours of instructional time.

A first step teachers can take toward transformative education is to pursue satisfaction, enjoyment, and purpose in their career (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Miller, Ramirez, & Murdock, 2017). Teachers seem to be at the lowest end of the educated employment sector spectrum. They receive lower pay than most educated workers and receive blame from parents, districts, states, and politicians for many of the ails in our world: lack of employment, low salary, poor reading and mathematics skills, and others (Borrero, Ziauddin, & Ahn, 2018). While educators do not always receive the esteem that they deserve, they are the leaders in our world. As teachers, we create future leaders, entertainers, activists, and business owners, among others. And it’s our responsibility to ensure that they become empathetic, creative, problem-solving, and nurturing global citizens.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

Consider the following questions independently or with your collaborative teams. 1. What responses came up for me as I read about culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies?

2. What are my first steps as an educator to prepare for implementation?

3. What challenges do I face in adopting culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies?