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Culturally Relevant/Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy

A key part of culturally responsive, inclusive, and anti-racist pedagogy is seeing students' home language as an asset that can be leveraged in the classroom. Some literature goes even beyond "cultural relevance", arguing that anti-racist teachers should seek to revitalize and sustain students' cultures and languages, particularly in the case of Indigenous languages, which might otherwise be lost. The following resources are separated by focus between culturally responsive and sustaining/revitalizing.

Culturally Responsive Teaching Resources

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.
Culture to the Max!: Culturally Responsive Teaching and Practice
This book offers an in-depth look into the practice and implementation of Culturally Responsive Teaching that can inform curriculum development, teacher evaluation, and classroom and culture evaluation.
Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools and Beyond
Deepen the dialogue to address racial disparities in your organization Schools, like all organizations, face a nearly insurmountable hurdle when addressing racial inequities--the inability to talk candidly about race. In this timely update, author Glenn Singleton enables you to break the silence and open an authentic dialogue that forges a path to progress for racial equity.
Applying critical race theory to social and emotional learning programs in schools (Attaya & Hilliard, 2023)
In this paper, we argue that when SEL programming is implemented in a color-evasive and value-neutral way, it can exacerbate racial inequities and lead to harmful practices within schools, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and other students of color. We examine how an integration of critical race theory and SEL may, instead, contribute to all students’ positive development and discuss the ways in which this programming may drive systemic change within school communities.
Culturally and Historically Responsive Education (Muhammad, G., 2023)
This policy brief aims to problematize the curricular issues that have traditionally framed schools from the 1600s onward. These framings have taught literacy as decontextualized skills, disconnected from students’ lives, their consciousness, and their joy.
Inclusive Pedagogy and Universal Design Approaches for Diverse Learning Environments (Sanger, 2020)
This chapter highlights two educational frameworks—Inclusive Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—that emphasize the educational importance of imbuing all students with a sense of belonging in the classroom and curriculum. Drawing from these approaches, the chapter suggests a series of concrete strategies for educators to enthusiastically harness diversity and amplify student learning. While written for college educators, most of it also applies to K-12 teachers.

Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Resources

Playful Literacies, Creativity, and Multilingual Practices (Yoon, 2019)
"Emergent language learners develop literacy through social interactions in multiple, overlapping communities: home, school, peer groups, and popular culture. The author focuses on how classrooms can be spaces that cultivate authentic literacy engagements while incorporating and valuing students' existing language resources."
Critical Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy and Indigenous Education Sovereignty (McCarty & Lee, 2014)
In this article, Teresa L. McCarty and Tiffany S. Lee present critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy as a necessary concept to understand and guide educational practices for Native American learners. ...McCarty and Lee argue that given the current linguistic, cultural, and educational realities of Native American communities, culturally sustaining pedagogy in these settings must also be understood as culturally revitalizing pedagogy."
Creative Failures in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Puzio, Newcomer, Pratt, McNeely, & Jacobs, 2017)
"Rather than building upon students' linguistic and cultural backgrounds, schools often "subtract" these rich resources from students' learning experiences... The language and literacy practices of students' homes are oftentimes left out of the curriculum in favor of English-language texts and materials that reflect mainstream cultural values and norms. The end result is the eradication of the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices that culturally and linguistically diverse students bring from home."
Culturally sustaining disciplinary language and literacy instruction for Hmong-American children (Spycher, Girard, & Moua, 2019)
"The cultural and linguistic assets students bring to the classroom, valuable resources for learning, are often neglected in school, depriving students an opportunity to leverage and expand such resources. This article argues for an instructional approach that integrates disciplinary language and literacy teaching with culturally sustaining pedagogy. We synthesize research and theories on the approach and provide illustrative examples with elementary grades Hmong-American children."
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice (Paris, 2012)
"Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms "relevant" and "responsive" are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative that, I believe, embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future."
Revitalizing Indigenous languages, cultures, and histories in Montana, across the United States and around the globe (Carjuzaa, 2017)
"Many educators have sung the praises of Indian Education for All, Montana’s constitutional mandate, and heard the successes of Montana’s Indigenous language revitalization efforts which reverberate around the globe. Teaching Indigenous languages is especially, challenging since there are limited numbers of fluent speakers and scarce resources resulting from harsh education and language policies imposed by the US federal government throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries... By embracing culturally responsive pedagogy, a dramatic change to education in Montana to truly promote the espoused democratic ideals of justice and equity has resulted."
Teacher-Family Solidarity as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Practice (Hong, S., Baloch, M. H., Conklin, K. H., & Warren, H. W., 2022)
In this research article, the authors examine the intersections of culturally sustaining pedagogy and critical family engagement to explore the possibilities for equitable family-school partnerships in urban schools. Based on the common values of trusting and caring relationships and power disruption within those fields, as well as data from a multi-year qualitative study of teachers and their relationships with students’ families, the authors introduce the framework of teacher-family solidarity. The framework challenges traditional conceptions of parent-teacher relationships, and the supporting narratives of teachers and parent/caregivers illustrate that teacher-family solidarity should become an indispensable part of culturally sustaining pedagogy and practice.
Translingual Play that Promotes Cultral Connections, Invention, and Regulation: A LatCrit Perspective (Arreguín-Anderson, Salinas-Gonzalez, & Alanis, 2018)
"Using Latino critical race theory as a lens, this qualitative study explored ways in which young children’s translanguaging practices informed the design of culturally relevant sociodramatic spaces in a bilingual early childhood classroom located along the Texas/Mexico border in South Texas."
“You Need Some Laugh Bones!”: Leveraging AAL in a High School English Classroom (Vetter, 2013)
"The purpose of this study was to examine how a White teacher (Gina) responded to African American Language (AAL) in ways that situated students as valuable members of a high school English classroom... Implications from the study suggest that teaching high school English is not only about knowledge of content or best practices but also about leveraging multiple languages in ways that position students as participants of a literacy community."
Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005)
This article "conceptualizes community cultural wealth as a critical race theory (CRT) challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color...[and] instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged." Submitted by Shama Thompson.

Funds of Knowledge

"Funds of Knowledge" are the "historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and wellbeing" (Moll et al., 1992, p. 134). Often, a community's knowledge, skills, and resources are not visible or valued in school contexts. "Funds of knowledge" can therefore be a valuable concept to introduce to graduate students, as it helps them see that they have much to learn from families and communities and it helps them to value multiple ways of knowing.

Research:

Here is some of the research base on this topic:

Formation and Transformation of Funds of Knowledge among U.S.-Mexican Households (Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg, 1992)
This is one of the seminal articles on Funds of Knowlege: "Public schools have relied on a deficiency model to structure instruction for minority children that underestimates the funds of knowledge that U.S.-Mexican households contain. We argue that these funds are not only a key to understanding the cultural systems in which U.S.-Mexican children emerge, but are also important and useful assets in the classroom."
Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms (Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez, 1992)
This is one of the seminal articles on the concept of "Funds of Knowledge", discussing how research into students' households can inform classroom practice.
Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, 2005)
This book is one of the seminal works on Funds of Knowledge. "The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions."
Dark Funds of Knowledge, Deep Funds of Pedagogy: Exploring Boundaries Between Lifeworlds and Schools (Zipin, 2009)
In this article, Zipin celebrates the concept of Funds of Knowledge and the ways that it challenges the way "academic curriculum selectively privileges cultural capital embodied in elite social-structural positions." It then examines issues with how this concept is often applied: the "problematic tendencies to build curriculum around (1) light (i.e. positive) but not dark knowledge from learners’ lifeworlds; and (2) knowledge contents but not ways of knowing and transacting knowledge (funds of pedagogy)."
Funds of Knowledge: An Investigation of Coherence within the Literature (Hogg, 2011)
This article provides an overview and analysis of the literature on Funds of Knowledge.
Power and Agency in Education: Exploring the Pedagogical Dimensions of Funds of Knowledge (Rodriquez, 2013)
This article provides another review of the literature on Funds of Knowledge.
Capitalizing on Funds of Knowledge to Support Family Engagement (Sebolt, 2018)
The author posits that if teachers can tap into family funds of knowledge -- the wealth of knowledge found in the home -- they can be better prepared to foster parental and family engagement.
Enhancing Academic Investment through Home-School Connections and Building on ELL Students' Scholastic Funds of Knowledge (Johnson and Johnson, 2016)
This case study describes "an academic intervention designed to enhance the motivation and classroom engagement of English Language Learners (ELLs) during literacy-based activities. Stemming from a sociocultural perspective of literacy (Au, 1993; Perez, 2004) within a funds of knowledge framework (González, Moll, & Amanti , 2005), our approach emphasizes personalized learning (Redding, 2013) by having the students design, develop, and implement classroom lessons based on their own interests."
Supporting Mathematics Understanding Through Funds of Knowledge (Williams, Tunks, Gonzalez-Carriedo, Faulkenberry, and Middlemiss, 2016)
"The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify the unique funds of knowledge among three Hispanic families living in the same city, specifically, how parents supported their children’s mathematics learning through funds of knowledge. Participants contributed to their children’s mathematics learning by promoting the five National Council of Teachers of Mathematics process standards—problem solving, reasoning and proof, communication, connection, and representation. Participating parents shared knowledge with their children through questioning and discussion, providing experiences, and promoting practice. In this study, participants valued education and supported their children’s mathematics learning at home and school activities."
Discourse and power: Implementation of a funds of knowledge curriculum (Reinhardt, 2018)
This research is centered on a teacher educator who is part of a curriculum redesign for a teacher education program, and examines how she navigates her identity through the second year of involvement in the redesign.

Distance Learning Resources

Teaching as Dialogue: Toward Culturally Responsive Online Pedagogy (Lawrence 2020)
This article examines the strategies used to engage with culturally responsive pedagogy in four online high school classrooms.
Practice What You Preach: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy During Covid-19 (Smith 2020)
This article "discuss[es] teacher educators' shortcomings in modeling CRP for our teacher candidates during the pandemic...[and] offer[s] reflective questions and specific actions to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy and anti-racist values in teacher education during and beyond Covid-19."
Celebrating Difference: Best Practices in Culturally Responsive Teaching Online (Woodley et. al. 2017)
In this article, the authors share best practices for designing culturally and linguistically responsive online courses and "provides examples of online activities that are validating; comprehensive; multi-dimensional; empowering; transformative, and emancipatory."

Additional Research and Resources

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (Hammond, 2014)
In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.
But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings 1995)
A framework to improve teaching in multicultural contexts (Sleeter 2018)
This paper addresses how teachers can learn to use Banks’s (2013) five dimensions of multicultural education, using a planning framework that has been shown to improve curriculum planning and teaching.
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix (Ladson-Billings 2014)
In this article, Ladson-Billings reflects on the history of her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy and the ways it has been used and misused since its inception.
The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas (Aronson & Laughter 2016)
This paper synthesizes the research connecting CRE to positive student outcomes across content areas in response to the marginalization of CRE in educational reform discourses.
Gangstas, Wankstas, and Ridas: defining, developing, and supporting effective teachers in urban schools (Duncan-Andrade, 2007)
This article argues that there are five indicators of effective teaching in urban schools: Critically conscious purpose, duty, preparation, socratic sensibility, and trust.
Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice (Gutiérrez and Rogoff 2003)
This article discusses how to characterize regularities of individuals' approaches according to their cultural background. The authors "argue against the common approach of assuming that regularities are static, and that general traits of individuals are attributable categorically to ethnic group membership" and suggest moving beyond this assumption by instead using a cultural-historical approach.
Do No Harm: Strategies for Culturally Relevant Caring in Middle Level Classrooms from the Community Experiences and Life Histories of Black Middle Level Teachers (Milton Williams, 2018)
"This qualitative study focused on the life histories of four female African-American middle level teachers. The findings illuminate how culturally responsive caring can and should be foundational to successful teaching that does not discriminate but instead uplifts every student and assures them that teachers will seek to know, understand, teach, and not degrade them. Elements of this caring framework include serving as students’ otherparents or fictive kin, taking time to know students without judgment, appreciating the knowledge in students’ communities, believing in students’ brilliance and holding them accountable in warm yet demanding ways, teaching racial history and teaching students to speak back to negative profiles that define them, and never sugarcoating injustices but teaching for success."
Telling Their Side of the Story: African-American Students' Perceptions of Culturally Relevant Teaching (Howard 2001)
This article expands the literature examining students' perceptions and interpretations of these learning environments. The authors describe the results of a study that sought to assess African-American elementary students' interpretations of culturally relevant teachers within urban contexts.
What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward (Paris and Samy 2014)
In this article, Paris and Samy "use the emergence of Paris's concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies...[and] offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past toward a CSP that keeps pace with the changing lives and practices of youth of color."
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures (Paris, 2021)
"What does culturally sustaining pedagogy mean in the context of a global pandemic, uprisings for racial and decolonial justice, and an ongoing climate crisis? In this essay, I build from decades of strength-centered pedagogical research and practice as well as the work of contemporary organizers to engage how educators can join communities in sustaining valued lifeways through education to ensure possible futures for all peoples and lands."
Communalism Versus Race/Ethnicity: Which Predicts What Pedagogical Strategies Will Be Culturally Relevant? Or Do You Need Both?
"Research on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy claims that culture drives students’ attitudes and behaviors to determine what learning contexts best scaffold learning but operationalizes race/ethnicity. This study extends the developmental range of this work and compares race/ethnicity and self-reported group orientation as predictors. In total, 138 high school (Study 1) and 118 college (Study 2) students completed a math task after a learning session. Race/ethnicity alone was not predictive. High group orientation students performed best after communal learning, while low scorers did best after competitive learning in both studies. This was true for Black participants only. More nuanced examination of these issues is needed."
City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row
This collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Kozol, Sapphire, and Patricia J. Williams provide some of the best writing on life in city schools and neighborhoods. Young people and practicing teachers, poets and scholars, social critics and journalists offer unique takes on topics ranging from culturally relevant teaching to the criminalization of youth and the inequities of school funding. Notably chapter 18 is Ladson-Billings article "Yes, but how do we do it?"