LibGuides: Middle Grades Resources: Child and Adolescent Pedagogy

Pedagogy Resources

Inclusive Pedagogy and Universal Design Approaches for Diverse Learning Environments
This book 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.
Teacher-Family Solidarity as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Practice
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.

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.

What Is Trauma Informed Teaching?

Trauma informed teaching, another component of social emotional learning (SEL), encompasses how you as an educator can cultivate a safe environment where students (and faculty) can thrive. It requires the ability to create strong relationships while maintaining professional boundaries.

Trauma-informed pedagogy is pedagogical practice that keeps trauma, its prevalence, and how it affects an individual, in mind. These practices are very similar to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and include practices such as:

Providing content information in advance
Using content descriptions, especially for potentially triggering media
Creating a safe and inclusive framework for discussions
Checking in on students
Encouraging community building and sense of belonging
Allowing for multiple ways to engage with course content
Building flexibility into assessment and absence policies
Valuing student input and feedback

Trauma Informed Teaching Strategies
A brief guide of tips on how to navigate students who have been traumatized individually and within the classroom.
* (note - only 3 free reads available) *
Childhood sexual assault in an institutional setting: Trauma-informed teaching and the appropriate use of “Self”
A personal but informed study on practices on how to develop relationships and understand triggers/responses from students.
Trust-based relational intervention as a trauma-informed teaching approach
This paper evaluates P-12 American school teachers' perceptions of a six-session training that used the trauma-informed Trust-based Relational Intervention (TBRI) system.