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#BlackStudentsDoWrite: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy With Black Youth

Tue, April 12, 8:15 to 10:15am, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 146 C

Abstract

In this paper, I present qualitative data on the literacy engagements and classroom performances of two students attending urban public high schools in the United States—Christina, an eighteen year old Afro-Jamaican female from the Northeast, and Derek, a seventeen year old African-American male from the Midwest. I open with anecdotes that describe my initial encounters with Christina, a student in my English class at Perennial High School, and Derek, a student in Ms. Moore’s English class and a participant in my study at Truth High School. The anecdotes help me to grapple with meanings of student resistance and performance in conducting work that relies on culturally sustaining perspectives to reject deficit framings of Black students, their cultural identities, literacy practices, and academic abilities. From the anecdotes, I draw out the larger theoretical significance of culturally sustaining pedagogies in relation to cultural modeling, culturally relevant pedagogies, and critically conscious research. Then, I turn attention to specific literacy engagements and performances by Christina and Derek to argue, as do Paris and Alim (2014), that the “languages, literacies, histories, and cultural ways of being” of Black students “are not pathological” (p. 86). My interest is here is with examining the validity of this framing—culturally sustaining pedagogies—in relation to Black students and their resistances to “academic” writing (and the restrictive parameters of Dominant Academic English and school-sanctioned tasks).

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