Research-Based Strategies for Teaching

The Takeaway: The authors provide a “loving” critique of asset pedagogies which were developed to combat deficit arguments surrounding the cultures that minoritized students bring with them into the classroom. In doing so, they offer Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP) as a viable alternative to previous iterations of asset pedagogies as it offers a framework to understand students’ cultures as pluralistic rather essentialistic, as emergent rather static or traditional, and as eligible for critique.

Critiques of Asset Pedagogies

• Asset pedagogies may unintentionally perpetuate essentialism over pluralism by reinforcing cultures as separate from one another and only exposing students to cultural content that is expected of their culture.
• Asset pedagogies may unintentionally frame culture as static and ancestral over emergent by centering “traditional” cultural practices and not existing shifts that are happening in living communities.
• Asset pedagogies may unintentionally view all forms of youth and minoritized cultures as positive or progressive out of fear of the White gaze. This does not allow space to critique the instances in which minoritized and youth cultures reproduce racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other harmful ideologies.  

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)

• CSP’s explicit goal is to support multilingualism and multiculturalism in practice and perspective for students and for teachers.
• CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster (to sustain) linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as a needed response to demographic and social change.
• The authors argue that CSP, as a term, stance, and practice, is increasingly necessary given the explicit assimilationist and antidemocratic monolingual/monocultural educational policies emerging across the nation, such as the “Ethnic Studies Ban” in Arizona.

Arguments

• The future of CSP must extend previous visions of asset pedagogies by demanding explicitly pluralist outcomes that are not centered on White, middle-class, monolingual, and monocultural norms of educational achievement.
• The repositioning of asset pedagogies to focus on the practices and knowledge of communities of color must understand that linguistic and cultural flexibility is imperative to educational outcomes as multilingualism and multiculturalism are linked to access and power.

Can you think of a time when you tried to integrate minoritized or youth culture in your course content? In what ways was it successful or unsuccessful? How much of the successes or difficulties of your lesson connects to Paris and Alim’s critique of asset pedagogies?