Embracing the Educator's Responsibility: Culturally Sustaining Curricular Excavation With Early Career Teachers

• In Event: Engaging With Teachers in Justice-Oriented and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

Abstract

Early career teachers often wrestle with the pedagogical and theoretical implications of creating and curating curriculum for instruction that cultivates and sustains the lived experiences, languages, literacies, and cultures of their students. This study analyzes how early career teachers in a university-based induction program embrace their responsibility to engage in a collaborative, critical curricular excavation process (Authors, in press) which draws on the theory of Culturally Sustaining Literacy Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and Sealey-Ruiz’s (2019) archaeology of self. Findings suggest that engaging in this process allows for early career teachers of Color to demonstrate their critical, cultural, and racial literacies within mixed-race collaborative groups, while white teachers began to embrace the tensions and ambiguities of critical, collaborative curricular excavation.

Author

• Kelli Ann Rushek, Miami University - Oxford