A Look Into Theory and Praxis of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Bilingual Settings

Racially and linguistically minoritized groups have long been subject to inequitable education in the U.S. It is well documented that Latinos are not achieving parity with White and Asian students. At nearly every stage of the... [ view full abstract ]

Racially and linguistically minoritized groups have long been subject to inequitable education in the U.S. It is well documented that Latinos are not achieving parity with White and Asian students. At nearly every stage of the educational pipeline, Latino students find themselves in a disadvantageous situation. Gándara (2010) notes that Latinos experience a trifecta of segregation. Racial, socio-economic, and linguistic segregation have contributed to a long history of marginalization among Latino students. Some educational researchers have suggested intervention in the form of critical pedagogy. This paper focuses specifically on the implementation of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSPs) which Paris and Alim describe as seeking “to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (2017).

As CSP currently stands, issues of language have not been addressed. However, schools that employ CSPs in language settings provide an opportunity to study how they are conceptualized and practiced by educators. This study employs various qualitative research methods to investigate the ways in which a small Latino-run charter high school in California uses CSPs to produce biliterate/bilingual college ready students. Because of its explicit school-wide commitment to implementing CSPs, this site offers a unique research opportunity to help fill in some of the unknowns of CSP research and praxis, specifically that of fostering bilingualism with careful attention the challenges that accompany Heritage Language Education (Beaudrie & Fairclough, 2012) and the curricularization of language (Valdes, 2015). The purpose of this study is to investigate how CSPs can respond to the linguistic needs of Latino students from a community where Spanish and English are both used. In this work, I explore how such pedagogical alternatives can serve as a model for success in an attempt to ameliorate the current disadvantageous situation of Latino education in the U.S.