Profs Django Paris and H. Samy Alim on Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Excerpt from: Sims, J.J. (2018). Revolutionary STEM education...

Culturally sustaining pedagogy has been building momentum for a few years now, based largely on the work of Professor Django Paris. Paris and others argue that a conceptual/terminological/pedagogical shift is necessary to truly benefit hyper-marginalized students. They argue that responsivity and relevance are not enough because, traditionally, they have not been used as levers to challenge the intrinsically inequitable structure of schooling in this country. Instead, they are conceived of as ways to create safe spaces within an unsafe environment, which is necessary; however, they fail to adequately challenge the oppressive structures that make safe spaces exigent in the first place. Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), on the other hand, argues that the very structure of schooling with all concomitant curricular, content-based, and pedagogical considerations should be re-imagined in a way that does not merely respond to cultural dissonance, but instead works to integrate the language, culture, and ways of being of hyper-marginalized students into the very fabric of their schooling experiences. The authors define culturally sustain pedagogy thusly:

Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality (Paris, 2012:1).