Culturally sustaining pedagogy

By Pete on April 1, 2024 • ( 1 )

In our upcoming resource, Adri Szlapak and I mention culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in EAL teaching. Here’s a quick summary of the concept and some random reflections on it.

What is CSP?

In the intro to this article, Paris (2012) describes culturally sustaining pedagogy as an approach that seeks to maintain ‘linguistic, literate and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic process of schooling’.

CSP is a movement away from monocultural and (certainly in the sense of EAL) monolingual bias. Enacting CSP promotes equity across communities, equitable access/opportunities, and values cultural/linguistic identity as a resource for learning.

De Oliveira and Jones (2023) share the following ideas for enacting CSP:

⁃ Incorporating students funds of knowledge (embedded cultural practices and knowledge that learners encounter from home and in their communities)

⁃ Using interactional scaffolding moves (recasting, recapping, elicitation, drawing on learners’ prior knowledge, and so on)

⁃ Utilizing students’ L1 in the classroom (such as through translanguaging techniques)

⁃ Using multimodal teaching practices (a combination of images, video, gestures, written text and so on – basically not just one ‘mode’ of input)

⁃ Functional approaches to language development (e.g. meaning-building, understanding genre, developing the skills to talk about academic language across subjects)

CSP is an asset-based approach to teaching and learning. Ladson-Billings provides a useful graphic summary of different approaches, based on the aforementioned work of Paris (2012):

CSP in my context(s)

I came across the term ‘culturally sustaining pedagogy’ a while back on my PGCEi. Before that, I’d considered ‘difference rather than deficit’ to be an important shift in perspective, and we explored as much during the DipTESOL I wasn’t familiar with asset-based approaches.

As a TEFLer, I mainly taught English as top-up or additional provision. This meant there wasn’t really a connection between my teaching and any mainstream curriculum. However, as an EAL teacher, I’m much more involved in enacting the mainstream curriculum. This brings the idea of CSP more onto my radar. I’m more aware of the covert curriculum, the absent curriculum, and so on in my context, and I have more opportunity to enact certain principles systematically/consistently.

Enacting CSP is a huge part of inclusive provision – not just in EAL practice but across the curriculum and indeed the school community. Regarding EAL, the recent principles to guide EAL pedagogy outlined by The Bell Foundation have clear links to CSP. These include stressing that other languages are an asset in language learning, highlighting the importance of appropriate scaffolding, and maintaining high expectations for all (respecting learner funds of knowledge).

In our work as Heads of EAL at St. Joseph’s, aspects of our provision have been shaped by CSP. I’ll explain more in an upcoming post on the principles guiding our EAL practice.

References:

De Oliveira, L. C., & Jones, L. (2023). Teaching Young Multilingual Learners: Key Issues and New Insights. Cambridge University Press.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational researcher, 41(3), 93-97.