Several years back, Jan Hare and Jo-Ann Archibald were looking for submissions for a book they were working on. In my work for a previous employer, I wrote a chapter on the development process which we used to create the Indian Residential School and Reconciliation Resources. For example, the chapter talks about the way that professional development workshops incorporated feedback from survivors and inter-generational survivors (who were also educators and there in their capacity as educators) in order to ensure that they were comfortable in the workshops. I didn't use the term "trauma informed" because I didn't know it then, but looking back, I think it was a trauma informed approach to professional development on residential schools and reconciliation. I learned a lot during that project and I am glad that I had the opportunity to document the process in a book chapter. If you would like to read the chapter, here is a (poorly) scanned version of the chapter on google drive (login to google is required). You can also purchase the whole book here.
Anyhow, today's book is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. Before I talk about the book, though, I will explain my path to the book.
I first heard the term "culturally sustaining pedagogy" in the book Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View. Series editors Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Lang state:
Although culturally responsive education has been a concern for Indigenous education since the emergence of colonial boarding schools (Brayboy, 2005; Brayboy & Castagno, 2009; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006), And for black education (Walker, 1996), Chican@/Latin@education (Slorzano & Yosso, 2000), and “urban” education as a general marker for minoritized communities of colour (Delpit, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995), The impact of indigenous epistemologies that engage the metaphysical, the communal, the intergenerational, and the past, present, and future possible has been profound in recent scholarship (Villegas, Neugebauer, & Venegas, 2008). Django Paris (2012) Proposes a need for a “change in stance, terminology and practice” beyond what is commonly called culturally responsive pedagogy to “culturally sustaining practice” (p.93). Such a stance focuses not so much on the translation of schooling into culturally responsive materials for the purposes of achievement, but positions education as the vehicle for sustaining cultural knowledges that have otherwise been targeted for extinction. (Tuck & Wayne Yang, 2019, p.xvi).
Upon reading this brief phrase, culturally sustaining pedagogy, I was immediately intrigued. I was already familiar with culturally relevant pedagogy. For those unfamiliar with it, here is the 1995 article by Gloria Ladson-Billings. A similar concept that educators may also be familiar with is culturally responsive teaching, which you can read about in this 2000 article by Geneva Gay. While I like the work of both Gloria Ladson-Billings and Geneva Gay, I don't think that they fully address some very specific socio-political considerations in Indigenous education in Canada:
- following a period of sustained government attack, Indigenous knowledges are currently in a period of revitalization. What this means is that students might not bring culture into the classroom with them in the same way or to the same degree as a student who, say, previously lived in another country where another language was spoken at home and in public.
- Indigenous knowledges are in a rebuilding phase. For other cultures, teachers may be able to find opportunities to immerse themselves within various cultures in order to build up their competency. Due to the nature of sustained government attack on Indigenous cultures, there are fewer opportunities for teachers to build up their cultural knowledge than they would have if they, for example, lived in a diasporic community or cultural enclave. This is especially true in BC urban areas, where even if you can find Indigenous events open to the public, often the events are multi-cultural and multi-linguistic due to the diversity of cultures Indigenous to BC as well as the diversity of Indigenous people who move to BC. So immersion opportunities for teachers are not as readily available as they may be for the examples used in some CRP studies.
- due to a sustained period of government attack, students who are culturally proficient may not feel safe bringing their culture into the classroom. And that fear is justified, because even as an adult, I can say that racism is still alive and sometimes when you do bring your Indigenous self forward, the response is not welcoming. And sometimes when Indigenous knowledge is brought into non-Indigenous spaces, it gets appropriated, misrepresented, or distorted. So it is understandable that some students may choose not to lead with culture in schools. As such, it would present a challenge to CRP to be responsive to something which is purposefully being kept safe by holding it back from public spaces.
- within a CRP context, the teacher is responsive to the cultures that present themselves in the classroom. However, within the context of recognition of territory (distinctions based), a relational obligation arises to specifically recognize the culture which is Indigenous to the area which one is teaching, even if there are no students from that culture in the classroom.
- under UNDRIP and under many Indigenous laws, ownership of Indigenous knowledge belongs to Indigenous people (collective, not individuals). As such, a teacher can't just one day decide to act as though they are Indigenous in hopes that it will improve students math scores. There is a requirement for relationality and respect for the unique nature of knowledge.
- CRP does not go far enough to challenge what is accepted as education. You can be responsive all day long, but if your textbook contains content which villainizes Indigenous people for standing in the way of colonization, either one of two things will happen. One, the student may see that your responsiveness does not reflect of the content being taught, and the responsiveness will be seen as inauthentic. Or, the student will internalize colonial conceptualizations of themselves, succeeding in mainstream schooling but at what cost to identity? Whose knowledge? Whose truth? What counts as education? What is the aim of education? CRP addresses what one teacher can do inside of their classroom, but does not go far enough in challenging the larger colonial structures within education. This risks depoliticizing culture, and in doing so, distorting it.
So, for several reasons, from the stance of an Indigenous educator, I wished for something more than what CRP had to offer. That being said, I acknowledge that CRP and CRT challenged the notion that the purpose of education is to teach children white middle class norms. I do think that CRP and CRT changed education for the better. And I think that CRP and CRT are still valuable practices. CRP and CRT created the conditions in which we could have this new conversation about culturally sustaining pedagogies. CRP paved the way for more. So gratitude for CRP.
Anyhow, after encountering the phrase "culturally sustaining pedagogy" in Tuck and Yang, I read Django Paris's concise yet powerful 2012 article, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Here is my super quick non-academic summary of the article: In the 1990s, a movement away from deficit pedagogies and towards resource pedagogies gained traction. In the 1960s and 1970s, deficit approaches measured students against white middle class standards and sought to eradicate home cultures. in the 1970s and 1980s, there was increasing acknowledgement of home culture as equal, but the system still sought to bring students towards dominant culture in education, this was the difference approach. Deficit approaches and difference approaches oriented students towards the dominant culture as the outcome of education, and resource approaches sought to bridge home and school in order to create a third space. Culturally responsive teaching sought to create access to dominant culture while maintaining the student's home culture, and helping the student develop a critical stance. Culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies do not go far enough, we need to support linguistic and cultural dexterity and plurality. Culturally sustaining pedagogy makes supporting linguistic and cultural dexterity and plurality one of the goals of education.
Django Paris and H. Samy Alim build on the 2012 article in a 2014 Harvard Educational Review article, What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward.
I listened to a 2016 AERA podcast in which Django Paris a guest along with several other scholars. One of the other guests, an Indigenous woman, had recently written a book which included the words "culturally responsive" in the title and she said now she wanted to throw it away. I don't think we have to throw away culturally responsive approaches. I think that they continue to be valuable tools in our toolbox. Do we need to place them in a hierarchy, where one is old and the other is new and better. To say we have to throw one out in order to accept the new is part of the disposable consumerist mentality. Can we say, these both have value, these both have applications, these both can teach us something? Do we have to take an evolutionist stance, and say this one is the less evolved option and this one is the more evolved and thus more superior option? Do we have to take a competitive stance in order to survive in scholarship, and diminish existing ideas in order to promote new ones? Or, can we say "these both represent historical moments, and including them both in our practice can provide our practice with dimension and make us more robust and capable of honouring the people who we are engaging with."
Anyhow, in 2017 Django Paris and H. Samy Alim edited a collection of essays on culturally sustaining pedagogies. I did have a moment when I realized that the time between the coining of the term and the release of the book was five years. I thought, how on earth did they launch a whole new paradigm in five years?!? But then when I read the book, I realized that this term "culturally sustaining pedagogies" is a descriptor used to refer to practices that were in play before the term was coined. That is, the term describes something that already exists, as opposed to creating practices which did not exist before. The term describes something which already exists in hopes of nurturing it in education and beyond.
The book is extremely engaging. I love the way that Teachers College Press provides a lot of concrete examples and teaching stories. For example one of the examples involves a student who was selected as commencement speaker at graduation. Her parents only spoke Spanish, and the school had an English only language policy. So she had to advocate to change the policy so that her parents could understand her while she was giving her commencement speech (Bucholtz, Casillas & Lee, 2017, p.53-54). Another anecdote involves a student who decided to drop out, but changed his mind when learned that the school was going to start offering a Native American Literature course (San Pedro, 2017, p.100). In addition to anecdotes, the book is full of concepts, such as Lee & McCarty's assertion that "tribal sovereignty must include education sovereignty. Regardless of whether schools operate on or off tribal lands, in the same way that schools are accountable to state and federal governments, so too are they accountable to the Native American nations whose children they serve." (Lee & McCarty, 2017, p.61).
In terms of theory, the most interesting section was by Gloria Ladson-Billings herself. Her chapter focused mostly on hip hop. But in the introduction to the chapter, she has this to say about culturally relevant pedagogy:
Today, I hear the term "culturally relevant pedagogy" everywhere I go; it is ubiquitous. Unfortunately, the practices that I see rarely represent the practice that I described when I had the opportunity to spend three years with eight outstanding teachers. So I will begin by briefly describing what I meant by culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) when I began to explicate these successful teachers' work. CRP involves three main components: (a) a focus on student learning; (b) developing students' cultural competence, and (c) supporting their critical consciousness. And everyone one of those key components is corrupted in most applications of CRP: Student learning is translated as assimilation and narrow forms of success, and cultural competence as "We did or read something Black"; and the goal of supporting students' critical consciousness is either distorted (viewed, as it often is) through the prism of whiteness) at best or conveniently left out altogether at worst. (Ladson-Billings, 2017, p.142).
I think it's interesting because she doesn't say "culturally relevant pedagogy is somehow flawed or inadequate." Rather, she says that she used the term to describe the work of specific individuals, and while the field has embraced the term, knowing the term has not been enough to implement the idea in other contexts. I think that that is an interesting way to frame things. In the conclusion to the chapter, she describes culturally sustaining pedagogy as "important and exciting change" and she says the authors in this book "help to remake and reshape culturally relevant pedagogy into what we now call culturally sustaining pedagogy." (Ladson-Billings, 2017, p.154). I think that it's so cool that she supports this work and also was able to contribute a chapter to the book.
Alim, drawing on Ladson-Billings' work, elaborates on this idea that CRP was never fully or properly executed, stating that:
As predominantly White teachers and teacher education programs began (mis)interpreting culturally relevant pedagogies (CRPs) through the lens of hegemonic whiteness, they often unwittingly devalued students of colours' cultural and linguistic practices (Ladson-Billings, 2014). Intentionally or not, whiteness was frequently and uncritically positioned as the unmarked norm by which all others are measured. Further, as Ladson Billings notes, teachers and teacher education programs often neglected the aspect of CRP that supported the development of students' sociological consciousness (in all fairness, how can teachers support what they themselves often don't possess?). (Alim, 2017, p.158).
When I read the term "culturally sustaining pedagogy" in Tuck and Yang, I was not sure exactly what it meant, but I was intrigued, so I read up on the concept. Overall, I think that culturally sustaining pedagogy is a good complement to Indigenous pedagogies and epistemologies. The examples provided were very broad, and so it's not a specific program. Rather, it is an ideal to keep in mind.
Alim, H.S. & Haupt, A. (2017). Reviving Soul(s) with Afrikaaps: Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in South Africa. In D. Paris & H. Samy Alim (Eds.), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (pp.157-174). Teachers College Press.
Bucholtz, M., Casillas, D.I. & Lee, J.S. (2017). Language and Culture as Sustenance. In D. Paris & H. Samy Alim (Eds.), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (pp.43-60). Teachers College Press.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2017). The (R)Evolution Will Not Be Standardized. In D. Paris & H. Samy Alim (Eds.), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (pp.141-156). Teachers College Press.
Lee, T.S. & McCarty, T.L. (2017). Upholding Indigenous Education Sovereignty Through Critical Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy. In D. Paris & H. Samy Alim (Eds.), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (pp.61-82). Teachers College Press.
San Pedro, T. (2017). "This Stuff Interests Me": Re-Centering Indigenous Paradigms in Colonizing Schooling Spaces. In D. Paris & H. Samy Alim (Eds.), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (pp.99-116). Teachers College Press.
Tuck, E. & Wayne Lang, K. (2019). Series editors' introduction. In (L.T. Smith, E. Tuck & K.W. Yang, eds.) Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (pp.x-xxi).
