What Counts as Culture and Cultural Repertoires in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies?

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

Abstract

Culturally sustaining pedagogies have been advanced as a means of foregrounding the plural and dynamic nature of youths’ identity and cultural practices, while recognizing the agentic linguistic, sociocultural, sociopolitical moves and practices that youth develop and leverage. In this chapter, Gutiérrez examines several tensions in CSP: reconciling its conceptualization of culture with its notion of cultural sustainability, as well as its important attempt to honor cultural practices while also capturing the hybrid and syncretic nature of youths’ repertoires. These are challenges not only in CSP but across approaches that attempt to rupture the encapsulation of current conceptions and pedagogies for youth from nondominant communities. Syncretic approaches to literacy and learning are offered as one approach. Organized around principles of historicity and prolepsis, the tension between the everyday/informal and school-based/formal) is preserved and leveraged as a resource for designing possible futures.

Author

• Kris Gutiérrez, University of Colorado - Boulder