Public schools teachers in the U.S. strive to reach the needs of all students in the elementary classroom. However, teachers are increasingly expected to follow standardized curriculum. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris, 2012) pushes toward individualized educational practices and against the assimilationism embedded in standardization. This study considers the ways in which nine women-identified teachers, one Black, two Latina, six white, who teach elementary school in a Midwestern university town, experience, discuss, and implement Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in a professional development course, specifically through the lens of the following question: In a course on culturally sustaining pedagogy, how do teachers experience race, culture, families, and family literacies? Grounded in empirical research that considers teaching and learning through a sociocultural lens, and in the theoretical scholarship of Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Pedagogy, the purpose of this qualitative, narrative inquiry is to describe teachers’ learning and responses to culturally sustaining pedagogical practices in order to understand this process and its implementation. Data for this qualitative inquiry were gathered over five months in a professional development course setting using the qualitative methods of observations, interviews, audio recordings, photographs, detailed field notes, and participant self-reflections. The data collected was analyzed through descriptive coding (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014), narrative analysis (Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011), and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2015; Gee, 2014). Results from the study suggest that engagement in culturally sustaining practices is constrained by the standardizations of school, in addition to the discomfort and lack of knowledge of some teachers when talking about race and power in the elementary classroom. Findings also suggest that teachers’ explicit engagement with research and discussions regarding these constraints led to new culturally sustaining practices.

Global competence--a necessary attribute in an increasingly interconnected world--describes having the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to act creatively and collaboratively on important global issues. In urban settings comprised of racial, ethnic, and/or linguistic-minority students, especially, a logical but seemingly underutilized facilitator of global competence would be instruction that draws from students’ funds of knowledge--the home-based practices central to a household’s functioning and well-being. In response to a need for deepened insight into how these concepts may interact in practice, the goal of this qualitative study was to better understand the experience of urban teachers as global competence educators, specifically, the extent to which they consider and utilize their students’ funds of knowledge in developing global competence. In this study, 30 Boston area teachers were interviewed using a semi-structured protocol to draw out their understandings of students’ funds of knowledge and their awareness of how these funds of knowledge might be used to further the development of global competence. Data produced in this study were analyzed through a multi-phase thematic coding process. A conceptual framework built upon existing definitions of global competence and funds of knowledge was developed to inform the design and methodology of this study, and was used as a guide for viewing and understanding the produced data. The two major findings of this study were that: (1) teachers, while seemingly able and willing to talk about global competence and funds of knowledge in relation to their students, did not seem to synthesize (or speak about their synthesis of) these concepts in practice, and, (2) in teacher interviews, potential global competence-supporting funds of knowledge were most often recognized in immigrant and/or economically privileged White students. The potential global competence-supporting funds of knowledge possessed by non-immigrant, minority, and presumably, low-income students were not routinely recognized or accessed.

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Thesis advisor: Mariela Páez / In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated persistent educational inequities and added exponentially to the existing “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Public schools’ sudden shift to remote learning marginalized a large population of students, including young bilingual children from immigrant backgrounds. These students are among the most vulnerable when it comes to remote learning not only because of accessibility issues, but also because many of these students’ families live in underserved and under-resourced communities that were negatively affected by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and persistent systemic racism (Fortuna et al., 2020; Schmit et al., 2020). Hence, there is an urgent need to understand pandemic-related experiences of immigrant families with young bilingual children and to respond with educational strategies that strive to mitigate the negative effects of this educational crisis. This dissertation study comprised of three papers addresses this need through a collaborative project with 20 immigrant families with 42 young bilingual children and two community organizations from the Metro and Greater Boston Area. Paper 1 used sequential mixed methods to provide an in-depth account of immigrant families' remote learning experiences and investigate structural barriers such as lack of support and oppressive practices that hindered the establishment of home-school connections during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paper 2 employed transformative mixed methods to document the development, implementation, and evaluation of a family engagement and remote learning program—the Home Connection. This program was firmly grounded in the equitable collaboration framework of family engagement to build a strong partnership with the family participants and to recognize the crucial roles of the families as co-designers, co-educators, co-researchers, and co-evaluators. Paper 3 is a practitioner inquiry reflecting on what I have learned as a teacher-researcher implementing culturally sustaining pedagogy to partner with immigrant families and teach young bilingual children from diverse backgrounds during pandemic remote learning. Findings from this dissertation documenting the struggles, resistance, and solidarity of these immigrant families will help inform educators, administrators, and policymakers in their planning and delivering of learning experiences and family engagement initiatives that center on the motivation, needs, and assets of diverse students and their families. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) is a framework designed to help traditionally marginalized students. Other frameworks have previously tried to draw on culture to help students in similar ways. However, Paris (2012b) claimed that the word sustaining enclosed a meaning of maintaining and enhancing these students' language and cultural practices that no other frameworks did until that point. There is some confusion for educators and others about CSP since it is a newer framework and that there are many of these cultural frameworks analyzing similar concepts. Therefore, the purpose of this literature review was to examine these previous main frameworks that Paris cited as influencing culturally sustaining pedagogies (i.e., funds of knowledge, culturally responsive pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, and culturally responsive teaching) and how these frameworks overlap with the four main key features of CSP. These four key features are: (a) centering of dynamic communities, their valued languages, practices, and knowledge across the learning setting; (b) student and intergenerational community agency and input; (c) working to be in good relationship with the land, with students, and communities; and (d) structured opportunities to contend with internalized oppressions, false choices, and inward gazes (Paris, 2021). The level of emphasis of each key feature by the main frameworks was also highlighted. Findings illustrate that the first CSP key feature was the most predominant since it was found in all previous frameworks. On top of that, the main framework that has influenced CSP the most is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Ladson-Billings since the four CSP features were represented in this framework.

For African Americans, literacy has historically been rooted in passion, collaboration, and social justice. This study explores two distinct sites of historical African American literacy development: literary societies of the 1800s and print culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Notably, literacy and culture were fundamentally intertwined during these times, creating an urgency and inspiration for literary pursuits not often seen today. In an effort to rekindle this reverence and utility for literacy in classrooms today, a culturally sustaining pedagogy is called for. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to leverage students’ cultural knowledge and skills. By culturally aligning curriculum and instruction, educators position students to experience the transformative power of literacy—a transformative power that was evident in African American literary societies and through the Harlem Renaissance print culture. This study seeks to merge historical and contemporary approaches to literacy development to reconceptualize literacy education and engagement for all students.

<p>For more than five decades, education scholars and activists have argued for a culturally relevant and nurturing education that reflects students' diverse experiences in K-12 classrooms. Yet, with the most recent national reform on science standards, the call to engage all learners pushed for advancing STEM in the United States, and many science education scholars have problematized such rhetoric. Unfortunately, the inclusionary blanket term like “engaging all learners” and the efforts that lead behind it do not consider the sociocultural realities that young children bring into the classrooms and the negotiation in learning school science. In this three-paper dissertation, I explore how middle school science teachers recognize the sociocultural realities students come with and cultivate a culturally nurturing education in response to the increase of racial, economic, and linguistic diversity within their integrated STEM classrooms. In particular, the aim of this dissertation to understand how middle school science teachers align school science, specifically in teaching integrated science and engineering, to the sociocultural realities of students by centering on the sensemaking of teacher’s lived experience and experiential knowledge. The first study draws on a narrative inquiry case study approach to understand how a middle school science teacher cultivated a culturally sustaining STEM classroom. The research question that guided this study was: How does Mrs. Johnson make meaning of her experiences in making science and engineering learning more culturally relevant and sustaining for her diverse middle school students? Findings from this study illuminates a complex narrative such as the intentionality of making multiple epistemologies explicit in learning science and engineering and the required racial reflexive work for cultivating a culturally sustaining and student-focused STEM classrooms. The findings also highlight challenges Mrs. Johnson faced as she integrates students’ lived experiences and alternative ways of knowing and doing into science and STEM teaching. The second study uses a single-case study approach to understand specific teaching practices that truncated the cultivation of a culturally sustaining education by exploring the opportunities that allowed internalized and interpersonal oppression to perpetuate with the same teacher, Mrs. Johnson. The research questions that guided this study are as follow: In what ways does teaching the GMO and Loon Nesting Platform STEM units foreground individual and interpersonal oppression to manifest? What teaching practices allow these moments of oppression to be pervasive? Findings from this study suggest that oppression becomes pervasive when teaching integrated science and engineering without considering how STEM learning could be irrelevant to students’ lived experiences and the role of power in teaching science. Based on these findings, I developed a year-long virtual professional development program that emphasized teaching integrated science and engineering with a focus on culturally nurturing and asset-based pedagogies. The final study draws on teachers’ funds of knowledge and identity to explore the sensemaking of a rural science teacher as he participates in the professional development program and how the sensemaking of his lived experiences informed his use of asset-based pedagogies. The research question that guided this study was: How do Mr. Jordan’s funds of knowledge and identity inform their use of asset-based pedagogies in reform-based, rural science classrooms? Findings from this study highlights Mr. Jordan’ funds of knowledge and identity informing his use of culturally responsive and relevant pedagogies. Implications of the third study proposes generational cultural wealth as a theoretical framework as one way teachers can begin aligning school science to students’ sociocultural realities. The final chapter of this dissertation presents a synthesis across the three studies and a summary of the implications for teaching.  </p>

Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) are educational institutions owned by Native American tribes intended to address the failure of the education system to support Indigenous students. Significant research has been done on the value of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and on TCUs, but little has been done to examine whether and how TCUs implement CSP. This study aims to fill that gap by examining teaching at Chief Dull Knife College (CDKC), a tribal college on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Interviews were conducted with eight white faculty members and four Cheyenne administrators at CDKC. Analysis of the interviews revealed that the instructors saw building personal connections with students as the foundation of teaching at CDKC and that they engaged in attempts at individual adaptation and structural change to support such teaching. The Cheyenne administrators found these efforts valuable, but suggested that more needed to be done to foster a connection between the white faculty members and the Cheyenne community and culture. Ultimately, this study reveals that instructors at CDKC are attempting to implement CSP, but that there are still gaps in that implementation. The interviews suggest that further structural changes are needed at CDKC to better support CSP and ensure that students are receiving the support they need to succeed.

This master’s thesis investigates poetic text writing through a teaching project conducted on a secondary school class in Sweden. Inspired by ekphrastic poetry, the teaching project consisted of poetry and literature reading. The students visited a sculpture related to the literature, upon which they wrote poetic texts about the sculpture. The main purpose of the study is to describe how teaching in the Swedish subject can make use of Swedish language teaching by developing students’ poetic texts that touches on topics such as living conditions and identity. Drawing from thematic narrative analysis, most notably Bamberg’s positioning model, the analysis investigates the narratives constructed in the students’ poetic texts as well as identity aspects negotiated through the narratives. The students’ identities were further discovered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews to deepen the understanding of the meeting between art, identity and learning.The general perception drawn from the interviewees’ answers is that the Swedish subject rarely includes knowledge of nor writing of poetic texts. However, the study emphasises that poetry could have an integral part of the education in the Swedish subject in secondary education.The results show that the students’ poetic texts tend to relate to the sculpture and the physical environment, as well as the social context of the environment. Furthermore, the identities of the students were shown to have a high relevance in the writing process. The teaching project was based on principles of culturally sustaining pedagogy and aimed at contributing to the sociocultural support of the school. As the students’ language and cultural backgrounds proved to be significant in the writing process, it became evident that multilingualism was a natural part of the student’s everyday school life.

No description available.