By Django Paris
The interrelated crises of climate catastrophe, emboldened white supremacy, resurging fascism, pandemics, and ongoing genocides have been increasingly unrelenting features of our lives and those of the children, families, communities, and lands we teach and learn alongside. Although each of these crises has in many ways been central across history, students, educators, and families are certainly feeling the heaviness of the times. I know I am. And even in the face of so much, those I teach and learn with, in and far beyond schools and universities, are bringing fierce commitments to centering and sustaining their communities with vision and joy. They know that our efforts need to be as unrelenting and globally connected as the forces that oppose just futures.
Maybe everyone who moves through unprecedented times feels like their moment is somehow the direst, but there does seem to be something especially existential, especially world-ending about this past decade. The thing about world-ending moments, of course, is that they are also world-building ones (Maynard & Simpson, 2022). Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latinx and all Global Majority people striving to sustain their valued lifeways—their very lives—in the face of schools and societies bent on the opposite have always known this. It seems then, as always, like a time where remembering the lessons from the past may help us build the educational world we need for the present and future.
In the current issue of the Harvard Educational Review, I join Gloria Ladson-Billings, H. Samy Alim, and Na’ilah Nasir to take up this educational moment, what brought us here, and to chart possible paths forward. In our article, “The Past, Present, and Future of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: An Invitation to Teachers, Researchers, and Communities,” we offer our understanding of where we’ve been and where we need to be headed as people committed to contributing to the world we need through strength, asset, and wisdom-based approaches to education.
We offer this new article ten years since I joined H. Samy Alim, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Teresa McCarty, and Tiffany Lee to publish the symposium on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in the Harvard Educational Review (Ladson-Billings, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). And, of course, it’s been thirty years since Gloria Ladson-Billings asked a different question in her foundational work on culturally relevant pedagogy (1994, 2021). Rather than asking what was wrong with Black children, their families, and communities, Ladson-Billings asked, what is right with Black children and their families, and what happens in the contexts where they thrive educationally? Ladson-Billings’s work has remained our collective pedagogical North Star in our journey with CSP.
We hope our current offering can be useful to all of us feeling the weight of these times, to all of us leaning into the possibilities of asking more just and liberatory questions in our work; to joining young people and communities in remembering and creating answers that will carry us toward the world we need.
References
Ladson-Billings, G. (2021). Culturally relevant pedagogy: Asking a different question. Teachers College Press.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: aka the remix. Harvard educational review, 84(1), 74–84.
Maynard, R., & Simpson, L. B. (2022). Rehearsals for living. Knopf Canada.
McCarty, T., & Lee, T. (2014). Critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy and Indigenous education sovereignty. Harvard educational review, 84(1), 101–124.
Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard educational review, 84(1), 85–100.
About the Author
Django Paris is the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice in the College of Education at the University of Washington on Coast Salish homelands. His teaching and research focus on centering and sustaining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and all Global Majority youth and communities in the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, and justice movements in and beyond schools. Paris has published several books, including Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (with H. Samy Alim; Teachers College Press, 2017), and Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square (with Alayna Eagle Shield, Rae Paris, and Timothy San Pedro; Routledge, 2020). He is also the editor of the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies series with the Teachers College Press and hosts the conversation series An Educational Otherwise.
He is a co-author of “The Past, Present, and Future of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: An Invitation to Teachers, Researchers, and Communities” in the Winter 2024 issue of Harvard Educational Review. To subscribe to HER, click here.