Sustaining Culture, Transforming Society: Emotion, Activism, and Youth Expertise

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice in a Changing World

Abstract

CSP seeks to support and strengthen longstanding heritage-based and emergent youth-driven community practices; in so doing, it aims to foster social justice by dismantling asymmetrical structural configurations of power (Paris 2012; Paris & Alim 2014). The goals of CSP, and especially its focus on culturally meaningful forms of knowledge, also closely align with educational theories that emphasize the importance of affect in sociopolitically transformative learning. This paper examines the affective agency of Latina and Latino youth to interrogate the linguistic inequities they critically examine within a university-community partnership program, SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) that shares the general pedagogical and political commitments of CSP. Recognizing youth as linguistic and cultural experts, SKILLS instructors collaborate with students to use this knowledge to advance sociolinguistic justice (Bucholtz et al. 2014). We consider the central role of affect in students’ challenges to the devaluation of their language in two different contexts: public discourse in U.S. society and the local institutional setting of their own school. These illustrations of youth agency and activism demonstrate the dual impact of CSP as both culturally sustaining and sociopolitically transformative.

Author

• Mary Bucholtz, University of California - Santa Barbara