Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Abstract

Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms “relevant” and “responsive” are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative that, I believe, embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality.

The Right to Culturally Sustaining Language Education for the New American Mainstream: An Introduction

“…In various ways, each of these articles takes up the ways communities, educators, scholars, and schools-bound up in the nexus of inequitable policies, ideologies, and practices-have worked across centuries and decades to forward what I understand to be a culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012;Paris & Alim, 2014) education, one that perpetuates and fosters multilingualism and multiculturalism, with the maintenance of dynamic heritage languages and cultures as a core principle. 4 The authors in this special issue have dedicated their professional lives-many decades of research and teaching-to understanding, fostering, and sustaining educational and linguistic justice for students, families, and communities that represent the new mainstream.…”

A School-Based Measure of Culturally Responsive Practices

“…Consequently, schools are challenged with providing an effective learning environment for every student in response to an increasingly diverse and multicultural student population. Culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000), or culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) are some of the terms or concepts that appear in the education literature to emphasize collective empowerment and social justice (Aronson and Laughter, 2016) fostering and promoting educational equity and excellence in schools through cultural diversity.…”

Culturally Responsive Peace Education: A Case Study at One Urban Latino K-8 Catholic School

“…On this account, the teacher is viewed neither as the sole nor even the primary fount of knowledge (Ladson-Billings, 1995;McCutcheon, 2002). Above all, the aim of CRP is to sustain (Paris, 2012) and validate students' background culture by drawing from their native "funds of knowledge" (Moll, Amani, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992;Sleeter, 2001), which includes language, histories and cultural practices (Gay, 2001). Funds of knowledge practices promote a dialogue-centered (de Mello, 2012) classroom where conversation-broadly conceived-is viewed as the chief mode of educational experience (Applebee, 1996).…”