Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Collaborative Elementary Civics Curriculum Development to Support Teacher Learning to Enact Culturally Sustaining Practices

“…This study examined teachers' reported thinking and perceptions about students' needs and struggles to design purposeful, equitable instruction. In particular, we investigated the teachers' perceived efforts to use culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) to foster students' civic and historical perspective-taking skills, a deliberative, inclusive classroom environment; and build a foundation for lifelong civic engagement participation. We worked within the designbased research (DBR) methodological tradition (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) allowing our team to flexibly evolve our understanding of both our civic perspective taking framework and related concepts and student and teacher thinking related to civic perspective taking simultaneously.…”

“…The research team did this by explicitly supporting discussions of connections between locally relevant issues, corresponding salient student identities, and strategies to empower and minimize risks to students holding those salient identities when participating in discussions on those issues. In response to this need, our design team decided to draw on culturally sustaining pedagogy (Alim & Paris, 2017) in the unit design process and center what we identified as locally relevant issues (Krutka, 2017) to the communities being served by the schools.…”

“…From the rich theoretical foundation of asset pedagogies, culturally sustaining practice (Paris, 2012;Paris & Alim, 2014 draws its mission from this larger family of critical pedagogical theories -to advance social justice and equity through teaching and learning (Ladson-Billings, 1999). Alim and Paris (2017) advocate for culturally sustaining practice that "… seeks to perpetuate and fosterdto sustaindlinguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation … positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits" (p. 1). Their call is to replace deficit-based lenses with not only asset-based ones, but with lenses that perceive those assets as rooted in the cultural experiences of students with targeted identities e in particular students of color, with immigrant or refugee status, speakers of languages other than English, and living in or near poverty.…”

“…The team explicitly worked to design lessons using culturally sustaining pedagogy that "seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed response to demographic and social change" (Paris, 2016, p. 85). Culturally sustaining pedagogy is a pedagogical approach that perpetuates linguistic, cultural pluralism (Alim & Paris, 2017); by design, our approach to curriculum development focuses on using assetbased lenses to understand students' and their experiences as well as using civic perspective taking as a guiding theoretical lens is central to asset-based frameworks for curriculum design. More specifically, we used civic perspective taking as a guide since the constellation of skills promotes the development of empathy and the explicit building of learning communities within classrooms, which can reduce the risks associated with participating publicly in discussions and other whole and small group instructional activities for children (Toledo & Enright, 2021).…”

A Quantitative Exploration of School Counselors’ Evidence-Based Classroom Management Implementation: Investigating Culturally Sustaining Practices and Multicultural Competence

“…Moreover, culturally sustaining schools celebrate and value cultural and linguistic practices in students' homes and communities, and avoid culturally disaffirming practices (Paris, 2012). Many scholars have underscored the importance of culturally sustaining practices in school settings (e.g., Alim & Paris, 2017;Gay, 2018;Orosco & O'Connor, 2014). In fact, research suggests correlations between educators' use of culturally sustaining practices and student achievement (e.g., grades and graduation rates), particularly for students from historically marginalized backgrounds (e.g., Cabrera et al, 2014;Howard & Terry, 2011).…”