Toward Culturally Sustaining Teaching

Early Childhood Educators Honor Children with Practices for Equity and Change

Kindel Turner Nash, Crystal Polite Glover, Bilal Polson, Kindel Turner Nash, Crystal Polite Glover, Bilal Polson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351108294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Demonstrating equitable practices and strategies that move toward culturally sustaining teaching such as translanguaging, explorations of children's literature, alternative modes of literacy assessment, photography and arts integration, student-driven poetry units, and more, this book shares the stories of four teacher–teacher dyads who worked together across university–school contexts to study, generate, and evaluate culturally relevant and sustaining literacy practices in early childhood classrooms across the country. Highlighting the voices and roles of children, families, community members, and teachers of Color, this book suggests new ways for all teachers to build and sustain relationships that are relevant and work toward being sustaining; and anticipates and offers solutions for challenges that arise in these contexts. Insightful and instructive, the narratives in this collection model how to create positive and mutually beneficial dynamics among teachers, children, and their families and communities.

This book offers a timely resource for pre-service teachers, teachers, scholars, faculty, and graduate students in language and literacy education, early childhood education, and culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining teaching.

1

Education for the Human Soul

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and the Legacy of Love That Guides Us

Kindel Nash, Bilal Polson, and Crystal Glover

Education for the human soul … give[s] power and the right direction to the intellect, the sensibilities, and the will.

–Anna Julia Cooper (1892)

Django Paris and Samy Alim (2014) said, in a groundbreaking reflection on culturally sustaining pedagogies:

We move away from the pervasiveness of pedagogies that are too closely aligned with linguistic, literate, and cultural hegemony and toward developing a pedagogical agenda that does not concern itself with the seemingly panoptic ‘White gaze’ (Morrison, 1998) that permeates educational research and practice with and for students of color, their teachers, and their schools. (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 86)

Their words and those of educator-activist Anna Julia Cooper (1892) as change agents more than a century apart from each other indicate that the urgent need for justice in educational spaces has not yet been successfully addressed. Charging us to engage in transformational love and education for the human soul, these educators play a strong role in framing the moral, philosophical, methodological, and pedagogical convictions that guide this volume. This book shares the stories of early literacy teachers and teacher educators who honor children and their families and communities and recognize the urgent need for pedagogical change. Guided by educators like Anna Julia Cooper, we focused on education for the human soul as we set out to develop culturally relevant practices in our classrooms and, through the writing of this book, began to ask questions posed by Paris and Alim (2017a, n.p.): How can our pedagogies be culturally sustaining and what is it we seek to sustain?

Foundationally, the educators in this book built their teaching on the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). As conceptualized by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995), CRP has three goals: building students’ cultural competence, critical consciousness, and academic achievement. The concept of culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP) (detailed later in this chapter) came into our worlds when we read the work of Django Paris (2012), who suggested it as an expansion and loving critique of Ladson-Billings’ (1995, 2009, 2014) ideas. Paris built on the legacy of CRP by focusing on ways CSP can contribute to the ongoing work of educational justice that CRP and other asset pedagogies have advanced (Paris, 2014), while emphasizing heritage and community practices as dynamic, not static, and insisting on pedagogies that sustain “linguistically and culturally dexterous ways of being” (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 91). Thus, while much of Paris and Alim’s articulation of culturally sustaining pedagogy honors Ladson-Billings’ intent by centering community languages, practices, and knowledge; ensuring student agency and community input; and developing students’ capacity to address oppression, their move to sustain requires particular attention to maintaining “linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as a part of the democratic project of schooling” (Paris, 2013, p. 95). This, in our view, means affecting institutional as well as day-to-day changes in individual classrooms so that cultural relevance, linguistic and cultural pluralism become normalized, embraced, and centered in the institutions of schooling, the lives of students, families, and the broader society. We understand this to mean a rejection of the dominance of the White gaze (Morrison, 1998) or, as Alim and Paris (2017) put it,

liberating ourselves from this gaze … [moving] away from the White imperialist project [to engage in the] “collective struggle against an educational system that contains us and toward one that sustains us … [shifting] the discourse about who we think the mainstream is not just because of demographic change but because [we] see inequality.” (Alim & Paris, 2017, pp. 13–15)

CRP (as the ideology that prompted our initial work) and CSP (as the philosophy that we strive to understand and embody) play key roles in the stories told by four teacher–teacher educator pairs/partners (dyads) in this book. These educators worked together for two years in richly diverse, multilingual classrooms across the United States through a project called Professional Dyads and Culturally Relevant Teaching (PDCRT), funded by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). PDCRT was initially inspired by another NCTE initiative, Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color (CNV) (Kinloch, 2011), which was developed by Arnetha Ball, Carol Lee, and Peter Smagorinsky and directed at different times through the last 20 years by Peter Smagorinsky, Maria Franquiz, Valerie Kinloch, and Juan Guerra. CNV pairs experienced scholars (Mentors) with doctoral students or early-career scholars of Color (Fellows) to support and foreground critical research in literacy education. With this impetus and inspiration, Susi Long and Erin Miller initiated the idea for PDCRT also drawing from Susi’s work with Carmen Tisdale and Janice Baines (Baines, Tisdale, & Long, 2018). It was envisioned as a program that would pair classroom teachers and teacher educators (dyads) as mutual mentors learning from and with each other as they generated culturally relevant practices in early childhood classrooms. Joined by Mariana Souto-Manning and Dinah Volk as an initial planning and leadership team, the idea was refined and proposed to NCTE’s Executive Committee in 2012. Established officially in 2013, the first two-year cohort of PDCRT dyads was funded by NCTE’s Executive Committee as a pilot project. As this book goes to press, PDCRT is welcoming its fourth cohort of dyads. This book represents the work of four dyads from the charter PDCRT cohort (2013–2015).

PDCRT’s purpose as outlined in the original proposal was to

create a space within NCTE for supporting early childhood Educators of Color and educators who teach children of color, English Language Learners, and children from low-income communities in: (1) generating, implementing, documenting, evaluating, and disseminating culturally relevant pedagogies in early childhood literacy; and (2) becoming more involved in NCTE, eventually in governance structures. (2013)

The project focuses on fostering and researching culturally relevant teaching as fruitful pedagogies deeply connected to centering languages, ethnicities, identities that have been erased or ignored in society and schooling. It focuses on six goals introduced here (Figure 1.1) but expanded upon from the perspective of many of the PDCRT’s founders in Chapter Six.

Figure 1.1 Professional Dyads in Culturally Relevant Teaching (PDCRT) goals.

Across university–school and geographic contexts, PDCRT dyads research, generate, implement, document, and evaluate culturally relevant literacy practices in early childhood classrooms. As explored in this book, we have come to see many of those practices as critical elements in not only culturally relevant but also culturally sustaining work. This chapter introduces readers to our work. Through it we describe the book’s contents and organization, the theoretical ideas and sociopolitical convictions that guide us, and the humanizing approach that teachers in this book took toward developing practices and documenting and analyzing their work with children and families. Finally, this chapter raises the question about what it will take for this work to be sustained in the efforts to:

Combat and eradicate oppressive, racist, educational policies that advantage monoculturalism, that debase the linguistic virtuosities of communities of color, and that recode terms such as relevance and responsiveness to mark tolerance over acceptance, normalization over difference, demonization over humanization, and hate over love. (Kinloch, 2017, p. 29)

This Book

The words in the subtitle of this book, “Honoring Children,” comes from a conversation that took place a couple of years ago among members of the charter PDCRT cohort when we met at the NCTE Annual Convention. In discussing the theoretical framework that would anchor this book, each of us shared our thoughts about what the work, at its core, was about. At one point, teacher and Chapter Four co-author Alicia Arce-Boardman said that, for her, “this work is about honoring children.” Everyone around the table knew that she had captured the essence of our work. When we say those words, however, it is important to know that we are not merely promoting a funds of knowledge approach, nor are we merely acknowledging that children bring multiple rich and legitimate languages, histories, and identities to the classroom. For us, honoring children carries important responsibilities to alter the Eurocratic status quo (King & Swartz, 2018) in schools and to re-center and pedagogically normalize languages, cultures, heritages, and ways of being that have been oppressed through systems that define what counts in schooling and society.

With that foundation in mind, this book shares examples from the classroom experiences of four dyads, contributing to bodies of work that address the following issues: (a) the absence of culturally relevant practices as sustained and systemic in early childhood classrooms in spite of volumes of work suggesting that such teaching is essential to teaching all students (Au, 1979; Gay, 2010; Genishi & Dyson, 2009; Hollins, 2015; Paris & Alim, 2017b; Woodson, 1933); (b) schools’ continued lack of success in educating young children of Color, emergent bi/multilingual children, and children from low-income households, to the same levels of literacy proficiency as that of their White,¹ middle-class, English-only peers (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2016); and (c) limited understandings about the impact of university–school partnerships working/researching together as mutual learning partners in classrooms and with children and families.

The need for potent examples of early childhood literacy teaching and assessment that counter the narrowly conceived norm is great. As Long (2011) offered, “without examples of inspirational teaching … too many teachers will not realize the tremendous agency (voice and choice) they have, and they will continue to feel constrained” (p. vii). Sharing new approaches, strategies, and practices, we fulfill a prominent need for early childhood teachers to develop pedagogies that might be sustained based on remixing and recentering the cultures of children (Ladson-Billings, 2017) and the development of children’s critical consciousness within a “deep knowledge of the particular context in which schools are located” (Hollins, 2015, p. 2).

The dyads who are chapter authors in this book are all teachers and teacher educators of Color except one teacher educator, committed to antiracist practices, who worked in classrooms that predominantly served children of Color. Thus, this volume shares examples and practices predominantly from teachers of Color and their students of Color. This is significant, for while scholars have argued for decades about the significance of forefronting the work of teachers of Color (Foster, 1997; Irvine, 2003; Milner, 2008), with the exception of Reading, Writing, and Talk (2017) by Mariana Souto-Manning and Jessica Martell and We’ve Been Doing it Your Way Long Enough: Choosing the Culturally Relevant Classroom (2018) by Janice Baines, Carmen Tisdale, and Susi Long, few early childhood literacy texts center on the practices of teachers and children of Color authored by educators of Color.

Throughout this book are examples of practices such as translanguaging, warm demanding teaching; a Latina mothers’ support group; selecting and creating culturally sustaining books; and valuing and organizing children’s study of their histories, languages, and cultures along with revered figures in sports, popular culture, music, and literacies. These and other practices featured in the chapters of this volume critically center on community languages and literacies and honor family and community ways of knowing. Importantly, these practices, which extend from and are accountable to children, families, and their communities, establish confianza and use multiple means to communicate with families, and employ authentic, contextualized, translanguaged assessments. In this way, the book offers examples of historicized practices that try to disrupt the colonized histories of communities, showcasing opportunities for children and families to confront oppressive and colonizing messages by acting on issues of racism, immigration, fairness, and justice.

The definitive goals of culturally relevant teaching are to build students’ cultural competence and sociopolitical consciousness, and increase student achievement (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014) while critiquing the norms that delimit what counts as achievement (Kinloch, 2017). Demonstrating how children can grow academically when their languages, literacies, cultures, and histories are centered rather than denied, degraded, or moved to the margins (Alim & Paris, 2017), we provide qualitative and quantitative data to show connections among these pedagogies and children’s motivation, engagement, achievement, and proficiency in literacy.

In these pages, we also focus on the processes that the teacher–teacher educator dyads experienced as they worked to develop authentic and critically collaborative, mutual mentoring relationships within the teacher–teacher educator partnership. As such, we offer practical strategies for teachers, teacher educators, and others to work together to generate and implement culturally relevant early literacy pedagogies and work toward their sustainability in students’ lives as well as normalized within partnerships centered around co-research, collaboration, and advocacy. It is the sustainability that we bring to the forefront in this work, recognizing that acknowledging relevance is a first step but without sustainability, these practices become merely the work of one teacher in one moment in time. Thus, a pedagogical journey which began with a commitment to generating, documenting, evaluating, and disseminating culturally relevant pedagogies that engaged teacher educators and teachers learning together, has grown through the writing of this book and the inspiration of Paris and Al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Foreword
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Education for the Human Soul: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and the Legacy of Love That Guides Us
• 2. Translanguaging Pedagogies in a Bilingual Preschool Classroom
• 3. Toward Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Engagements with Latina Mothers Through Latino/Latina Children’s Literature
• 4. Together Ensuring Students’ Voices are Heard, Stories are Told, and Legacies are Put into Action
• 5. Growing Our Village: The Power of Shared Knowledge in Early Childhood Literacy
• 6. Culturally Relevant Pedagogies as the Norm: Lessons Learned, Action Steps, and Questions to Help Us Move Toward Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Index