Read
For this activity, read “What Is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Why Does it Matter?” from Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. A PDF of this chapter was included in the Week 2 email.
Write
Reflect on and respond to the following questions by posting a comment below:
- How would you describe CSP to a colleague?
- What is one example from your own teaching of how you incorporate CSP into your courses?
- Beyond applying CSP to the materials in your courses, in what additional ways might you incorporate CSP into learning experiences and activities in which your students engage?
- How might you include CSP in your ideas for an open pedagogy assignment?
1. A lot of our course content covers the experiences and perspectives of a majority/dominant group and little to no experiences and perspectives of minoritized groups. CSP acknowledges this deficiency and fills the gap by using content that is diverse, includes as many voices and perspectives as possible, including taking the experiences of students seriously as part of course content.
2. I intentionally use examples and videos and messages from diverse pool as well as encourage students to share their own experiences. This is in both SPE but more so in my intercultural communication course where students have expressed appreciation for the opportunity I give them to share their experiences through discussion board questions.
3. My response to question 2 also answers this question. In speech course I encourage students to choose topics they about for the speech and I give them a list of possible topics I believe they can relate to. In Intercultural communication the discussion board questions for each chapter cover understanding of the concepts and then their experiences that reflect they understanding and experience of the concept.
4. In spring 2022 I obtained permission from some students to use their course material (essay and discussion board responses) as content for future students. I intend to use this student generated material in my assignments in the future by
a. asking students to read the experiences of their colleague and build on that with their own experiences or to critique the perspective of the author.
b. continue to use diverse course content that represents different voices and seek permission of students to use their course input as content for the future
How would you describe CSP to a colleague?
Culturally sustaining pedagogy is one of the tools in our toolbox to address social, economic and pedagogical inequity by using experiences from non-dominant groups in our society to teach the work of our classes. By only teaching from the dominant perspective, the “white” perspective, we blank our our students pasts and force them to accept the unacceptable; the abnegation of self. Since this is clearly anathema, it often leads to “non-learning”, which is a form of self-survival. Using their experiences and experiences from cultures they are connected to, we give our students a chance to incorporate and learn what we are teaching on terms they can accept.
What is one example from your own teaching of how you incorporate CSP into your courses? I always begin by acknowledging my privilege as a middle-aged cis-gendered white male and how the cultural antecedents we discuss fit closely to the culture I was raised in. I then teach each component of my courses with as wide a variety of faces, backgrounds, varying points of view that I can muster. I mix them all together in an effort to remove any one color or ethnicity as an expert.
In the future I will be using student constructed materials taught by students to teach components of my classes. As I grow more confident in this approach, I will expand it. I can see clearly that this will work very well going forward. To that end, I will build an assignment where students will teach basic outline structure (Hook, Introduction, Preview, 3 main points, Conclusion, Clincher, and Transitions) to each other in my SPE 100 class. This may be too ambitious for my first effort but we will see through the course of the development.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy asks important questions: what do my students already know? What are their strengths? What are the strengths of their families and communities? What knowledges, what cultural and language practices do they bring? Are these various practices recognized and welcomed into the class?
To acknowledge, appreciate and investigate the repertoire of knowledge that students bring to the classroom is crucial. Various knowledges can be applied to every area of classroom learning and behavior. As instructors, looking student knowledges from an asset perspective will change the way we instruct, interact with, and co-learn from students, 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 disagreement.
Knowledges 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. Culturally sustaining practices allow, invite, and encourage students to not only use their cultural practices from home in school, but to maintain them. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy allows students to exist not only in the culture of their school, but also in the culture of their home.
I try to invite students to bring their languages into the classroom (in-person or virtual), to share with and teach the rest of us about features of that language, thereby (hopefully) making the space a more egalitarian one of discovery and co-learning. I like to pair students who speak different home languages together to interview one another about their home language and culture; both students are thus instructors and learners by the end of this activity. Sharing this lesson plan with other writing instructors could make for a potentially useful OER resource I would hope.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy celebrates diversity as a part of schooling for positive change. In a classroom, it is the idea that students bring knowledge to the class that can enhance the learning of the entire student body.
In my own classes that address the global art history survey, I make sure my students spend at least half the semester in non-Western regions studying their art and objects (if I do any more decolonization, my general survey art history class will turn into a class of artistic curiosities because the objects would be so esoteric).
In my own art history class, I encourage students to help me teach the different cultures in which I am not an expert.
I have created a final project in one of my art history classes that asks students to choose a cultural object from their own heritage and do a presentation and a final paper on it. Since students need to teach this object, they are more focused on learning everything they can about something that gives them cultural pride and a good grade. For a class that focuses on modern art, students can introduce an artist that they admire from their culture. Every country has artists, and it would be interesting to learn about the values and concerns the artists not covered by the Western canon (even students who are from a Western culture, they will be required to choose an artist we did not study in class).
How would you describe CSP to a colleague?
I would describe CSP to a colleague as a way to decenter whiteness (particularly the historically dominant perspective of wealthy white heterosexual cisgendered men with western European ancestry) and empower students by making them feel like their knowledge and backgrounds can be assests rather than detriments within the classroom. Some students are resistant to classroom learning because they see it as being a system for the white and economically privileged, by including their voices, backgrounds, and perspectives they can feel more welcome and engaged (especially with the common demographics of the CUNY students that we teach).
What is one example from your own teaching of how you incorporate CSP into your courses?
One example is that I frequently use readings from Latinx authors who pepper their writing with Spanish. As a large percentage of our students are Latinx and Spanish speaking, this can help to make them feel more included and more empowered as ESL students. When they encounter intimidating texts, seeing familiar words can make them feel both more connected and encouraged. Some of these writers include Junot Diaz, Sandra Cisneros, and Carmen Maria Machado. If students come from the countries depicted in the stories, or have parents who do, I will have them inform the class about their culture and the country’s history. By doing this, the students see their nonwhite backgrounds as assets rather than detriments. They are teaching me and the other students about their culture, rather than having me tell them what their culture is like.
Beyond applying CSP to the materials in your courses, in what additional ways might you incorporate CSP into learning experiences and activities in which your students engage?
I have had my students write about their identities and backgrounds in the essay assignments for class, and I would like to expand this further into more of the assignments and group work within class.
How might you include CSP in your ideas for an open pedagogy assignment?
I would like to have my students develop materials that could be reused with future students, such as presentations on their culture, language, and identity. This could include multimodal assignments and writing prompts.