Quick Tips: Making your everyday practice culturally sustaining
As teachers, it is our ethical duty to incorporate our students’ identities in our classroom, especially when it comes to non-dominant cultures and communities. If we want our students to be the next generation of changemakers in the world, we must prepare them for that work by filling our practice with diverse perspectives & methods of instruction. Personally, I've decided as a teacher to adopt a framework of culturally sustaining practice. That means I try to consistently support students’ cultural, linguistic, and literate practices as a priority, rather than including their identities as an afterthought (See Gloria Ladson-Billings’ (1995) and Django Paris’ (2012) research for more info on this).
BUT integrating this work in a meaningful way can feel very challenging! Here are some quick ways to incorporate culturally sustainable practice that I've tried out in my own classroom:
**sidenote: these tips were implemented in a workshop-style classroom**
Tip #1: RETHINK YOUR MENTOR TEXTS!
Chances are, if you're following a provided school curriculum (such as TCRWP, Engage NY, etc) then the majority of your mentor texts and read alouds are centered on white characters and culture! Hint: even books featuring "neutral" animal characters (Frog & Toad, Poppleton, Zelda & Ivy) are centered around white, middle class culture. The texts that you prioritize to your students sends a message about the lifestyles and cultures that matter. Figure out which books you can easily swap out- even changing up a text or two for each unit makes a big difference!
**Check out Lee & Low publishers for leveled text suggestions.
Tip #2: CONNECT YOUR WRITING TO YOUR STUDENTS
One of the stranger things I witnessed in my internship was a teacher writing reviews on Pinkberry and Starbucks as mentor texts for a class of students in the Bronx who had never been to either place. Make the content of your writing relevant to your students! Many students tend to emulate the mentor pieces. If you write a story about a girl and her treehouse, all of a sudden you have half a class of kids writing about tree houses for their realistic fiction, despite never seeing one in person. Use the neighborhood community or shared spaces as the basis for your piece, so that students feel invited to write from their own communities.
TIP #3: AFFIRM TRANSLANGUAGING
Recognize and affirm students' languages by allowing them to move, mix, and match their languages in the classroom. One easy way to establish a culture of translanguaging is by sharing texts of authors who have done so as mentor texts in reading and writing. If you speak multiple languages or dialects, think aloud the process of language choices for your students during writing lessons. Demonstrate for them how one character in your piece might speak a mix of Spanish and English to her family, but use English with her friends.
Tip #4: LOOK TO COMMUNITY INSIDERS
Get to know the community of families within your school and/or community leaders of cultures you want to integrate! Invite family members into the classroom for storytelling or to teach a skill. Reach out to diverse authors and see if they could come to the school to inspire your students, or provide you with some resources. You do not have to, and should not, do this work alone.
These are just some of the multitude of ways that you can begin to integrate culturally sustaining pedagogy into your teaching. Remember, that this is an ongoing process that will develop and grow over time. Reflect constantly on your work, and keep the focus on your goal of centering your students.
