Cultivating Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy through Field Experiences: Discourses of Elementary Preservice Teachers of Color

ABSTRACT

This study uses Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism to examine how two preservice teachers of Color conceptualized and implemented culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy (CR/SP) during their practicum. The participants’ development and practice of CR/SP were contingent on their lived experiences, appropriation of CR/SP, dialogic negotiations with multiple stakeholders, and critical engagement with circulating authoritative discourses during their fieldwork. By considering how preservice teachers of Color dialogically engage with CR/SP in the field, teacher educators can design field experiences that better prepare culturally responsive preservice teachers of Color.

Disclosure statement

The author has not potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplementary material

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Notes

¹ In this paper, people of Color refer to African American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Bi/multiracial, Latinx, Native American. I capitalize on the term Color to center socio-historical, cultural, and political marginalization and racialization (e.g., Kohli, 2014).

² Although interchangeably using the term “culturally relevant pedagogy” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014) and “culturally responsive pedagogy” (Gay, 2010) in this paper, I acknowledge that the pedagogical shift from “relevant” to “responsive” by Gay (2010) underscores an awareness of relationships among knowledge, and practices, and identity variables of students and teachers.

³ I adopt the term intersectionally minoritized instead of a minority or nonwhite because issues of race and racism intersect with other social constructs such as gender, sexuality, class, and languages (e.g., Maddamsetti, Flennaugh, Rosaen, 2018; Maddamsetti, 2018, 2019; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2019).