Disrupting the status quo: exploring culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies for young diverse learners

Abstract

This article highlights four qualitative studies that examine young diverse populations (i.e. middle-class African-American learners, Latinx immigrant children, emergent bilingual writers, and teachers of low-socioeconomic African-American learners) using culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies as our theoretical lens. The research questions are (1) What are the features of classrooms that support culturally sustaining learning for young children? (2) What social, cultural, and linguistic resources do learners draw upon when engaging in culturally sustaining spaces? Findings in this paper indicate that (a) children need critical safe spaces to foster CSP (b) children draw knowledge from varied resources and (c) teachers’ must be able to navigate policies to implement practices that utilize students’ cultural referents.