Culturally Relevant & Sustaining Pedagogies

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

A foundational text for this approach is Geneva Gay’s, Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, Teachers College Press (3rd ed., 2018). Gay defines Culturally Reponsive pedagogy therein as a student-centered approach that uses “...the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.” A comprehensive 2019 study of culturally responsive teaching by New America, “Culturally Responsive Teaching A 50-State Survey of Teaching Standards” identifies at least 8 competencies that their review of the literature suggests (the summary below comes from CA State Department of Education.

1. Reflect on one's cultural lens: Culturally Responsive Educators (CREs) are reflective about their own group memberships that may be based on race, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. They are cognizant that their life experiences and those group memberships may create biases that can influence their interactions with students, families, and colleagues. 

2. Recognize and redress bias in the system: CREs recognize that their students’ access to educational opportunities may be influenced by their social markers (e.g., race, ethnicity, social class and language) and advocate for all students to have access to high-quality teachers and schools. 

3. Draw on students’ culture to shape curriculum and instruction: CREs draw on their students’ cultures and life experiences when planning their instruction and reject instructional materials that contain cultural biases and/or stereotypes. They supplement the curriculum if it lacks the representation of their students’ heritage. 

4. Bring real-world issues into the classroom: CREs connect their curriculum to real-world problems and ask students to consider solutions to them. These issues may involve injustices that exist in their communities or nationwide. Through this process, CREs empower their students to see themselves as change agents that can right the injustices that exist in the world. 

5. Model high expectations for all students: CREs hold high academic expectations for all students and believe that all students are capable of academic success. 

6. Promote respect for student differences: CREs are models for how all students should respect one another and embrace their fellow classmate’s social, cultural, and linguistic differences. 

7. Collaborate with families and the local community: CREs work to break down barriers that may keep students’ families from participating in their children’s education (i.e., work schedules, language barriers). CREs make efforts to learn about the families and community in which they teach. 

8.  Communicate in linguistically and culturally responsive ways: CREs understand and honor both the verbal and nonverbal culturally-influenced communication styles of the community in which they teach. They also seek to communicate with parents that speak a home language other than English by utilizing translation services.  

Another resource faculty may use toward investigating the manner in which their syllabus organizes and suggests a culturally responsive curricular experience is the Culturally Responsive Teaching Checklist provided by UCLA’s Re-Imagining Migration project (2017). Besides offering a longer definition of culturally responsive teaching, and a set of questions for instructors to answer for themselves as to how they are responding to a variety of possible cultural differences that contemporary educational experiences must learn to consciously engage, the checklist theorizes 5 levels of responsiveness that are each itemized with examples reflecting that level of engagement:

Level of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Incorporated into Teaching Practices

Level 0
    • No culturally or linguistically relevant materials were included in my class
Level 1 / Contributions Approach
    • Heroes, holidays, historical events, & discrete cultural elements are incorporated into class lessons
Level 2 / Additive Approach
    • Multicultural content, concepts, themes are incorporated to the lesson from multicultural students' perspectives
Level 3 / Transformation Approach
    • The structure of the curriculum enables students to view concepts, issues, events, and themes from the perspectives of diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural groups
Level 4 / Social Action Approach
    • Students make decisions on important social issues and take action to help solve them

NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools produced a related but much more in depth scorecard for culturally responsive curriculum in 2019. While designed to help with the examination of English Language Arts curriculum specifically, the scorecard comprising 30 questions for assessing a course is likely a great resource for those looking to begin serious reflection on their syllabi. The scorecard is organized across 3 broad thematic categories: the Representation of peoples (both within and as authors of texts), how the curriculum engages with Social Justice (as related to issues of decolonization, power and privilege; the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives within in; and it’s ability to connect to students’ real lives with actionable examples), as well as for assessing the cultural responsiveness of the materials teachers themselves will consult to organize and teach the course).

Lastly, the Lib Guide for Culturally Responsive Curriculum at Portland State University offers a huge set of resources for deeper reflection and consideration of how one’s syllabus will be constructed and course conducted. Beyond re-affirming much if not all that has been listed or stated previously, here the culturally responsive checklist for faculty also specifically highlights the need to supportively include a wide variety of learning styles as well as to ensure that the class remains open to “difficult dialogues” or what we might otherwise call “brave spaces.”

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

In her 1994 book, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, Gloria Ladson-Billings–as perhaps the key architect of this approach–counseled, “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 that employs them.” If there is a single defining difference between culturally responsive and relevant approaches to education then it may be this: culturally relevant pedagogy is not simply a multicultural assets-based approach to teaching and learning but rather a critical pedagogy that seeks

1. students’ academic success and skill development (along with students’ general intellectual and moral growth),
2. bilingual and cultural competence in which students’ cultural identities are explored and utilized as assets while also allowing them to explore trans-cultural and languaging opportunities, and
3. the production and organization of critical sociopolitical consciousness that engages in struggle against the cultural norms, values, ideologies, and institutional structures that gird societal inequity and unfreedom.

Since 2014, Ladson-Billings has been concerned with the application and understanding of culturally relevant pedagogy. Often, she has argued, schools and teachers provide readings on it but then fail to actually practice the ideas in a serious manner. This has resulted in its being used to justify “curricular tokenism” in which syllabi are made to look representationally diverse but without any systematic reasoning behind the arrangement save for tokenism. Another problem has been its use as an instrumental way to have BIPOC students motivated to otherwise assimilate to White norms. Finally, the issue has been raised that teachers cite culturally relevant methods towards the celebration of any and all cultural products by BIPOC students and communities instead of drawing upon such cultural work towards more critically complex examination of both its emancipatory and more limited (and even socially oppressive) aspects. With this in mind, Ladson-Billings has called for the ongoing reimagination of culturally relevant pedagogy and has more recently celebrated it as: culturally sustaining pedagogy.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Over the last decade, Django Paris (along with his frequent co-author, H. Samy Alim, and others like Casey Wong) has further extended the traditions of culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy by further asking of such work: What does it seek to sustain culturally and how does such education further the sustainability and survivance of oppressed groups and peoples? In 2017, Alim and Paris in their essay, “What is culturally sustaining pedagogy and why does it matter?” outlined 4 features of culturally sustaining pedagogy and provided correlative examples:

1. Valuing community languages, practices, and ways of being: Students’ languages, literacies, and cultural ways of being are centered meaningfully and consistently in classroom learning instead of being considered as “add-ons.” 

2. Schools are accountable to the community: Educators and schools are in conversation with communities about what they desire and want to sustain through schooling. 

3. Curriculum that connects to cultural and linguistic histories: Educators connect present learning to the histories of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities both locally and nationally. 

4. Sustaining cultural and linguistic practices, while providing access to the dominant culture: Educators value and sustain the cultural and linguistic practices of the community while providing access to the dominant culture (white, middle class, and standard English speaking). 

In 2020, in the essay, “Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A critical framework for centering communities,” Alim, Paris and Wong summarized culturally sustaining pedagogy as follows:

Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is a critical framework for centering and sustaining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander communities as these memberships necessarily intersect with gender and sexuality, disability, class, language, land, and more. First and foremost, CSP explicitly names whiteness (including white normativity, white racism and ideologies 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, occupation, 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 imperialist 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. 

This more clearly highlights the manner in which culturally sustaining pedagogy approaches are decidedly oppositional to white supremacist orders inclusive of intersectional oppressions and as manifest across all forms of settler colonial cultural ideas and practices. Making transformative resistance to white settler colonial systems a core demand of such pedagogy illuminates how it may be culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0 and it also further highlights the generative nature of valuing the concept of sustainability within such work. Thus, Alim, Paris and Wong further conclude from the above:

CSP is fundamentally about sustaining communities and their lifeways and, by doing so, sustaining 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 unsustainable, settler capitalist ways of relating to each other and to the land (and so the inward gaze).

Thus, faculty interested in incorporating culturally sustaining approaches within their syllabus should recognize the need for centering anti- and de-colonization as a theoretical and political framework through which to engage the topics within their curriculum, while also connecting the cultural identities and practices of students to traditions of land-based relationship as possible, with particular attention to how the course and its class members are embedded within and reproduce oppressive hegemonic systems of white imperialism and settler culture, on the one hand, and the emancipatory potentials of Indigenous ancestral wisdom and revitalized organizations of cultural practices that work to resist and alternate hegemonic racial capitalism and its affiliated cultural harms. In this way, culturally sustaining pedagogy is also a critically culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy with a focus upon Indigenous cosmologies, languages, and ongoing demands for political sovereignty across the curriculum.