Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in the Project of Black and Indigenous Coalitions and on Turtle Island

• In Event: 31.041 - Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Intergenerational Sustenance and Solidarities From Turtle Island to //Hui !Gaeb

Abstract

This paper presents a meta-analysis of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) (Paris, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2017) as a coalitional project that has across its first five years been explicitly intergenerational, centering Black, Indigenous and other People of Color in the distinct and related projects of educational Sovereignty, Resurgence, Justice, and Liberation. Situated in contemporary scholarship on settler colonialism and white supremacy in education (Tuck & Yang, 2012, 2018; Grande 2018) that links the ongoing legacy of land theft, genocide and enslavement, this paper traces the emergence of CSP with its foundational antecedents in the asset pedagogies movement (e.g., Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy, Moll & Gonzalez’ funds of knowledge). Looking at the ways Native and Black scholars and scholarship has been central to the early development of the conceptual and empirical project of CSP, the author then offers historical examples of Black and Native solidarity in education and social movements (e.g., the 1960’s ethnic studies movement). With this scholarly and historical foundation, the paper concludes by looking at the ways scholars and practitioners of CSP have joined the contemporary social movements of Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter through their research and advocacy. Ultimately, the paper argues that CSP can and must be a site of solidarities and coalitions between Black educational studies and Native educational studies in the ongoing context of settler colonial educational violence and the contemporary educational incarnations of Indigenous resurgence and Black liberation.


References

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Author

• Django Paris, University of Washington