Reviewed by Sheyenne Mitchell-Brown
Who am I and what do I want to understand better as a teacher?
I am a pre-service teacher who picked up this book wanting to know how I– a white woman– could build my future classroom on a foundation of educational equity. I wanted to be my best for all my students, no matter where they’re from, what language they spoke, or the color of their skin. So I picked up this book and began soaking in all the ways I can teach and facilitate learning to further justice for all my future students in this wildly diverse world.
Who are the authors and from what beliefs about teaching and learning do they come from?
This book had over 20 people writing and sharing ideas about their experiences in classrooms, all working toward the goal to share how they enacted Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP) and how they envision its future. Each author comes to the table with different racial, cultural, and teaching backgrounds. Every chapter comes with a new voice ready to share those experiences and the lessons learned within the classroom.
What questions or problems in teaching and learning does this book work to answer, uncover, surface, trouble?
The problem they are tackling in this book arose when they asked themselves, “What is the purpose of schooling?” When they reflected upon the age-old question, they decided this:“The purpose of state-sanctioned schooling has been to forward the largely assimilationist and often violent White imperial project, with students and families being asked to lose or deny their languages, literacies, cultures, and histories in order to achieve in schools”(Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 1). This problem is old and widespread. It desperately needs a solution, and the authors of this text propose to have found one.
What is their answer and how do they answer it (e.g., theory, strategies, examples, resources)?
The solution they propose is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: “CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster– to sustain– linguistic, literate, and cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 1). This is not a quick fix nor a simple “do this and then this will happen;” It is a slow dismantling of centuries of harm and cultural erasure: the students, the victims; grades, the weapon; us, the teachers, the unknowing agents of harm The problem began in the classroom, and so it must end there. Practicing CSP in the classroom regularly is how we as educators make strides toward healing and a better future for our students.
What are one or two quotes, passages, strategies that are especially worth sharing with teachers and why?
“My initial encounters with Christina and Derek provide more expansive ways for me to see, listen to, and work in collaboration with young people in urban schools. Christina’s strategies of undermining me with language and Derek’s accusations that I called him by name because I wanted something signify performances of resistance that often get misread in educational species as angry, hostile, and quasi-violent. I use the phrase performances of resistance to refer to a mode of communication or a particular, directed way of responding to the negative gaze, the degrading treatment, and the hurtful assumptions many youth of color receive from others, peers and adults alike. They engage in performances of resistance (e.g., eye-rolling, sharp verbal responses, silence, a seemingly disinterested disposition, absence, etc.) as a way to protect and safeguard themselves from harmful, potentially painful, damaging forms of interaction they often encounter from others who might misread, misunderstand, ridicule, and denigrate them. Given that schools are primary sites of ideological struggle –for racial and linguistic equality, for educational equity, against the criminalization and disenfranchisement of students of color– young people’s performances of resistance are not uncommon” (Penn, Kinloch, & Burkhard, 2016); (Paris & Alim, 2017, p.27).
I found this passage important because I have already witnessed so many teachers misinterpret student behavior, and I have watched as students who need attention, help, and love are cast aside into hallways for being the “problem child.” CSP is essential for decoding behavior, finding its meaning and roots, so teachers can respond and give what every student needs: to be seen.