To be completed before Tuesday, June 14, Zoom session.
Culturally sustaining pedagogy and trauma-informed pedagogy, like open pedagogy, are asset-based pedagogies. As we discussed, asset-based practices focus on strengths of our students and their communities, rather than deficits. Before our next Zoom session:
- Read about culturally sustaining pedagogy;
- Read Mays Imad’s article, “Leverage the Neuroscience of now,” about trauma-informed practices and review Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning Examples, from the Columbia School of Social Work and Alex Shevrin Venet’s Principles of Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education.
After reading the information at the links above, respond in a few paragraphs to the following questions by posting a comment below.
- What are some ways you currently incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy and trauma-informed practices into your courses?
- How might you apply asset-based pedagogies to other learning experiences in your courses? Give specific examples.
Bonus listen: For more information on trauma-informed pedagogy, Tea for Teaching has a terrific interview (39 mins) with Karen Costa, an educator who’s been working in this area for several years.
8 thoughts on “Reflection on Asset-based Pedagogies”
Steve
1. I believe that everyone has something to contribute to our class discussion based upon individual’s culture, history, ethnicity, etc. Therefore, in our Chapter on Social Psychology, we discuss Social Justice, Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Classism, etc. I emphasize to everyone that learning about culture, ethnicity and history plays a significant role in understanding the social justice movement of today. I discuss the following in class: FAlN (in NYC- Armed Forces of National Liberation for the Island of Puerto Rico), The Role of Women in the Civil Rights Movement and The Black Panthers, The Role of Women in the Women’s Rights Movement, The Role of Jewish Americans in the Civil Rights Movement and so many other groups and individuals that have played a significant role in social justice in America. I encourage my students to visit the Museum of the City of New York to learn more about the history of Social Justice and Political Movements in NYC.
2. For Trauma based Pedagogy, I employ the following; a) Meeting students where they are in terms of their personal experiences, history and uncertainty; b) Always giving positive feedback and commentary and thank the individuals for sharing commentaries and perspectives – all voices are important in order to have a rich and diverse classroom experiences; and c) I have to understand that at times a behavior exhibited at times is not an indication of the person. I have had students who will lash out at others in a discussion. These individuals are not upset with classmates but more of a projection of circumstances that they have experienced or currently encountering. So, it is important for everyone to know that we respect everyone and that there is no judgement being passed.
How might you apply asset-based pedagogies to other learning experiences in your courses? Give specific examples.
It is important for me to be sensitive to different types of linguistically and cultural approaches that students provide when answering questions and or having discussions with classmates.
Encouraging students to learn from each other in terms of a person’s culture, ethnicity and history. Be supportive of students asking questions of classmates and wanting to discover things that at times might be off topic (At times, going off topic can be beneficial to a classroom discussion based upon my experiences).
I also try to connect student’s past experiences with the now – information in articles, videos, blogs, – remind students what classmates may have stated in previous discussions. Connect old information and experiences with new information.
At times, let students lead the discussions and ask questions to classmates.
What are some ways you currently incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy and trauma-informed practices into your courses?
In our first class, each student is asked to make a Self- Introduction presentation. Name, background, educational goals, career goals, etc.
They are then asked to rank themselves on a scale of 1-10 on how they are feeling about returning to class. And why?
For my early morning classes, (especially Monday at 9:00 am) I start our class with an energizer question.
I.e. what did you have for breakfast this morning? If you didn’t have breakfast today, what is your favorite breakfast food?
This has led to students sharing the different types of foods (home county and culturally) that they bring to notice with their classmates and energizes them.
We study how US business practices are different from International Business practices. I have incorporated current events, and local and world events as part of the business weekly topic. The class discusses how events are viewed differently in different countries in the world.
How do you feel about this?
Why is it important for us to know this in our place in the world?
In the class Case Study semester assignment, I scaffold it into four parts, weighted equally. As each due date is reached, the student’s work is reviewed and received feedback to move on to the next part. We also reviewed in class discussions what they have researched as key issues in the case.
How might you apply asset-based pedagogies to other learning experiences in your courses? Give specific examples.
I believe that our classroom should be a community of learners (students and teachers) that we learn from each other in terms of a person’s culture, ethnicity, and history. I am supportive of students asking questions of classmates and wanting to discover things among themselves.
In our breakout groups, I rotate the leadership of the group reporter so that all students get a chance to lead the group. The shy students do step up and take on the responsibility of group leader because they were asked to.
For Trauma Informed Pedagogy there is a tension that I think gets ignored except in the final article by Venet. While acknowledging the very real trauma in student’s lives, it should not be an excuse to infantilize students. To quote Venet, “Rid ourselves of any savior mentality that causes us to discount the agency and self-determination of students.” I am reminded of the movement that presumably came from a good place, but did exactly that, the ‘A for all movement.’
There is a tension between suggested practices. Yes rubrics and routines are important, but I think they have the potential to limit the authentic voices of students and respect their languages and ways of being (Paris and Alim). I try to find a mix but there is a certain disingenuousness in not acknowledging the tension.
I do try to foster collaboration and peer support. And in my feedback I try my best to consider whether my feedback is in line with a growth mindset.
I try to respect identity by giving students an opportunity to express their identity, and share how they would prefer to be addressed etc. I give them the space to do so, but as I do believe in the now discrarded constructed but valuable right to privacy that it should be a student’s choice. There should be no pressure on student’s to do so. It’s not my or other student’s business if how a given student identifies etc.
So I think I can say that while I have work to do, I DO embrace many of these practices. With the following exception. I think asset based learning has a place, but frankly I don’t want it when I’m learning. I”m a member of a recreational sports team and I am very glad when my coach points out my deficits and works withe me to overcome them. I’m considering trying out salsa dancing and I do not want the teacher to focus on what I do well, I want ze to tell me what I am doing wrong. Sometimes educational practices can get so far up their own #$@ that they lose a little perspective. Now if that salsa teacher points out what i am doing wrong and gives me an analogy to surfing (which i have been doing for 40 years) sure that is going to make my learning experience more effective, But don’t want to ignore my deficits.
I have two different introductory assignments (discussion board for online courses, in class free write exercises for face-to-face) that ask students to draw upon what I now understand to be their assets.
Academic Autobiography instructions: An academic autobiography asks you to explore your prior educational experiences in light of the expectations your professors have of you in college. [I offer a series of prompt questions for them to consider]. The idea is that you stand a better chance of success if you recognize your academic strengths and weaknesses (and, of course, if you address those weaknesses). It is important to address the following questions to develop the most from this exercise:
– After evaluating the syllabi for my classes, what is the most intimidating aspect? What academic or work experiences from my past will contribute to my academic success in college? What skills will I need to work on in order to succeed academically in college?
– In general, what are the academic or work-life strengths I bring with me to college? How can I best utilize my strengths? What are my academic weaknesses? How can I address these weaknesses?
The second assignment I have used asks students to connect more personally (before any research) to a topic within the content of the course. I ask them to complete the following tasks, and offer many prompt questions to consider in addressing these three main questions:
1.) Reflect on your decision to study criminology. Identify a societal crime, justice or victimization related problem of interest to you, one that you may have experienced or witnessed or heard about within your social circle, employment field, personal experience (past or present),
2.) Describe your relationship to the problem (dissect personal connection
3.) Describe how you would need to change and grow to work on the problem – what are/can and will you do today to contribute to a solution to this problem?
I have had students do this on day one in my Writing intensive course, question by question, and have had them share if they choose. I can then draw on this information through the course to reflect ack comments on papers or in class discussions or online discussion boards, to personalize my relationship with the student as a person.
I think I might apply asset-based pedagogies to other learning experiences in my courses by asking students to use the medium that they feel comfortable in – like video (TikTok) or blog, or paper or even an in-class presentation if they wish. I think I could also always ask what draws the student to a topic (tell me why you connect with this topic), or what personal experience may inform their opinion. I could even ask if there are students with specific experiences (like military service or police experience, or if they wish to chare about other experiences related to criminology, as women or of a specific ethnicity or sexual orientation, if they wish to share related to the classroom discussion. I often do this myself, situating my identity in the discussion, particularly as a white woman in criminal justice teaching mostly students of color.
In my class, I would like to create an open discussion forum to share all inspiring information to everyone. I will encourage every student to share his/her success strategies when he/she converts from in-person learning mode to online learning mode. I will also post my former students’ success stories in the discussion board as good models for my current students to follow. Students will benefit from participation with this learning activity. By sharing successful information with each other, students will learn study skills on how to use educational software to facilitate learning, how to use media resources to communicate with each other, where to find helping hands in needs, how to cope with personal emotion problems, how to deal with time stress, how to thrive in the new online learning environments, etc. Successful study experiences will help students to build their learning confidence and reduce math anxiety.
In my class, I will create learning activities and small projects for students to work in group. Collaboration and cooperation in group with timelines will create tight bonds and build close connections among students to enhance their sense of belonging.
I will use weekly homework assignments and monthly tests to monitor students’ learning progress and to evaluate students’ academic performance. Feedback from assessment information will help me adjust the teaching pace and break down the difficulty levels step by step to meet the learning objectives.
As an instructor, I would like to help every student in my class as much as possible to reach his/her potential. I would like to build a productive learning community for my diversified student body. Students information with various cultural backgrounds and different academic backgrounds will be considered as positive values to my classroom teaching. I strongly believe that every student can learn math in his/her appropriate way.
I incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy in my MUS 102 class by being inclusive of woman composers, African American composers and Latino composers, which have been excluded from textbooks until recently. We discuss that framework and why they are finally being recognized today. One of the trauma-informed practices I use in my class is facilitating peer support and mutual self-help – from the first day, I ask students to exchange numbers or create a class WhatsApp where they can share their class notes and create study groups for tests. Students have often informed me when their peers are absent or ill through this shared connection.
One aspect of asset based pedagogy I would like to apply is “sharing power and decision making with my students” – I like the idea of co-creating an assignment together that is inclusive of what they value in the learning process. As a result, I think this would make the grading process more transparent.
The cultural aspect of one’s life is always subconsciously built into our actions, in the ways students learn and the ways educators deliver their courses. Openly discuss what students would like to learn and how much prior knowledge they have in the subject matter can help me better adaptively change the course delivery. I always have an open mind about the different strategies or different ways to teach a particular topic and ask students the difficulties they have or in what ways they had learned it to tweak and find alternative ways to help student understand and to find the best approach that suits the students. For example, a math problem in chemistry can be expressed in things we are familiar with like currency or cooking recipes.
As for trauma-informed practices, always allowing flexibilities, encouragement, keep students in the loop were important. Since the pandemic, Blackboard has become an essential part of learning. Designing a blackboard page that works and keep students informed and also post helpful course materials that students can work on at their own time was beneficial during the time being that learning were done remotely. Being back in person for the most part now, I feel like there are many things I have to express more carefully to be mindful of others due to many recent incidents nationwide. While I had mentioned majority of my teachings are based on applications or referring to real life situations, now there are even more limitations.
I like to see creativity in students. I like to see their ideas from their different learning backgrounds and perhaps their cultural backgrounds. One thing I would like to apply asset-based pedagogy in my course is have student design an assignment as a project. Have them create an assignment that is unique to their ways of thinking, their ways of learning, and have students input their personal touch to promote and express their differences.
What are some ways you currently incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy and trauma-informed practices into your courses?
o For Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing or prioritizing through certain course design choices and features. I’m excited to delve into improving what I’m doing and adding in some more features more deliberately.
Providing the ‘course roadmap’ guide that I’ve mentioned before is an effort to foster trust, clarity, transparency, and reliability.
I’ve encouraged student storytelling of work/life experiences via class activities that touch on sales skills, behaviors, or core principles, that has garnered and encouraged tips/support-sharing and camaraderie.
An “aspirational” resume assignment fosters choice and connects to big-picture purpose and drivers (for those who fully engage with and complete the assignment).
I empower voice and choice by normalizing the struggles, difficulties, and vulnerabilities of the human experience via course policy and process on late assignments. The official policy is ‘no late assignments’ however that comes with a ‘life happens clause’ that I explain is available on a case by case basis and how to engage that process. The case-by-case life happens process heavily relies on the student in question DEMONSTRATING the key Professionalism Skills (that I emphasize in the course syllabus and roadmap) in how they treat me and the course; particularly modeling: communication, transparency, accountability skills and behaviors.
Though my grading process still relies on grades I’ve structured it in such a way as to de-emphasize test and quizzes. These cannot be the sole determining factors of succeeding or failing in my class. The rest of the weight of the grades given and the other grade earning opportunities rests upon if and how, when/how often, and to what degree of effort/quality does/did the student show up for an assignment or activity.
For sense of purpose, verbally or through some class prompts or assignments I celebrate them at various points/ milestones of the course. These are not tied to any particular work or assignments. For example:
• The hashtag intros I described at the start of the semester (and having them use that hashtag in future assignments) – Conveying my appreciation for their thoughtfully thinking of one and sharing what it means to them with all of us.
• Reaching mid-semester break (spring/fall) – designed so no assignments are due during this week if everyone keeps pace together. I set this “if possible group intention” at the start of semester, where I state it as our collective goal/aspiration to stay on track together.
• An aspirational resume assignment helps students to tap into their own goals, aspirations, and sense of purpose. The Pitch Presentation Group Project also helps with this while connecting to classmates who hold similar interests as they do. I invite students to use their own ideas or areas of interest to self-organize into groups to complete this assignment. This assignment also gives some voice and choice that other aspect of the class do not.
o Regarding CSP, I’m realizing that I’ve intentionally brought in and approached my course design and experience to embrace and express; some humanity, some levity, some ease, some curiosity, some rigor and challenge, and self-reflection and imagining etc. for the most part deliberately left out culturally sustaining pedagogy (expect for self-referential aspects that I may share – i.e. 1st generation daughter of immigrant parents). I didn’t realize that this might be a problem and that the work of working through one’s own (my own) internalized racism is ongoing. I thought I was establishing a healthy personal boundary and reinforcing a sense of fairness and equity around the experience and container for facilitating the course. The first level of protection was to project myself from projecting any of my affective reactions or my experiences onto my students experiences, perceptions, interpretations, or processing of info. The second level is/was the sense of wanting to protect the sense of a common ground, a common starting point that as a class we are beginning from, on day 1, plus the common goal we are aiming to achieve by the last day of week 16.
o Though boundaries are indeed still quite important, and protecting the course container for facilitating learning is equally important my embedded biases around “rigor”, “the standard (mainstream corporate white)”, “preparing them for real world business spaces” (i.e. corporate spaces, non-profits, government, and other business spaces where: HR protects the company not you, some do not have Chief Officers, Directors, or VPs of People, and often may not have Learning/Talent and Development programs as part of the organizational structure or priority. Where this mean that you [students] will need to self-cultivate (curiosity and interests), self-teach, self-develop, self-identify and self-motivate paths forward and various self-experiments and iterations of professional and career trail an error – wherever a company’s resources fall short (or all together lack thereof). Now that I’m writing this out and thinking it through, it’s ridiculous for me to think that my one class can prepare them for encountering good people playing out F’d up roles or situations, due to causes and conditions that have been entrenched before they arrived into a company that hired them, or the company cultures they will inherit and learning to understand and navigate their roles and responsibilities (written and unwritten) within that company and its culture. That said my instinct to want to try to do this within 8 to 16 weeks of content that has nothing (yet everything) to do with these topics is spot on and a good place to start perhaps!
How might you apply asset-based pedagogies to other learning experiences in your courses? Give specific examples.
o Leaning into deliberately creating more culturally sustaining pedagogy, while working through my cognitive biases, and dropping the notion of needing to protect or prepare my students for the business cultures and culture of work that lies ahead (if not 100% perhaps just by 40%) might do a great deal to free up the learning process and what gets discussed and discovered “outside the box”. [Highway Driving Analogy] The goal may be to stay on the right road, yet instead of staying rigidly in the center of the road, or only using one lane of a multilane highway; allowing all of us including me to use which lane is needed at the appropriate time (letting the students help define that) and being clear to avoid the shoulders, ditches, and gutters, to either side of that road or highway may be the key.]
o Some initial ideas of ways or areas of the course that could be enhanced via the framework of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy are:
researching and integrating “history of sales & sales practices” into the course content (this alone could help replace some of the textbook content I was assigning previously). Within the historical lens lots of opportunity to bring in a CSP and TIP approach could be possible.
researching and integrating sales from an international business point of view YET also via story telling opportunities perhaps from student’s own ethnic/cultural centric neighborhoods and places of family origins. (Caveat here though is they may not have the life experience or memories of their own and might have to rely on family members – communication and openness may or may not be a challenge here, so, how to foster curiosity and investigation in a culturally sensitive way?)
Have students act out, via class skits, various aspects of the sales process – and do it in 2 different ways. 1) in the way they think is the expected or ‘most proper’ industry standard sort of way to approach the sales situation, and 2) the second time in a way that lets them bring their own personal style, flavor and cultural insights/knowing into the interaction/engagement.
Figuring which and what pieces of my own stories I can tell (i.e. only fragments that qualify as offering valuable and rich relevant learning experiences and learning content) and how to do so safely for them and for me.