Can We See It? Making Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Visible in Practice

• In Event: Transformative Practices in Teacher Education: Lessons from the U.S. and China

Abstract

Objectives
Notions of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014) and its antecedents have long been present in teacher education; there seems to be strong tacit agreement that culturally sustaining pedagogy is important and desired. Yet preservice students often know more about theories of culturally sustaining pedagogy than what such pedagogy looks like in practice and what constitutes its enactment. This paper examines video records of practice in an experimental place-based teacher education program for instantiations of culturally sustaining pedagogy.


Background
TeachDETROIT was established in 2016 as a place-based (Matsuko, Hammerness, & Lee, 2024), culturally sustaining (Paris & Alim, 2014), and community-driven (Zeichner, 2015) program that prepares teachers to work in Detroit schools. To cultivate culturally sustaining pedagogies, TeachDETROIT places students in Detroit classrooms from the first days of the program, alongside strong mentor teachers who themselves support assets-based pedagogies. The mentor teachers participate in a summer workshop where much of their work focuses on naming and identifying teaching moves that are culturally sustaining. TeachDETROIT maintains long-standing partnerships with a handful of Detroit schools, and these partnerships are strengthened by ongoing professional development activities, social engagements, and various forms of mutual support. TeachDETROIT students complete a community ethnography, as well as a child study in the tradition of descriptive review (Carini, 1986), and participate in frequent outings together in the city. Students also take a course designed for TeachDETROIT on the families, schools, and communities of Detroit, in addition to a number of general education foundations courses that touch on assets-based pedagogies, “inclusive teaching,” and “teaching in a multicultural society.”


Methods and data sources
Following Erickson (2006), we analyzed the video records of six TeachDETROIT preservice teachers’ teaching practice and their reflections on those lessons, housed on the GoReact© video platform. This analysis was directed towards giving language to and making visible instantiations of culturally sustaining pedagogies in practice, and to understand how preservice students make sense of this complex and abstract idea.


Results and discussion
Analysis of preservice teachers’ enacted practice showed instances of culturally sustaining pedagogies visible in four categories: 1) verbal communications including word choice, intonation, use of second language; 2) revision and revoicing of curriculum materials; 3) physical positioning of bodies and space; 4) references to families and community assets in the flow of instruction. Often these instances could be variously interpreted, raising questions of attribution error (Kennedy, 2010). The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges of interpreting teaching, which is by nature contingent, dynamic, and relational.

Author

• Jennifer M. Lewis, Wayne State University