Learning From Arts Education: Culturally Sustaining Approaches to Middle School Language Arts

• In Event: Critical Professional Development and the Racial Justice Possibilities of Teachers of Color in K–12 Schools

Abstract

As Gorski (2019) writes, students of color tend to have “less access to engaging pedagogy and more exposure to control-oriented teaching practices” (p. 58). My students—who are primarily (but not exclusively) of Latinx descent, from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador—are living in East Oakland, a community deeply impacted by economic and environmental oppression, and are often denied access to engaging curriculum that reflects their lives. This paper explores how I built on a La Lotería lesson I was exposed to at the CPD, and developed a unit intended to be a culturally sustaining approach to our 6th grade grade reading and writing class. I set out to create curriculum that encourages critical thinking and provides lenses for students to understand systems of oppression around them and imagine ways to interrupt those systems.
The principal theory guiding my work is Paris and Alim’s (2017) culturally sustaining pedagogy, which delineates that students deserve to feel valued, seen, included and engaged by the curriculum they encounter. In this way, I am firmly guided by the understanding that openly discussing racism, sexism, colorism and all types of oppression openly builds trust and creates a safer classroom in which all students can learn. I also sought to operate from a funds of knowledge framework as outlined by González, Moll, and Amanti (2005), which posits that students and families come to school with abundant knowledge that can assist in the development of academic knowledge and skills. My practice has demonstrated that when students feel that they and their knowledges are valued, they will be willing to take academic risks in their reading and writing.
In my fourth year attending the CPD in 2018, I attended a workshop by a CPD Presenter in which he presented art curriculum he developed around the Mexican game of Lotería. I was inspired to bring a similar curriculum to my 6th graders as an opening unit, and along with three other CPD attendees developed a 4 week curriculum in which students would learn the Lotería game and history through analyzing texts and critiquing the underlying biases and stereotypes in the original game, and create their own Lotería card to represent their community. Lastly, students had to write about their card, comparing and contrasting it to a traditional card and explaining the reasoning behind the theme of their card.
Throughout the unit, students were highly engaged and interested. They brought in artifacts from home that represented their families, communities and cultures, and used academic language to describe them to their classmates. They played Lotería and analyzed the biases and stereotypes demonstrated in the cards. At the end of the unit, they created a card that directly challenged a biased card and represented themselves or their community in some way, and wrote a paragraph to compare and contrast it to the original card. This unit created a sense of trust and community in the classroom, which paid off for the rest of the year as we continued to engage in conversations around oppression through our critical reading and writing curriculum.

Author

• Lisa Kelly