Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

• These notes cover culturally sustaining pedagogy, rethinking the classroom, representation, censorship, (mis)education, and community cultural wealth.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

• Culturally sustaining pedagogy actively sustains and promotes marginalized communities' cultural and linguistic practices within the school environment.
• Culturally relevant pedagogy focuses on making learning relevant to students' backgrounds, while culturally sustaining pedagogy actively promotes cultural and linguistic practices.
• The goal of culturally sustaining pedagogy is to create an inclusive, affirming, and empowering learning environment that values diverse cultures.
• Integrating students' languages and literacies into the curriculum and challenging dominant norms are techniques of culturally sustaining pedagogy.
• Django Paris is a key figure, moving beyond Gloria Ladson-Billings' culturally relevant pedagogy.
• Asset pedagogies value the knowledge and skills diverse students bring to the classroom, contrasting with a deficit orientation that focuses on what they lack.

Vocabulary Related to Pedagogy and Culture

• Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP): Incorporates students' cultural backgrounds into the curriculum to promote academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness.
• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP): Perpetuates linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation, enriching strengths rather than addressing deficits.
• White Gaze: Assumes the default perspective is white, influencing how people of color perceive their work and behavior.
• Double Consciousness: Du Bois described it as seeing oneself through the eyes of others, especially in a context of contempt or pity.
• Funds of Knowledge: recognizes diverse experiences, skills, and cultural practices within families and communities as valuable learning resources.

Rethinking the Classroom & Ethnic Studies

• The four premises of ethnic studies are:
  • Indigeneity and roots: recognizing holistic, ancestral, pre-colonial origins.
  • Coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide: acknowledging the replacement of ancestral legacies with a Eurocentric model.
  • Hegemony and normalization: understanding how the Eurocentric model has been normalized, negatively impacting students of color.
  • Decoloniality, regeneration, and transformational resistance: responding to the Eurocentric model through restorative actions and empowerment.
• Hallmarks of ethnic studies include curriculum as counter-narrative, criticality, reclaiming cultural identities, intersectionality, community engagement, culturally responsive pedagogy, and recognizing students as intellectuals.
• Ethnic studies provides a framework to discuss power, freedom, and institutionalized regulation, particularly concerning students of color.

Representation, Censorship, and (Mis)Education

• #weneeddiversetexts: Arose from a 2014 book convention with all white authors, advocating for diverse representation in children's literature.
• Stakeholders involved in book bans include parents, teachers, students, families, school boards, and legislators.
• Commonly banned themes include sex and sexuality, diversity, queer or POC characters, violence, drugs, grief, and race and racism.
• Ed Scare: refers to a fight for ideological control over education, demonizing diversity through fear and intimidation.
• Book Ban: Prevents access to certain books in public spaces based on content, often initiated by concerned groups.

Community Cultural Wealth

• Five tenets of critical race theory:
  • the intercentricity of race and racism with other forms of subordination
  • challenge to dominant ideology
  • commitment to social justice
  • centrality of experiential knowledge
  • transdisciplinary perspective.
• Education has a contradiction: schools can oppress while also having the potential to empower.
• Traditional Bourdieuean cultural capital theory values a narrow range of assets defined by White middle-class values.
• Six forms of community cultural wealth:
  • Aspirational capital: Maintaining hopes for the future despite barriers.
  • Linguistic capital: Skills gained through communication in multiple languages/styles.
  • Familial capital: Cultural knowledge nurtured among family and community.
  • Social capital: Networks of people and community resources.
  • Navigational capital: Skills to maneuver through institutions not created for Communities of Color.
  • Resistant capital: Knowledge and skills gained through challenging inequality.

Vocabulary related to Oppression

• Surveillance: Being closely monitored, controlling one's identity and actions.
• Cultural Integrity: A group's shared beliefs and actions, free from outside influences.
• Critical Race Theory (CRT): Examines how race and racism impact social structures, practices, and discourses.
• CRT in Education: Challenges how race and racism affect educational structures.
• Cultural Capital (Bourdieu): Knowledge, skills, and abilities inherited by privileged groups.
• Community Cultural Wealth: Knowledge, skills, and contacts used by Communities of Color to resist oppression.
• Cultural Capital (Franklin): Group consciousness that serves as a resource for advancement.