Families today are using culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP)-a social justice pedagogy that incorporates marginalized cultural practices into the classroom-to cultivate their children into future cosmopolitan professionals. Asian American, black, and Latinx families rationalize that CRP helps their children learn "a little bit of everything" and be "open minded." Students find value in learning about cultures they consider different from their own and in learning Mandarin because of China's emergence as a global economic power. [Asian American students, black students, cosmopolitanism, culturally relevant pedagogy, social mobility] Liu Cultivating Cosmopolitans 91Similarly, families view CRP as a way of advancing students' individual social mobility, though it has not been written about as such. A number of scholars have used neoliberal frameworks to show how multicultural education has been commodified (e.g., Atasay 2015; Reay et al. 2007). But few have applied this same framework to understanding CRP. Instead, the CRP literature mainly focuses on the development of teachers' cultural competencies (e.g., Howard and Rodriguez-Minkoff 2017) and the efficacy of this pedagogical approach (e.g., Portes et al. 2018). In other words, it emphasizes the production side of CRP. Absent from this literature is an examination of the consumption side of CRP-that is, the perspectives of students and parents. By analyzing the perspectives of students and parents within the context of a shrinking US middle-class (Pew Research Center 2015) and a changing global political economy that rewards knowledge workers, I show how parents and students instrumentally view CRP as a commodity that advances their individual social mobility by preparing them to be professional workers in the global economy.Educational scholars have rightly critiqued how CRP gets lost in translation when these principles are applied in practice (e.g., Ladson-Billings 2014). Teachers often blunt the sociopolitical dimensions of CRP, ignoring its anti-racist orientation and its approach to teaching about structures of oppression. Yet even when CRP is implemented with fidelity and thoughtfulness, it is still subject to commodification because of a changing economy that rewards workers who exhibit cosmopolitan traits-traits such as "openness toward divergent cultural experiences" (Hannerz 1990, 239). In light of the increased value of cosmopolitan cultural capital in professional job markets, my research is guided by the following questions: (1) What meanings and values do parents and students assign to CRP? (2) What cultural practices and dispositions are prioritized in the development of cosmopolitan cultural capital?Parents and students view CRP as a way of developing cosmopolitan dispositions valued in professional-class jobs today. This article provides a case study of the Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS). In word and deed, FACTS implemented CRP in ways that remained true to CRP's original goal of developing students' sociopolitical consc...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.