Responding to “Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy That Accounts for Dis/Ability”

Developing an Equity-Centered Practice: Teacher Study Groups in the Preservice Context

“…We also acknowledged critiques of UDL, particularly those problematizing how the framework had overlooked students' cultural backgrounds. We applied Alim et al's (2017) argument that culturally sustaining pedagogieswhich foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995;Paris, 2012Paris, , 2021)-be cross-pollinated with UDL for learning that sustains the assets, backgrounds, and needs of all students, across diversity spectra, including but not limited to ability and racial identity. Asset-based frameworks have centered strategies for activating students' higher-order thinking skills by shifting the teachers' role from singular authority to one who distributes learning in ways that frame all students as coconstructors of knowledge (Lambert & Tan, 2017).…”

Balancing Literacies

“…Applying the cross-pollination of CSP and DSE theories to an elementary reading workshop makes possible an inclusive balanced literacy instructional approach that also attends to the need for structured intervention. Consideration of text selection and instructional methodology, as well as how the classroom teacher attends to dis/ ability as both an identity position and a form of neurodiversity is essential to this form for instruction (Alim, et al, 2017;Valle and Connor, 2018). The following sections provide classroom teachers and teacher educators with a concrete example of what this work might look like with elementary school aged children.…”

‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure': Leveraging the Overlapping Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education

“…This seemingly counter-intuitive and pervasive exception to the 'culturally relevant/ responsive/sustained' approach was, and continues to be, intimately tied to the nature of disability and the perceived objective lens used within the medicalized rhetoric of lack -the rhetoric of special education that manifests in exclusive material realities for students always seen as 'in need' of a savior. Luckily, these asset-based pedagogies are not only being used to construct more intersectional narratives of the need to understand disability exclusion (Waitoller and King Thorius, 2016), but their originating authors are also responding accordingly in light of such arguments for disability inclusion within these frames (Alim et al, 2017), which provides a bridge to confront nuanced disability-based approaches to critical pedagogy.…”