Amidst a series of raging pandemics - COVID-19, racial justice, political polarization, economic downturn - a community of educators came together to, process, learn, create, and respond. Many of the issues that were now in headlines had always been there - racism, inequality, polarization - we new we needed to interrogate the role that education plays in fostering these inequities and under-serving our most marginalized students.

We began in summer 2020 using reading, writing, and discussion as we considered theories and frameworks: Culturally Responsive & Sustaining Pedagogies, Critical Mentoring, Humanizing Pedagogies, Youth-Adult Partnerships along with our own and our students’ experiences with pandemic distance teaching and learning, and what we know from experience to be good teaching. From that research, reflection, writing and discussion, we collectively drafted design principles for what we are calling Culturally Sustaining Learning Partnerships.

These design principles guided our community as we planed to return not to what was but to What We Can Become, so that classrooms, schools and communities might become more equitable, humane and responsive. This effort continued throughout the 20-21 school year as our community effort supported a space for educators who believe education can and must do better and to work together to design for more equitable, humane and responsive classrooms, schools, and communities.Informed by practice, we continued to revise and refine these draft principles for Culturally Sustaining Learning Partnerships as we learned from our students and our teaching over the course of the school year.

At monthly evening meetings across the course of the 2020-21 school year, educators met online to share work and learning. Through fully online, hybrid, and in-person instructional models, educator participants utilized the Culturally Sustaining Design Principles to...

• Design classroom communities and experiences

• Co-create, implement, and evaluate learning

• Teach and learn alongside our students

Through writing, conversation, and listening, our community supported each other in living and embodying these principles in new and emerging teaching environments. We took the bold and vulnerable step not to go back to what was but to create something new and better.

The following is a collection of texts that informed the Design Principles for Culturally Sustaining Learning Partnerships.

Youth and Adult Partnerships

• Being Y-AP Savvy: A Primer on Creating & Sustaining Youth - Adult Partnerships by Shepard Zeldin and Jessica Collura

• Preparing for Youth Engagement: Youth Voice, Youth-Adult Partnership, Youth Organizing by Shepard Zeldin, Jill Gurtner, and Brie Chapa

Pandemic / Distance Teaching & Learning

• "Go Back to Better": An Interview with Cornelius Minor by Cornelius Minor and Troy Hicks

• Teachers, We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were by Bettina Love

Culturally Responsive - Sustaining Pedagogies

• Guidance on Culturally Responsive - Sustaining Remote Education: Centering Equity, Access, and Educational Justice by Dr. David E. Kirkland

• What Would it mean for English to Become More Culturally Responsive and Sustaining? by Randy Bomer

• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change In Stance, Terminology, and Practice by Django Paris

• A Humanizing Pedagogy: Reinventing the Principles and Practice of Education as a Journey Toward Liberation by Marîa del Carmen Salazar

Additional Texts

• Transforming Teaching Practice: Becoming the critically reflective teacher by Barbara Larrivee

• White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun

• The Architecture of Ownership by Adam Fletcher