More Than Just a PowerPoint: How Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Empowers Youth and Inspires Social Change

• In Event: Youth in Revolt: Latina/o Youth Fighting for Their Education

Abstract

In California, Latinos make up the majority of K-12 students at 51% (Pew Hispanic, 2014). Racial and linguistic discrimination has contributed to a long history of marginalization among Latino students (Crawford, 2001; Del Valle, 2003; Perea, 2004). While historically Latinos have been striving for legal educational equality, and have made significant strides towards it, it is well documented that Latinos are not achieving parity with White and Asian peers. According to the Pew Hispanic Research Center (2013) Latinos had the lowest college enrollment rate at 34.3%, when compared to Asian, (66.9%), White (44.9%), and Black students (35.6%). Latinos also showed the highest high school dropout rate. While structural barriers have been set in place to restrict equitable educational access for Latinos, many researchers believe there remains hope in the form of critical pedagogical intervention. McCarty & Lee asked the question, “What if, indeed, the goal of teaching and learning with youth of color was not ultimately to see how closely students could perform White middle-class norms but to explore, honor, extend, and, at times, problematize their heritage and community practices?” (2014). I look to see how such pedagogical alternatives can serve as a model for success in an attempt to ameliorate the current disadvantageous situation for Latino students.

Ladson-Billings’ foundational work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), (1995) has been widely referenced in educational research since its debut. CRP operates under the notion of students as subjects rather than objects and empowering students through the inclusion of culture as part of the curriculum in order to succeed academically. Building from CRP, Paris (2012) offered the idea of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP). Paris & Alim (2014) propose that CSP “seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literary, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed response to demographic and social change” and advocate for the multicultural, multilingual student.

This work explores preliminary findings of a long-term research project at a predominantly Latino charter school in San Jose, CA. This high school uses a holistic implementation of CSP throughout the campus. Through classroom observations, interviews, and artifacts analysis, I was able to build a complex understanding of how critical pedagogical methods were influencing the literary and intellectual development of the students. The focus of this work comes from an English classroom that centered social justice within a CSP framework. As one freshmen student stated during a group presentation on the school to prison pipeline, “It’s more than just a PowerPoint”, explaining that the impact of the assignment reached far beyond the walls of their classroom. While there exists ample quantitative evidence showing positive benefits for students in critical pedagogy based classrooms, I look to gain insight from the perspectives of the students themselves as to how such pedagogies function as educational tools of empowerment and liberation. Research on successful CSP classrooms can help inform policy and teacher education practices in ways that are responsive to needs and norms of students of color.

Author

• Courtney Peña, Stanford University