Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures PDF 2021

The Educational Forum ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utef20 Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures Django Paris To cite this article: Django Paris (2021) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures, The Educational Forum, 85:4, 364-3...

The Educational Forum ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utef20 Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures Django Paris To cite this article: Django Paris (2021) Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures, The Educational Forum, 85:4, 364-376, DOI: 10.1080/00131725.2021.1957634 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2021.1957634 Published online: 15 Sep 2021. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 668 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=utef20 The Educational Forum 2021, VOL. 85, NO. 4, 364–376 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2021.1957634 Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures Django Paris Banks Center for Educational Justice, College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS What does culturally sustaining pedagogy mean in the context of a global Black education; pandemic, uprisings for racial and decolonial justice, and an ongoing cli- Indigenous education; mate crisis? In this essay, I build from decades of strength-centered peda- Asian and Pacific Islander education; Latinx gogical research and practice as well as the work of contemporary education; decolonization; organizers to engage how educators can join communities in sustaining abolition; educational valued lifeways through education to ensure possible futures for all peo- justice ples and lands. What does culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) mean as families, educators, and communities care for young people, elders, each other, the lands, as we face a global pandemic and an ongoing uprising for racial and decolonial justice? As I write this article, I am teaching and learning with a remote CSP class from here on Coast Salish homelands at the University of Washington. It is week nine of the 2021 winter quarter, the same week we last experienced in-person teaching and learning a full year ago. Forty undergraduates, almost all education majors, are taking the class. The majority of the students are Asian, Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander, with a smaller number of White students. Most of the students were born after the year 2000. What so many of these students are thinking about, the questions they have, and the projects they are embarking on are an important window into the present and future of CSP. They want to know about the relationships between CSP and Black Lives Matter, antiracism, decolonization, and abolition. They want to know about CSP in STEM and what CSP means for addressing the climate crisis. They want to know about the role of trans elders and communities in sustaining trans identities through teaching and learning, about how CSP can help disrupt ableism by centering and sustaining disabled students across intersections with race, gender, and more. They are interested in basketball coaches as culturally sustaining educators with Black college athletes, how to apply CSP beyond education in fields of health and the arts and, perhaps most directly, how to explain CSP to their parents and families as they look to use CSP in their own communities. An additional window into the present and future of CSP is the ways these under- graduate education majors are taking up our past collective work with CSP as they engage our CSP book (Paris & Alim, 2017) as well as foundational and contemporary work in culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014, 2017) and allied work centering culture, learning, and various projects of intersectional justice and decolonial practice in education (e.g., Asian American Feminist Collective, 2020; Eagle Shield et al., 2020; Kean, 2020; Simpson, 2017; Waitoller & King Thorius, 2016). While similar questions and interests have emerged across the past three years of my graduate and undergraduate courses in CSP, this current moment of a CONTACT Django Paris [email protected] Banks Center for Educational Justice, 110 Miller Hall, Box 353600, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. © 2021 Kappa Delta Pi  The Educational Forum 365 pandemic disproportionately harming Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities and our elders, of an uprising for racial and decolonial justice, of climate crisis, as well as emboldened white supremacist terrorism, has made their interrogations even more press- ing. That age-old question, “What is the purpose of schooling?” has been thrown, for this gen- eration, into existential relief. How can education be reclaimed, imagined anew, transformed to be part of a possible future? A Brief History of the CSP Collective Before directly engaging these vital questions about the current and future work of CSP, let me pause to offer a definition and a very brief history of the development of our collective work on culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs—we use the plural “CSPs” to name the necessarily varied enactments of CSP). Nearly a decade ago now, I published the first article on CSP (Paris, 2012), coining the term and conceptualizing its initial contours. I came to that writing, as I come to all my work, anchored by my own experiences as a Black teacher, learner, and researcher born to a White settler mother and a Black Jamaican father on Ohlone homelands in San Francisco, California. That first CSP article built on the beautiful legacy and ongoing work of the strength and asset-based pedagogy tradition, including, among others, Moll and Gonzalez (1994) funds of knowledge, Gutiérrez’s (2008) third space and, foundationally, Ladson-Billings (1994, 1995, 2014, 2017, forthcoming) seminal work on culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). Indeed, as Ladson- Billings (2014) has written in her own generous and generative engagement with our CSP col- lective, “culturally sustaining pedagogy uses culturally relevant pedagogy as the place where the ‘beat drops’” (p. 76). It is that leading beat, that break toward justice, that heartbeat of CRP and other strength-based pedagogical approaches that our work on CSP joins in the ongoing project of bending education to center the beauty and futures of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities. This is to say that CSP should not be seen as in conflict with CRP (or other seminal work in the strength-based tradition). Indeed, any attempts to divide (versus build with) our collective work are based in misreading (or not reading) our body of mutually enriching scholarship. Rather, all work in these traditions seeks to dismantle deficit approaches so pervasive in the education of our young people and to instead critically center our strengths, our assets, our communities in teaching and learning. This is why I frame CSP as joining this work, as part of this tradition, as following the lead of the past and present even as, together, we offer deepened paths forward in a shifting, unequal, and increasingly precarious world. It is also vital to share up front that CSP, like CRP, funds of knowledge, the third space and all of the work in the strength or asset-based traditions are names and articulations for what Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities, including critical educators, have always worked to accomplish across the centuries: to center and sustain the young people in their communities through teaching and learning while they grow and expand who young people are and can be through the process of education. Shortly after the publication of that initial CSP article, I was joined by the person who has been my main collaborator in the CSP work, H. Samy Alim. In our CSP work, Alim and I build from our own learning, teaching, and research with youth in the United States, in sov- ereign Tribal Nations, and in South Africa and Spain (e.g., Alim, 2004; Alim & Haupt, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2017; Paris, 2011, 2020) to forward three areas of needed engagement in CSP research and practice: 1) The mutually enriching extension of previous articulations of asset 366 D. PARIS pedagogies to center on sustaining the valued lifeways of students and communities of color (thereby transforming learning settings and systems that were designed to eradicate or assim- ilate those communities, practices, and activities); 2) The fluid and dynamic nature of youth and community cultural practice and activity (versus previous static mappings of race onto language and culture); and 3) The need for an inward gaze that can pedagogically engage the damaging internalizations and problematic beliefs and practices present in our own commu- nities (versus imagining all beliefs and practices in our communities as inherently good and worthy of sustaining). As we have written (Alim & Paris, 2017; Alim et al., 2020; Paris & Alim, 2014), sustaining Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander young people, families, and communities as these memberships necessarily intersect with gender and sexuality, with disability, with migration, with language, with land, with class and more, is the central purpose of CSP. And such education happens wherever teaching and learning perpetuate and foster critical linguistic and cultural pluralism as part of positive social transformation and revitalization. This means, as our collective has documented across numerous publications focused mainly on US con- texts, that CSPs exist in elementary through college classrooms, in community organizations, and in peer and family settings. CSPs exists across entire schools centering Native students from several sovereign Tribal Nations in the Southwest (Lee & McCarty, 2017; McCarty & Lee, 2014), in classrooms serving youth who immigrated from myriad countries to New York City (Lee & Walsh, 2017), within single classrooms centering Black students in the Midwest and Northeast (Kinloch, 2017), in teacher education programs foregrounding decolonial prac- tice in the Western US (Domínguez, 2017), with Native elders in the Plains (Holmes & Gonzalez, 2017), in performing arts programs centering Black, Latinx, and Pacific Islander students in California (Wong & Peña, 2017), between Native mothers and their children across Indigenous family contexts (San Pedro, 2021), and, moving beyond the US nation-state borders (as is vital always), among Hip Hop youth communities and community organizations in South Africa (Alim & Haupt, 2017). Let me also add that our CSP collective, which has held retreats, published in journals, and presented at conferences together, has been intentionally intergenerational, foregrounding the ongoing leadership of many founding scholars of the strength or asset-based pedagogy tradi- tion, including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Carol D. Lee, Teresa McCarty, Norma Gonzalez, and Kris Gutiérrez. As well, our work has made space for the path breaking scholarship of the next generation of scholars who are taking the work in necessary directions, such as Timothy San Pedro, Jamila Lyscott, Casey Wong, Michael Domínguez, Valerie Shirley, Jeremy Garcia, Danny Martinez, and many others. As important, our collective has embodied the memberships, relations, and identities of the communities of our work and living. That is, we are primarily Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander scholars, educators, and community members with a small number of White scholars and educators in long-term solidarity with our communities. In this way, our collective has embodied many of the features we have come to understand as fundamental to educational settings enacting CSPs. Common Features of Settings Enacting CSP While there are many consistencies across culturally sustaining teaching and learning settings, CSPs of course take on necessarily different forms across different cultural contexts with  The Educational Forum 367 different communities in different places. Within this expected variation, these key features have emerged across our collective work: 1. A critical centering of dynamic communities, their valued languages, practices, and knowledges across the learning setting (versus simply attending to static versions of language and culture in minimal lessons, units, and in uncritical ways) (Alim & Haupt, 2017; Bucholtz et al., 2017; Wong & Peña, 2017); 2. Student and intergenerational community agency and input, what Lee and McCarty (2017) named “community accountability,” where families, elders, and students are understood as central collaborators in learning settings, offering invitations, consul- tations, approvals, and input (Eagle Shield et al., 2020; Irizarry, 2017); 3. Working to be in good relationship with the land, the people of the land, with stu- dents and communities (this means developing reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities, the lands and places of the work, and with each other in learning settings) (Eagle Shield et al., 2020; Holmes & Gonzalez, 2017; Lee & McCarty, 2017; San Pedro, 2021); 4. Structured opportunities to contend with internalized oppressions, false choices, and inward gazes (this means attending to possible internalized false beliefs that our practices and selves as communities of color are not valuable in education settings, contending with false choices between sustaining lifeways and critical uptake of dominant practices—both can happen, and it also means turning that inward gaze upon our own selves and communities as we critically assess what to center and sustain) (Alim et al., 2020; Irizarry, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2017). In our work with educators across settings seeking to enact CSP, we have offered these features as guides in the work, and have recommended flipping them into questions as curricular and pedagogical filters for designing culturally sustaining settings with com- munity members (e.g., Do we critically center dynamic communities, their valued lan- guages, practices, and knowledges?; Are student and intergenerational community agency and input built into the setting?). Working with stakeholders to answer those questions in the affirmative is part of the work of designing and upholding culturally sustaining settings. It is worth noting that enacting these features within educational settings in nation-states and societies whose institutions continue to uphold whiteness and colonial- ism is a central space of growth for all of us seeking to center and sustain communities through education. Divesting from Whiteness and Settler Logics As we have explicitly named centering communities across multiple intersections and neces- sarily divesting from whiteness and colonial logics is the heart of CSP. Alim, Wong, and I (2020) most recently put it this way: Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is a critical framework for centering and sustaining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander communities as these memberships nec- essarily intersect with gender and sexuality, disability, class, language, land, and more. First and 368 D. PARIS foremost, CSP explicitly names whiteness (including white normativity, white racism and ide- ologies of white supremacy) as the problem, and thus, decentering whiteness and recentering communities is our point of departure. In the context of the United States and other nation-states living out the legacies and contemporary realities of genocide, enslavement, apartheid, occu- pation, and various forms of colonialism, CSP recognizes that the purpose of state-sanctioned schooling has always been to forward the largely assimilationist and often violent white imperial- ist project. In the context of deeply-entrenched, structural racial and economic inequalities, CSP is necessarily and fundamentally a critical, anti-racist, anti-colonial framework that rejects the white settler capitalist gaze and the kindred cisheteropatriarchal, English-monolingual, ableist, classist, xenophobic, and other hegemonic gazes. (p. 261) For educators committed to this work, this means focusing on both divesting from particular ideologies, logics, and associated educational policies and practices and investing in others, and this work takes on different forms depending on our own relations, memberships, iden- tities, and experiences. For White educators (and educators of color invested in whiteness) seeking to be and become culturally sustaining educators, this means divesting from whiteness and the ways whiteness castes White normed practices and bodies as superior–which means educators invested in whiteness must be willing to give something up. What spaces are we willing to relinquish, reshape, and reclaim to make necessary space for centering us and/or others, our lifeways and/or other lifeways in our spaces of teaching and learning? As I think about the classrooms and schools, community organizations, and peer and family spaces enacting CSPs, they all reflect this necessary divestment from whiteness and investment in centering dynamic communities and their practices, knowledges. Paths for educators toward such divestment have been laid out across recent learning to teach literatures in both univer- sity-based teacher education (Domínguez, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2017; Matias, 2016; Paris, 2016) as well as in research about learning to teach as cultural communities (Alim & Haupt, 2017), as elders and parents (Holmes & Gonzalez, 2017; San Pedro, 2021) and with the land (Eagle Shield et al., 2020; Simpson, 2017). Still other divestments are needed on the path to being and becoming culturally sustaining educators. For those of us who are not Indigenous to the lands where we teach and learn (and for all people who have internalized settler logics), this means divesting, too, from settler logics and the way dispossession, extraction of the Earth, damaging logics of competition, and indi- viduality are normed as the right and only ways to be in education and far beyond. Such settler logics are, indeed, baked into most nation-state education systems, across state-sanctioned institutions (from health to law) and are foundationally linked to racial settler capitalism, the violent system of economic, social, and cultural exploitation and dispossession that emerged from and perpetuates the legacies of land theft, genocide, and enslavement (Grande, 2018; Paris, 2019; Robinson, 1983). Such logics of extraction and dispossession and individual com- petition, where Black, Indigenous, and migrant communities in particular are largely consid- ered disposable, are also fundamentally responsible for the current climate crisis. Here where I write, on Coast Salish homelands, the peoples of these territories have been in reciprocal relationship with the lands, waters, and all beings since time immemorial. Conversely, as Yakama scholar Michelle Jacob (2013) has shared, settler logics have only been emplaced for a relatively short time on these territories, just a couple hundred years (compared to many thousands of years). And yet the destruction wrought by these logics has been immense and has us collectively on the brink of ecological and infrastructural collapse (think fires raging across the West during summer 2020 and 2021, deep freezes across Texas and  The Educational Forum 369 Mississippi in winter 2021, and powerful hurricanes raging across the Caribbean and US for the past decade). And, of course, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander com- munities globally bear the brunt of the pain and damage in such disaster, collapse, and its aftermath. Examples of culturally sustaining and other strength, land and desire based (Tuck, 2009) approaches to teaching and learning that seek to divest from the violence of such settler logics include much recent work in Indigenous education and nation-building, alongside recent work in Black education and liberation movements (Eagle Shield et al., 2020; King, 2019; Million, 2013; R. Paris, 2017; Romero Little et al., 2014; Simpson, 2017; Tuck & Yang, 2018). Following the lead of such work is a central part of the future of CSP, as it is a central part of all of our possible futures. It is also worth explicitly mentioning that whiteness and settler logics uphold intersecting ideologies and systems of oppression, including cishetero- patriarchy, ableism, monolingualism, and more (Annamma, 2016; Rosa & Flores, 2017). To be and become culturally sustaining educators, we must be willing to give up the false and damaging beliefs that who we are (and the unjust power that may come with our memberships, identities, relations), that what our norms and beliefs are (including those damaging ones we may have internalized), somehow deserve more attention in teaching and learning settings. This is particularly important the more positions of unjust power (often called “privilege”) we occupy in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, language, class, and so on. And, of course, we must be willing to resist and refuse when institutional, governmental, or other policies and practices reinforce these false and damaging beliefs in superiority, in extraction, in dispossession. It is vital to note the current wave of oppressive education policies anchored in such beliefs that is sweeping the US (from bans on Critical Race Theory to anti-Trans youth bills). These policies echo those of past decades (and centuries), including Arizona’s 2010 House Bill 2281, which banned Ethnic Studies by targeting the highly successful Mexican American Studies program in Tucson Unified School District (Acosta, 2013). Although seven years later as a result of educators, families, and scholars organizing, HB2281 was declared racist by a federal judge, my point here is that resisting such policies will continue to be part of divesting from violent, exclusionary logics. These needed divestments from whiteness and settler logics bring still other pressing needs in our conceptions and enactments of CSP and other strength and asset-based pedagogies. This is work which our CSP collective has in many ways just begun to join more deeply (Alim & Paris, 2017; Alim et al., 2020; Eagle Shield et al., 2020), even as communities and movements have been engaged in this work for generations. And it is work which begins to answer the existential questions posed by the undergraduate education majors I am learning with during this pandemic, uprising, and climate crisis. Like others, I have been thankful for the emerging publications that have begun to offer us the vision we need for our uncertain educational present and future (Ladson-Billings, 2021, forthcoming; McKinney de Royston & Vossoughi, 2021; Nasir & Bang, 2020). It is this contemporary work, alongside that which I have cited to this point, which invites us toward the future of CSP. The Necessary Future of CSP In her seminal, field-building (and still field-leading) book The dreamkeepers: Successful teach- ers of African American children (1994), Ladson-Billings offered, “Culturally relevant teaching is about questioning (and preparing students to question) the structural inequality, the racism, and the injustice that exists in society. The teachers I studied work in opposition to the system 370 D. PARIS that employs them” (p. 140). That quote has echoed across my own learning, teaching, and thinking for several years now and the current moment of pandemic, uprising, and climate crisis has brought its meaning even further into focus. What does it mean to be an educator working in opposition to the system that employs us, working toward a system that is relevant to and sustaining for young people, families, communities, and the lands? The year 2020 offered powerful and scathing indictments of the system that we are embedded and implicated in, from pre-K-12 through university education, to health, law, and across every facet of society. In particular, we saw racial settler capitalism, with its anti- Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-Latinx, anti-Asian and Pacific Islander, anti-disabled, anti-trans, anti-poor ideologies, systems of extraction, violent policing and incarceration, discrimina- tory health and housing, and massive food, wage, and wealth disparities take center stage. Let me bring you back here to Coast Salish homelands and the University of Washington (UW), to another group of undergraduates with whom other faculty members and I have been learning in solidarity; the students of the Black Student Union (BSU), African Student Association (ASA), First Nations at UW, and the recently formed UW Black Lives Matter (UWBLM). As part of what has been called the George Floyd Rebellion (in reference to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and other state-sanctioned murders of Black people, including of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police), students in BSU, ASA, First Nations, UWBLM, and other groups organized across summer 2020 to push the university to center and sustain Black students, faculty, staff, and communities alongside Native students, staff, communities, and lands. I could recount many necessary actions the students led, which many of us as faculty supported and organized alongside. There were teach-ins, institutes, meetings with upper administration, and demands to disarm campus police and hire more Black faculty, among others. One moment from their work that summer stands out. It was a march for Black Lives on campus (with masks, physical distancing, and other health precautions common across BLM protests globally last summer). During the march, Black students and faculty and other faculty and students in solidarity gave speeches at various locations about George Washington as an enslaver and land thief, about the history of Coast Salish place-names and Native presence on campus, and about the violence of policing and alternative forms of community care. UW professor Rae Paris, a Black woman poet and prose writer, was invited by students to read from her “Open Letter of Love to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter” (R. Paris, 2017, 2020), which she wrote in 2014 after the non-indictments of the police who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in NYC. The letter was signed that year by over a thou- sand Black professors. Paris’s letter ends, “We see you. We hear you. We love you.” (p. 132). These undergraduate students (who were largely in their early teens back in 2014) were leading us in this movement work, connected intergenerationally to the ongoing work of bending education to center and sustain us. At one point in the day, our hundreds strong protest marched passed the football stadium. It was not lost on us that, unconnected to the Black student-led protest and demands of the day, in massive letters on the external score- board flashed the message, “Black Lives Matter.” We all laughed, offering some choice words at the irony of an institution advertising such a claim as students took to the streets and boardrooms to make it a reality. I offer this brief descriptive tribute to the undergraduate organizers (who continue, as I write, to pressure the university into much concrete action around funding, hiring, and other  The Educational Forum 371 priorities), to hold up the possibilities and responsibilities of this moment for CSP and for all strength and asset-based work in teaching and learning. I could also hold up the allied work of Indigenous organizers across the US who pushed for name changes (like that of the Washington Football Team), statue topplings, and land rematriation alongside (and often in concert with) the Movement for Black Lives across summer 2020. These contemporary incar- nations of Indigenous resurgence are, of course, connected to the 2016 and ongoing Standing Rock movement, opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline as well as past and present allied land and water protection movements, which are connected to the long history of radical Indigenous resistance (Estes, 2019), and which ultimately, like Black Lives Matter, are fighting for lives, lifeways, and lands that will benefit all people, all beings, and a possible future for us together on this Earth (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Eagle Shield et al., 2020; Garza, 2014; Simpson, 2017). In the opening chapter of Education in movement spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (Eagle Shield et al., 2020), Menominee organizer and writer Kelly Hayes (2020) offered prescient reflections on teaching, learning, and organizing on the front lines of Standing Rock and also of Chicago Freedom Square (a 40-day long Black-led encampment organized by the #LetUsBreathe Collective and others to protest long-term Chicago Police Department violence against community members). The encampments at Standing Rock and Freedom Square were occurring during the same time in 2016, and in both places, community members founded schools for the children of families in the encampments. Hayes was an organizer in both movement spaces and wrote, “a thousand lessons were in the air, both in Standing Rock and in Chicago. Perhaps one day, they will all fall to the Earth and point all of us toward the next chapter” (p. 22). Learning with the brilliance of the undergraduate students across this summer and winter, with Black, Native, Latinx, and Asian and Pacific Islander youth, elders, and com- munities organizing across the pandemic, seeking to center and sustain our futures in the face of climate crisis and white supremacy during this time is the next chapter Hayes invites us to imagine. Indeed, the transformations fought for through ongoing uprisings led by youth, elders, and communities have shifted the social vocabulary and imagination, and have shifted what is on the table in our collective work toward the educational and social institutions and enactments we need. Antiracism, anti-colonialism, abolition, divest/invest, community care versus polic- ing, mutual aid, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Sovereignty, Stop Asian Hate, trans rights, disability justice, migrant rights, and who is an essential worker are front and center in the minds and mouths—if not yet the actions and policies—of many more people and institutions. As educators—pre-K through university and across community organizations and spaces—it is time to go all in on understanding and enacting these movements alongside the communities we teach and learn with. If not now, when? What would it take for CSP and other strength and asset-based pedagogies to go all in on understanding and enacting alongside communities? For one thing, we would need a more serious critique of racial settler capitalism (commonly called “capitalism”) and a truly aboli- tionist vision (Kaba, 2021; Love, 2019; The Red Nation, 2021) of an otherwise within our work in CSP. Grounded by the leadership and vision of the students and community partners we are currently learning and enacting CSP with, from Coast Salish Lands, to California, from Spain to South Africa, we have begun to make these connections, relations, solidarities ever- more explicit. As Alim, Wong, and I (2020) recently shared: 372 D. PARIS CSP is fundamentally about sustaining communities and their lifeways and, by doing so, sustain- ing life—the planet, our relationship to the land. This means continuing to center, listen to, and follow the lead of Indigenous people in this work. This means re-forging and continuing Black, Latinx, and Asian and Pacific Islander connections to land and community well-being—and all of these must be centered beyond state sanctioned settler capitalism’s commodification of and violence upon Indigenous, Black and migrant bodies and communities, who are often forced to labor on or move off the land as well as relate to each other in unsustainable ways. It is also true to some degree that all of our communities, as we have written, have internalized these unsus- tainable, settler capitalist ways of relating to each other and to the land (and so the inward gaze). As we continue to build together, we remain grateful for our CSP collective and look forward to continuing our efforts to create the world we need, with our ancestors, our young ones, our elders. (p. 272) While we have begun this necessary reckoning with capitalism in our work in CSP (Alim et al., in press; Paris, 2019, 2020; Wong, 2021), we are far from where we need to be if we are to work in productive opposition to the system that employs us as we regenerate, reclaim, and reimagine an education system that sustains us. Several scholars, including in the field of education, have offered recent critiques of capitalism, as well as visions and enactments of resurgence and transformation through teaching and learning (Au, 2018; Grande, 2015, 2018; La, 2017; Love, 2019; San Pedro, 2021; Tuck & Yang, 2014). Within much of the strength and asset-based pedagogy work over the past several decades (including our own work on CSP), however, we have not done a sufficient job of thinking about the fundamental relationships between nation-state education and the ongoing violence of racial settler capitalism. As critical geographer and abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2020) has shared publicly on mul- tiple occasions, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” Because this is so, there is no ultimate vision of racial justice or liberation (educational or otherwise) within capitalism and ongoing settler colonialism: As such, increased access to the system as it is cannot continue to be the primary goal of strength-based pedagogical work. We must go further, following the folks in our field who have made these critiques, enactments within education, as well as spending more time learning with other fields who are offering beautiful abolitionist visions and enactments of a world (including an educational world) centered on community care (Kaba, 2021; The Red Nation, 2021). As more of us argue not for the return of nation-state education to what it was before the pandemic, but rather for reclaiming and reimagining a radically different vision of education, it is time to double down on joining the leadership of the students, families, and communities we learn with. It is clear from the questions and projects the undergraduates in my CSP course are pursuing that, for many of them, centering and sustaining necessitates a radical transfor- mation of the purpose and practice of schooling, one that understands subject areas and disciplines (from STEM to history to the arts) as grounded in service to community care (versus in individual accumulation, stratification, extraction, and the like). One that under- stands intersecting systems of oppression as a given and holds up strategic coalitions that center valuing those who have been most devalued by education as a clear path forward. And it is clear from the students organizing across cities, campuses, and communities that the future they desire is one that likewise values Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander people, families, and the lands in ways radically different than the status quo in schools and society. At base, so many of the young people with whom I am learning are asking for and working to create a way out of a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.  The Educational Forum 373 We have much evidence from our CSP collective that offers us windows into education spaces that center and sustain the valued lifeways of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander young people (and so, ultimately, all people). As we have written, these examples are not about offering access to the system as it is, but about transforming spaces toward what they could and should be. The current moment, full of so much pain and loss, but also brimming with hope and possibility for a more loving and just future, has invited us to better understand what we must divest from and invest in to more completely embrace such needed reclamation, transformation. I do not know where we will be in the pandemic when this article lands in your hands, but I do know our painful memories and losses, our ongoing movements toward justice and liberation, our learning about the world we need and deserve from this unrelenting time will be lasting, generational. And I also know that young people alongside elders, families, and their communities will continue the intergen- erational work of imagining and enacting an education that sustains them, that sustains life, that sustains futures. If our collective work on CSP, joining the decades of beautiful work in the strength and asset-based traditions, can be a small part of that needed future, I am thankful. Acknowledgements My thanks to Gloria Ladson-Billings for the invitation to submit to this necessary forum and for her generative comments on earlier drafts of this essay. My thanks as well to H. Samy Alim and Casey P. Wong for their generative comments on earlier versions of this essay. Any faults are mine alone. H. Samy Alim, Casey Wong, Stephanie Parks, Jazmen Moore, Doua Kha, and Alayna Eagle Shield would also like to thank the Spencer Foundation for their generous support of our current CSP research partnerships across Washington, California, Spain, and South Africa. Finally, a special shout-out also to doctoral student and critical educator Jazmen Moore, who has been my pedagogical collaborator in the CSP undergraduate class at the University of Washington during 2020 and 2021. Notes on Terms I use “Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander” across this essay. As we have written else- where, we of course understand that Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communi- ties are not mutually exclusive communities. At times in this essay I also use “people of color” or “communities of color,” terms of solidarity/mutuality that can also flatten important distinctions and do not name the specificities of race, racism, and resistance within particular communities (e.g., Black or Native or Asian). As well, “people of color” is not inclusive of all Indigenous people, communities, and nations, where land and relation are primary in addition to racialization. Finally, it is true that all of these racial and ethnic namings are in many ways US-centric and that racialization is not the only intersecting axis around which CSP revolves. In our CSP work, we name the specific (e.g., Black Jamaican, Lakota, Fijian) and/or broader communities (e.g., Black, Native, Pacific Islander) as contex- tually appropriate and as communities name themselves (Alim & Paris, 2017; Moore & Paris, 2021; Paris, 2019). I also use the term “cisheteropatriarchal” in this essay, which names the linked systems and ideologies associated with cisgendered, heteronormative, patriarchal norms that guide policies and practices with the goal of denying the rights, wellbeing, and thriving of LGBTQ + people, of women of all genders, and intersections therein. ORCID Django Paris http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9689-0674 374 D. PARIS References Acosta, C. (2013). Pedagogies of resiliency and hope in response to the criminalization of Latin@ ­students. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 9(2), 63–71. Alim, H. S. (2004). You know my steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. 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