Three Decades of Culturally Relevant, Responsive, & Sustaining Pedagogy: What Lies Ahead?

Since 1988 I have been researching what I came to call, “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” (CRP). This work, that examines the pedagogical expertise of those teachers who are successful with students who have traditionally struggled in US classrooms, has exploded across the country and around the world. The challenge has been to identify teaching practices that have remained faithful to CRP theory. Thus, teaching that focuses on advancing student learning, developing cultural competence, and fostering critical consciousness is the only practice that accurately represents what is meant by Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. This work was initiated by the national attention being paid to teaching in the mid-1980s. Shulman’s (1987) highly cited article, “Knowledge and teaching” provided a generic look at teaching that focused on content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and what Shulman identified as “pedagogical content knowledge.” However, little in Shulman’s work spoke to the specificity of culture and the pedagogical expertise of teachers who were experiencing success with those students who rarely experienced school success. This was the perceived need that Culturally Relevant Pedagogy addressed. To his credit, Shulman chaired the Spencer Fellows selection process that chose my initial proposal on culturally relevant pedagogy. Although the early work on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy described teaching in elementary classrooms, over time scholars began to see and document outstanding practice in secondary classrooms. Similarly, scholars expanded the work beyond literacy and social studies to include STEAM subject areas (See for example, work of Emdin, Kinloch, Milner, and San Pedro). The point of these applications was to document the usefulness of the work in multiple contexts. By 2012, Paris (2012) began discussing a new stance on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy he termed, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy.” This work saw Culturally Relevant Pedagogy as foundational to creating a pedagogy that explicitly embodied resistance to the status quo and encouraged marginalized communities to fight for their linguistic and cultural sovereignty. This work gained traction and resulted in a volume (Paris & Alim, 2017) that included African American, Latinx, Asian American, Indigenous approaches to culturally sustaining pedagogies. Another aspect of CRP that has emerged over the last decade is the salience of youth culture and its influence on students, teachers, curriculum, pedagogy and culture writ large. The influence of youth culture is evident in the work of scholars such as Christopher Emdin, Bettina Love, Marc Lamont Hill, and others. Emdin’s (2016) critically acclaimed book and hands-on work with the Science Genius program (see, https://hiphoped.com/science-genius/ provided an important framework for understanding the power of youth culture to transform teaching and learning. CRP has gained lots of attention and traction in schools and districts throughout the US. Teacher professional organizations, state departments of education, and individual school districts have endorsed or subscribed to some version of culturally responsive education. Indiana published its “Culturally Responsive Teaching: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practices https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2021.1957632