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Center for the Professional Education of Teachers

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Get to know the cultures and lives of your students, and evaluate ways in which your instructional practices can support them.

Culturally sustaining practices (CSP) allow, invite, and encourage students to not only use their cultural practices from home in school, but to maintain them. CSP allows students to exist not only in the culture of their school, but also in the culture of their home.

For teachers within New York City, it's important to note that culturally responsive pedagogy, or culturally responsive-sustaining education according to the DOE, is a requirement for New York City schools. This requirement emphasizes the need for teachers to embrace diversity, get to know their students, and to help students feel welcomed and seen in school.

There is no one way of practicing CSP - this would go against the very idea of sustaining students' cultures! - but there are ways to understand what a CSP approach may require from a teacher. Think about CSP as a mindset rather than a series of practices.

But even with a mindset of wanting to be responsive to student needs, it can be difficult to figure out what you should actually do to respond to student cultures, and much of the information out there comes from the world of academia, which can be difficult to translate into practice.

CSP asks: what do my students already know? What are their strengths? What are the strengths of their families and communities?

It's important to investigate the funds of knowledge that your students bring to the classroom. Funds of knowledge can be applied to every area of classroom learning and behavior. A three-year-old who appears to read books backwards may have funds of knowledge stemming from reading in Arabic, which is read from right to left. A fifth grader who fights often on the playground may be defending her friends and family. As teachers, looking at both situations from an asset perspective will change the way we teach these children, whether it's demonstrating how English texts are read without telling a student that what they're doing is wrong, or disciplining with compassion and an understanding of the virtuous (though inappropriate) intentions involved in engaging in a fight.

Funds of knowledge do not only apply to knowledge about culture and language, which, while important, are not the complete extent of how students bring their cultural experiences into the classroom. Tabitha Kidwell and Luis Javier Pentón Herrera offer an example of how a teacher in the US learned that one of his students, who was from a marginalized indigenous group from Guatemala, had spent much of his life working in fields surrounded by nature. The teacher used this new knowledge to plan a lesson where students went outside and collected rocks for a future project.

School practices currently reflect the norms of monolingual, white, middle class students, which often excludes students who come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Students who are excluded from these norms are often viewed through a deficit lens, which means that teachers or school personnel attribute poor academic performance or behavior problems to faults within the students.

Deficit lenses can be directed toward anyone in the school or community. If, for example, a teacher believes that parents in a particular cultural demographic are not involved in their child's education and blames this for their students not doing well academically, that teacher is looking at the parents through a deficit lens. A deficit lens may mean a teacher believes a student to be incapable of learning due to language, disability, or personal characteristics, or attributing behaviors due to "culture".

Even literature from respected sources may be operating within a deficit lens. In my first teaching job in the US, my school district required us to read a book on how poverty affects children's development and cognitive abilities. Although the book appeared to have a sympathetic view of children living in poverty (and I lapped it up eagerly at the time), I can see now that it was hugely problematic.

The book created a focus on what my students could not do. On their supposed deficiencies that I did not blame them for, but did allow me to envision myself as some sort of savior. My students did not need saving. They needed love and compassion and understanding. The book projected a deficit lens of an entire social class.

Incorporating a CSP approach into your practice can help you to question the deficit lens that may exist in your school, and work towards diversifying materials that are available to your students. From a CSP standpoint, students and their families are viewed as people who possess assets for your classroom - a stark contrast to the deficit lens, which implies that they are lacking in some way. This shift in mindset will help you to meet the specific cultural needs of your students as you begin to bring their cultural practices into the classroom.

Getting started

It's not necessary to know everything about every culture or language in order to incorporate CSP into your classroom. It is important, however, to try to get to know the cultures and lives of the students you're teaching, and to evaluate ways in which your instructional practices can support your students.

Getting to know the cultures of your students: there are many ways to get to know your students better - you may be practicing some of them already! During my time as a teacher, I often sent my students and their parents a survey, to help me better understand things like their outlook on school, their language, and even their hopes for the coming school year. The answers I received were extremely useful in helping me to establish a rapport with my students and in building strong relationships with their families.

Evaluating your instructional practices: This will take some time and effort to implement, but one place to start is by using the information you've learned about your students to inform what you teach. This might look like integrating books that include people from your students' cultures into your curriculum - or if that isn't possible, working to make them available and prominent in your school's library. It might also look like bringing your students' languages into the classroom, and allowing students to use their home language. You might also consider welcoming members of your students' communities or support systems to your classroom to bring additional outside perspectives. It may feel overwhelming to consider adjusting your mindset and your instruction - the key is to make deliberate, thoughtful changes over time, in order to better support your students and grow a more culturally sustaining practice.

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: An Introduction

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Get to know the cultures and lives of your students, and evaluate ways in which your instructional practices can support them.

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (California Dept. of Ed)

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (California Dept. of Ed)

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy builds on decades of asset-based pedagogical research including Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings) and Culturally Responsive (Gay and Hammond) and Linguistic (Hollie) Pedagogy.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy 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.

Django Paris and H. Samy Alim describe the key features across culturally sustaining educational settings in an Education Week Author Interview: 'Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies' .

Feature

What it Looks Like

Students' languages, literacies, and cultural ways of being are centered meaningfully and consistently in classroom learning instead of being considered as "add-ons."

Educators and schools are in conversation with communities about what they desire and want to sustain through schooling.

Educators connect present learning to the histories of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities both locally and nationally.

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).

Resources

H. Samy Alim and Django Paris, eds., Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, Teachers College Press (2017).

Gloria Ladson-Billings, "Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix" , Harvard Educational Review (Volume 84, Number 1, p.74-84, Spring 2014), accessed October 2019.

Ferlazzo and Paris, "Author Interview: 'Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies'" , EdWeek (2017), accessed January 2020.

Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy

Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy extends Paris and Alim's research to Native American learners. The Western colonization of the United States historically erased Native American culture, belief systems, and languages. Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy specifically relates to reclaiming or revitalizing what Native American learners lost through the process of colonization.

Most Native American learners in the United States attend schools outside of reservations and constitute very small percentages of public school populations. Disparities on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as well as in graduation rates, overrepresentation in special education, and college completion rates are evident when comparing Native American students to their White counterparts.

Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy is a promising practice in utilizing Native culture and language to positively impact Native learners' achievement. Deeply embedded in these practices is the teaching of Native languages in order to allow students to deeply connect with their cultural communities. Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy ensures that Native culture is present throughout the curriculum as well.

Resources

Michelle M. Jacob, Leilani Sabzalian, Joana Jansen, Tary J. Tobin, Claudia G. Vincent, and Kelly M. LaChance, "The Gift of Education: How Indigenous Knowledges Can Transform the Future of Public Education" (PDF) , International Journal of Multicultural Education (Volume 20, Number 1, 2018), accessed October 2019.

Teresa L. McCarty and Tiffany S. Lee, "Critical Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy and Indigenous Education Sovereignty" , Harvard Educational Review, accessed October 2019.

Questions: Teacher and Leader Policy Office | TLPO@cde.ca.gov | 916-445-7331

Last Reviewed: Thursday, March 09, 2023

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy builds upon the Asset-Based Pedagogies that came before it but presents the need to not only affirm and connect to students' cultural backgrounds, but also to sustain them through schooling.

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Checking Yourself for Bias in the Classroom (Me/They/We)

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Checking Yourself for Bias in the Classroom (Me/They/We)

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Checking Yourself for Bias in the Classroom

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Unconscious bias can shape the responses of even the most well-intentioned educators. But you can check yourself—one teacher shares how.

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Got Bias? (Interaction Institute for Social Change)

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Got Bias? (Interaction Institute for Social Change)

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Got Bias? - Interaction Institute for Social Change

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A big shout out to our colleagues at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Their recently released report "State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2013" reviews what science can tell us about what implicit bias is and how it works, why it matters and how to reduce it.

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Cover Art by Favianna Rodriguez
Django Paris and H. Samy Alim agreed to answer a few questions about their new book, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World.

Django Paris is Associate Professor of Language and Literacy and Core Faculty in the African American and African Studies Program at Michigan State University. In January 2018, he will join the faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle, as the Director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice.

H. Samy Alim is Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
LF: You make a distinction between culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Can you say more about those differences? Django Paris and H. Samy Alim: This is an important question, one we have of course thought deeply about. In order to explore this question we'll need to first define culturally sustaining pedagogy: CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster-to sustain-linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation and revitalization. CSP positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive, rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits. Culturally sustaining pedagogy exists wherever education sustains the lifeways of communities who have been and continue to be damaged and erased through schooling. As such, CSP explicitly calls for schooling to be a site for sustaining-rather than eradicating-the cultural ways of being of communities of color. CSP builds on decades of crucial asset-based pedagogical research that has countered pervasive deficit approaches to prove that our practices and ways of being as students and communities of color are legitimate and should be included meaningfully in classroom learning. Whether explicitly stated or not, this tradition of asset-based pedagogical research has fought against persistent, ongoing beliefs in White superiority and the systemic racism they engender. In the past 25 years, this research has importantly included work on the funds of knowledge (Luis Moll, Norma Gonzalez and their collaborators), the third space (Kris Gutiérrez and her collaborators), cultural modeling (Carol Lee), and, to your question, Gloria Ladson-Billings' seminal conception of culturally relevant pedagogy. Indeed, Ladson-Billings (2014) wrote in her recent article in the "Harvard Educational Review" that "culturally sustaining pedagogy uses culturally relevant pedagogy as the place where the 'beat drops'"; it does "not imply that the original was deficient" but rather speaks "to the changing and evolving needs of dynamic systems " (p. 76). It is these changing and evolving demographic, cultural, and social needs coupled with the persistence and even increase of deficit-framed policies and practices that make a more explicit commitment to sustaining the valued practices and ways of being of students and communities of color so necessary in the current moment. For us, then, it is not so much about distinctions between CSP and CRP, but rather about the ways CSP can contribute to the ongoing work of educational justice that CRP and other asset pedagogies have forwarded. CRP continues to guide our work, even as we continue to develop needed pedagogical theory and practice. It's also worth noting that across our own careers as classroom teachers and now as university educators, we have both been deeply informed by CRP and the other asset pedagogies CSP builds from. And we are deeply grateful that the founders of these frameworks are members of our CSP collective and have chapters in the book! So while you can take our word for it, it's really important to read what Ladson-Billings, Gutiérrez, Lee, Gonzalez and others have to say about CSP. Within our new book Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies is the kind of intergenerational "building" that we hope can produce a strong educational justice movement going forward.

LF: What would you say to teachers who claim to "not see color" and teach all students the "same"? Django Paris and H. Samy Alim: No matter how well-intentioned, when a teacher (often a White teacher but as we mention in the book, teachers of color, too, can be invested in "Whiteness") claims that they "don't see color" they are engaging in "colorblind" rhetoric that is harmful to communities of color for at least three obvious reasons: (1) They are denying their own "Whiteness" (and/or their investment in "Whiteness") and all of the social privileges and power that they gain from that, and (2) They are denying other folks' "Blackness," "Brownness," or "Asianness" (as examples) and all of the social discrimination that flows from that, and most importantly, (3) They are constructing racism as individual and intentional, rather than institutional. Racism is structural; it is historical and enduring. The U.S.-unfortunately for People of Color-is structured from top-to-bottom by race (including infant mortality rates, quality of educational opportunities, housing and employment discrimination, and so on and so on; all social science research confirms this). As we write in the introduction to the book, our work on CSP has been informed by justice movements like the Standing Rock #NoDAPL movement for Indigenous sovereignty, land, and clean water for all people and by #BlackLivesMatter. We'll leave readers with this #BlackLivesMatter meme that went viral and, we believe, has direct relevance to this question: SAYING ALL LIVES MATTER IS LIKE SAYING "ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL" WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY ENSLAVING OVER 4 MILLION HUMAN BEINGS. If the message still isn't clear, then consider this. Saying that you "don't see color" whenever People of Color are vocal about racism and discrimination is akin to saying you "don't see gender" (or more accurately, gender expression) whenever women (of any gender) raise their voices about sexism and harassment. It is dishonest. And frankly, we have no time for it. What we do have time for, though, is genuine, open, honest, courageous conversations about racism and how education can disrupt racism. This book brings all of us together in a collective effort to address racism and all other forms of discrimination in our educational policies, practices, and pedagogies. We hope you will join us in that effort.

LF: Your book shares lots of teaching strategies. This may be an unfair question, but could you share two or three of your favorites and explain why you like them? Django Paris and H. Samy Alim: This is an unfair question! You'll note that the book is called, "Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies" (CSPs)-plural! In the book we join a collective of educational justice workers (teachers, youth, families, researchers) to forward examples of CSPs across Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and immigrant communities in the U.S. and also in South Africa. Several of the chapters focus on classroom level examples, while others look at entire schools or communities enacting CSPs. Across these long-term, community-engaged studies the book, community accountability and local affordances and constraints mean CSP takes on necessarily different forms across different contexts (hence, the plural). This is to say that what we are seeking to sustain through our teaching, how we seek to sustain it, and why we do so all depend on who the students are, where the school is, who the teachers and school leaders are. Even within this necessary and expected variation, key features across culturally sustaining educational settings include: This means that educators don't see students' languages (e.g., Navajo, African-American Language, Spanish, "standard" English), literacies (e.g., Hip Hop, poetry, social media, street art) or ways of being (e.g., spiritual beliefs, ways of relating to adults and elders) as somehow marginal or to simply be added to the existing curriculum. Rather, these facets of students' selves and communities must be centered meaningfully in classroom learning, across units and projects. Even as this may be in tension with some of the expectations of many school settings, it is also true that such centering has proven to increase student outcomes on dominant measures of school achievement. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 show how teachers center students' cultural communities in classrooms serving Black, Latinx, Native, and Pacific Islander students specifically. As educators, we know all too well about the many systems of accountability we are subjected to. Unfortunately, being accountable to the communities-the students and families-we serve is generally not something we are required to do. Culturally sustaining educators and schools are in conversation with young people and families about what they desire, what they want to sustain through schooling. Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 13 (among others) give examples of how teachers and administrators reach out to communities and remain accountable to their needs. Culturally sustaining educators connect present learning to the histories of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities, to the histories of neighborhoods and cities, and the histories of the larger states and nation-states that they are part of. It is crucial when we are seeking to sustain valuable practices that we link those practices up with the past and present of communities. Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz recently told a group of students of color at one of our college campuses that the whole purpose of our educational system was to "make us misunderstand ourselves." He was speaking about the role of educational institutions in colonial and neocolonial contexts. This, of course, can have a deep impact on our communities. When an educational system and larger society continually tells us that we are a "problem," that we lack rich languages, beautiful cultures, and storied histories-that we are deficient in all of these ways-we can internalize false understandings of ourselves, our practices, our communities, and our futures. Across the chapters in the book, educators work to show the value of communities and their practices beyond the dominant narratives of White, middle class, "standard" English monolingual/monocultural superiority which schools largely uphold. These educators are working to refuse, reject, and in some cases, return what Toni Morrison calls the White gaze. Chapters 7 and 9 on the U.S. and South Africa are great examples of this. As teachers we create and adapt curriculum-the stuff of teaching and learning-and we plan how it is we will teach it. Culturally sustaining educators are no different; it's just what and who we value and include in the process that shifts. We work to curricularize-to make into curriculum-the previous four elements as we choose (together with students and community members) what we are seeking to sustain. What will we read, write, perform, research? In what classroom and community settings? Who are the sources of knowledge we must be in critical conversation with? Being and becoming a culturally sustaining educator is dynamic; it's about critically learning with community; it's about, together, sustaining who youth and communities are and want to be; and it's about doing all of that with respect and love.

LF: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share? Django Paris and H. Samy Alim: Thanks for this opportunity to share our work on CSP with the "Ed Week Teacher" audience. We hope the book can be of use to educators committed to equity and justice in a time of continuing inequity and injustice in our schools and in society. For us, it is always important to keep the goals of our teaching front and center. CSPs are about more than just resistance. This book, in fact, is about building the kind of world that we want to see for our children (that's the symbolism of Favianna Rodriguez's brilliant cover design). As we continue to think through the promises and challenges of culturally sustaining pedagogy, we are hopeful that this work can join young people, educators, communities, and scholars in producing a collective vision of an educational system-and a future world-that sustains us. LF: Thanks, Django and Samy!

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Django Paris and H. Samy Alim agreed to answer a few questions about their new book, "Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World."

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Tackling Implicit Bias (Learning for Justice)

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Tackling Implicit Bias (Learning for Justice)

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Editor's note: This article is the first in a three-part series that links three important ideas-implicit bias, stereotype threat and identity safety-all backed by research.
As educators, it may seem overwhelming that, in addition to addressing overt racism in our classrooms and schools, we also need to tackle unconscious racial prejudices, known as "implicit bias," not only in our students, but in ourselves. However, it is possible to address implicit bias, and the solutions are in our hands.

The recent events in Ferguson came as a dramatic wake-up call for our country. Fifty years after Selma, we still have a racial divide in this country. While overt racism has greatly declined from the days of segregation and lynching, and many laws now seek to protect our citizens from discrimination, pervasive racist attitudes rear their ugly heads in harmful and sometimes deadly ways. For many of us who strive for equity and social justice in our rapidly diversifying country, the next big hurdle in our path is tackling aversive racism and stereotyping-also known as implicit bias. Negative stereotypes feed our minds like a steady drip of toxin; we may not even be aware of as it occurs. Whether toxic attitudes are about other people or ourselves, they are very damaging.

Several research experiments have deepened our understanding of implicit bias:

In one experiment, word association was used to identify bias. Study participants were shown words with positive or negative associations like "happy" or awful" and then rapidly shown either black and white faces. Right away, they were told to classify the words as pleasant or unpleasant. White participants classified negative words more quickly if the words were shown after they saw black faces, suggesting a negative association with black people.[1]

In another study, research subjects viewed black and white faces so quickly that they didn't consciously know what they saw. Then a blurred object flashed on the screen. Sometimes the object was a knife or gun. If participants saw black faces, they quickly identified the guns and knives. If they saw white faces, it took more time to discern the object.[2]

Understand the Problem

One of the challenges of changing implicit bias is that, because we are often not conscious of our beliefs, we can take actions based on them without realizing it. These types of reactions have been part of the fabric of humans since our earliest days. Often we fear people and events that surprise us or are unfamiliar to us. To some extent, this type of stereotyping is built into us as a survival mechanism that gets passed on to children. That does not mean implicit bias is "natural" or right. It means we need to be aware that we are capable of holding beliefs that are not based in logic. Once we do that, we can step back and analyze how implicit bias negatively affects us today.

Like the canaries in the gold mine, the unconscious bias that lurks in our minds can indicate the potential for devastating outcomes such as an officer making a split-second decision and killing an unarmed youth. And for educators, implicit bias can cause us to suspend and expel students more rapidly, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan captured when he highlighted statistics on how black students are suspended and expelled at rates three times those of whites, often for lesser offenses.

Implicit bias does not just belong in the domain of white police officers and educators, though. Jennifer Eberhardt, an implicit bias researcher, says, "A lot of the tests we've done, we give them to students, to ordinary citizens and to police officers. We're finding the results are generally similar." It can also be harmful when it causes subjective and discriminatory choices in hiring, approving people for loans and many other arenas.

Move Toward Solutions

A growing body of research is emerging on how to counteract implicit bias.[3] We need to become knowledgeable about how unconscious prejudice works in order to begin to change it. (You can take online Implicit Association Tests, or IATs, to measure unconscious bias.) Beyond this awareness and taking accountability, there are specific ways that educators and others can counteract it.

While thinking about overcoming unconscious attitudes may be overwhelming, the good news is our brains are malleable. Educators can work on countering negative stereotypes and looking at each person as an individual instead of lumping them together. They also can create identity-safe classrooms where everyone feels a sense of belonging and empathy toward others, with opportunities to get to know and befriend others who are different from them.

The next two blogs in this series will show on-the-ground action by teachers using promising practices to address implicit bias. The second blog in the series will show how teachers are countering negative stereotypes by having students learn about ways to reduce stereotyping in class and understand the concept of stereotype threat, the fear of confirming a negative stereotype.[4] The third blog will focus on creating identity-safe classrooms where students and their social identities are assets, rather than barriers, to success in the classroom.[5]

All students deserve to be welcomed, supported and valued as members of the learning community. Before we can truly model empathy for and acceptance of individuals from identity groups different from our own, we must learn to be honest about the biases we hold.

Cohn-Vargas is director of Not in Our School and coauthor of Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn.

[2] Dreifus, 2015

[3] Devine, 2012

[4] Steele and Aronson, 2002

[5] Cohn-Vargas, Steele, 2013

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Editor's note: This article is the first in a three-part series that links three important ideas-implicit bias, stereotype threat and identity safety-all backed by research. As educators, it may seem overwhelming that, in addition to addressing overt racism in our classrooms and schools, we also need to tackle unconscious racial prejudices, known as "implicit bias," not only in our students, but in ourselves.

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Take the implicit bias test

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Here you will have the opportunity to assess your conscious and unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music. At the same time, you will be assisting psychological research on thoughts and feelings.

Sessions require 10-15 minutes to complete. Each time you begin a session you will be randomly assigned to a topic. Try one or do them all! At the end of the session, you will get some information about the study and a summary of your results. We hope that you will find the experience interesting and informative.

If you haven't already registered, fill out a brief form to register and then begin! This site is free and there are no advertisements.

For best results, close other distracting programs on your machine, minimize noise distraction in the area, and make sure that you have up to 15 minutes to spare. The study will open in a pop-up window.

REGISTERED PARTICIPANT ENTRANCE

Enter email address here:

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Here you will have the opportunity to assess your conscious and unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music. At the same time, you will be assisting psychological research on thoughts a…

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How can educators tackle stereotypes that negatively influence classroom performance? Here are some suggestions from the director of Not In Our School.

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As an antidote to implicit bias and stereotype threat, educators can build identity-safe classrooms and schools.

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Project READY: Module 17, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

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Project READY: Module 17, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

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After working through this module, you will be able to:

Describe asset-based pedagogical approaches including Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP).

Assess the extent to which lesson plans, teaching practices, and schools incorporate CRP/CSP.

Introduction

Historically, schools have seen the home cultures of students of color and English-language learners as deficits to be overcome or resources to be treated as a bridge to preferable, dominant practices. Current pedagogies, including culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies, take an asset-based approach, viewing students' home and community cultural practices as resources "to honor, explore, and extend" (Paris 2012, p. 94). In this module, we will explore this asset-based approach to students' home and community cultural practices. The most well-known asset-based approach is culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP).

CRP's goals:

Students achieve academically.

Students demonstrate cultural competence (maintaining their own heritage and community practices while gaining access to dominant practices).

Students understand and critique the existing social order. (Ladson-Billings, 1994)

Culturally sustaining pedagogy retains these goals but goes a step farther. In addition to ensuring BIPOC students maintain their own heritage and community practices while gaining access to dominant practices, culturally sustaining pedagogy engages with students' youth culture practices and recognizes that youth are producers of culture as well as consumers. Culturally relevant pedagogy sees BIPOC students' heritage and community cultural practices as resources to honor and explore; culturally sustaining pedagogy sees them as resources to honor, explore, and extend.

Who is...

Dr. Gloria-Ladson Billings

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings is a pedagogical theorist and teacher educator whose research focuses on culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory.

To learn more about Dr. Ladson-Billings and her work:

Watch this video, Successful Teachers of African-American Children.

one of Dr. Ladson-Billings's texts (we recommend starting with The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children).

The graphic below compares deficit, difference, and asset-based approaches:

Watch

Culturally sustaining pedagogy has been described as "culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0." Watch this video to learn more about culturally relevant and culturally responsive pedagogies.

As you watch, consider these questions:

What is the primary premise of culturally relevant pedagogy?

How is culturally relevant pedagogy compatible with what we know about good teaching?

What dilemma is culturally relevant pedagogy designed to address? How does it address this dilemma?

Click or tap the arrow to the left of each question below to read our answers to the questions we asked you to consider.

Read

For a more in-depth exploration of culturally relevant pedagogy, read this article from Learning for Justice.

Listen

To learn more about culturally sustaining pedagogy, listen to this conversation with Django Paris, who coined the term. You can also follow along with or read the transcript [PDF].

As you listen, consider the following questions:

What is the goal of culturally sustaining pedagogy?

What should we ask ourselves when we're taking on a culturally sustaining approach? How do we address this question?

What is the difference between culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy?

What can educators do to move toward culturally sustaining pedagogy?

The key question we must keep in mind as we implement culturally sustaining pedagogy is, "What are we seeking to sustain?"

Who is...

Dr. Django Paris is a professor of multicultural education and researcher whose research and teaching focus on understanding and sustaining languages, literacies, and lifeways among youth of color in the context of demographic and social change.

To learn more about Dr. Paris and his work:

the book he co-edited with Dr. H. Samy Alim, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World.

Click or tap the arrow to the left of each question below to read our answers to the questions we asked you to consider.

Here are some points to remember about culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies:

Culture is "dynamic, shifting, and ever-changing" (Paris, 2012, p. 95).

Take care not to essentialize students' cultures or be overdeterministic in linking cultural practices to racial and ethnic groups.

Value both traditional, heritage practices and current, community practices.

Invite students to critique cultural texts and practices, considering how they can promote inequity or be exclusionary.

"...learners can be sources and resources of knowledge and skills..." (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 79)

CSP is not a teaching guide or a set of lesson plans. It's an approach to the craft of teaching.

- Lorena Germán

Images of Practice

Read these blog posts [PDF] to learn how six different teachers implement culturally sustaining pedagogy in their classrooms. As you read, consider these four elements of culturally sustaining pedagogy:

1. key beliefs and values

2. instructional strategies

3. activities

4. environmental elements

respond

In your journal, respond to these questions:

What messages did you receive from school about your own heritage and community cultural practices?

How do you view your students' heritage and community cultural practices? How does that impact your instruction?

Act

In your journal, brainstorm what you can do in your library or classroom to incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy into your instruction.

When you're done, click here to see our ideas.

Work with students as co-creators of curriculum and programming:

Invite students to participate in the selection of materials for your library or classroom.

Have students choose from a menu of different products to use to demonstrate how they engage with instructional or library resources.

Have students create their own questions to ask as writing prompts.

Invite students to share their own stories.

Include students' out-of-school experiences as reference points in class discussions.

Bring students' culture into the curriculum and library:

Use popular media (movies, comics, video games, music, more) and non-traditional texts (street art, tattoos, more) that students identify as personally resonant as texts to engage with and critique.

Use these same media as ways for students to demonstrate understanding.

Connect with the community:

Bring in guest speakers. It is critical that guest speakers reflect the racial diversity of your community. BIYOC should have opportunities to hear from community leaders who look like them and share their culture and some of their experiences.

Select one change you want to make in your library or classroom to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy. Make a plan, then implement it.

BUT WAIT!
In this section, we address common questions and concerns related to the material presented in each module. You may have these questions yourself, or someone you're sharing this information with might raise them. We recommend that for each question below, you spend a few minutes thinking about your own response before clicking the arrow to the left of the question to see our response.
Why is culturally sustaining pedagogy important?

Culturally sustaining pedagogy demonstrates to BIYOC that their cultural and linguistic practices, and by extension they themselves, are of value. When they believe their own forms of expertise are valued, they are more likely to succeed (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Culturally sustaining pedagogy, then, has the potential not only to show students that we think their cultural and linguistic practices are important, but also to contribute to their academic success. Further, "multilingualism and multiculturalism are increasingly linked to access and power in U.S. and global contexts" (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 87). Perpetuating and fostering pluralistic cultural and linguistic practices helps students gain access and power.

Youth culture moves so fast. How can I keep up?

You don't need to keep up. Allow your students to be the youth culture experts in your library or classroom. Find ways for them to bring their own cultural expertise into the space and their academic work, both by demonstrating its value as a subject of study and by asking them to critique it.

Isn't it racist to assume that all people from the same race share the same culture?

As we discussed in Module 7, culture is not race-dependent or race-determined and "it is important that we do not essentialize and are not overdeterministic in our linkages of language and other cultural practices to certain racial and ethnic groups in approaching what it is we are seeking to sustain"(Paris, 2012, p. 95). Culturally sustaining pedagogy does not ask educators to make assumptions about students' culture; instead, it asks them to invite that culture into the classroom based on students' own articulation of their cultural and linguistic practices. It asks educators to center those practices, rather than insisting that students only approach knowledge creation from a dominant, white, monocultural paradigm.

In the public library, we often celebrate culture in a superficial way through book displays on a specific holiday or cultural holiday celebration like Dia de los Muertos. How can we use culturally sustaining pedagogy in book displays and library programs?

Invite families and youth to help plan programs, events, and book displays. Think about ways you could extend a cultural program such as Dia de los Muertos using culturally sustaining pedagogy. Create displays that celebrate the ethnicity, languages, and culture in your branch throughout the year, not just on specific holidays. Make sure to show the deep and nuanced aspects of culture, ethnicity, and language, rather than just the concrete aspects like food and music. Revisit Module 7 for additional ideas.

Additional Resources

Paris, Django and H. Samy Alim, Eds. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press.

References and Image Credits

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2012). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: AKA the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85-100,134,136-137.

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Module 17: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

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After working through this module, you will be able to: Describe asset-based pedagogical approaches including Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). Assess the extent to which lesson plans, teaching practices, and schools incorporate CRP/CSP.