Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Black education
• Indigenous education
• Asian and Pacific Islander education
• Latinx education
• decolonization
• abolition
• educational justice

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Gloria Ladson-Billings for the invitation to submit to this necessary forum and for her generative comments on earlier drafts of this essay. My thanks as well to H. Samy Alim and Casey P. Wong for their generative comments on earlier versions of this essay. Any faults are mine alone. H. Samy Alim, Casey Wong, Stephanie Parks, Jazmen Moore, Doua Kha, and Alayna Eagle Shield would also like to thank the Spencer Foundation for their generous support of our current CSP research partnerships across Washington, California, Spain, and South Africa. Finally, a special shout-out also to doctoral student and critical educator Jazmen Moore, who has been my pedagogical collaborator in the CSP undergraduate class at the University of Washington during 2020 and 2021.

Notes on Terms

I use “Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander” across this essay. As we have written elsewhere, we of course understand that Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities are not mutually exclusive communities. At times in this essay I also use “people of color” or “communities of color,” terms of solidarity/mutuality that can also flatten important distinctions and do not name the specificities of race, racism, and resistance within particular communities (e.g., Black or Native or Asian). As well, “people of color” is not inclusive of all Indigenous people, communities, and nations, where land and relation are primary in addition to racialization. Finally, it is true that all of these racial and ethnic namings are in many ways US-centric and that racialization is not the only intersecting axis around which CSP revolves. In our CSP work, we name the specific (e.g., Black Jamaican, Lakota, Fijian) and/or broader communities (e.g., Black, Native, Pacific Islander) as contextually appropriate and as communities name themselves (Alim & Paris, 2017; Moore & Paris, 2021; Paris, 2019). I also use the term “cisheteropatriarchal” in this essay, which names the linked systems and ideologies associated with cisgendered, heteronormative, patriarchal norms that guide policies and practices with the goal of denying the rights, wellbeing, and thriving of LGBTQ + people, of women of all genders, and intersections therein.