My research interest is on indigenizing college education to support native American students and improve their completion rates. American education has historically been used as a tool to subjugate and assimilate Native American peoples. This painful history may seem far from present day, yet the vestiges of this system remain, and Native American college students hold the lowest graduation rate of any demographic in the US (in both high school and college). As a dean of academic affairs at a community college in Arizona, I am compelled to find ways to support Native American students at the college level by rebuilding a system that wasn’t built with them in mind.

Culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is an asset-based approach to education that builds on decades of pedagogical research countering the pervasive deficit approaches to education. While CSP necessarily engenders an expected variation from one classroom to the next, the pedagogy consistently employs the “curricularization” of the following key components.

• Critical centering on diverse community languages, literacies, and cultural knowledge

With CSP, educators respect students' languages, literacies, and ways of being instead of than treating them as marginal footnotes. Rather than merely adding these culturally relevant components to existing curriculums, these aspects of students' personal and communal identities are an integral and central part of learning throughout the curriculum.

• Community and student involvement and agency

Educators and administrators remain accountable to the needs of their communities by remaining in conversation with the communities they serve and learning about their culture, what they value, and what aspects of their culture they desire support in sustaining.

• Historically contextualized learning

Culturally sustaining educators link learning today to racial, ethnic and linguistic histories, neighborhood histories, city histories, and larger state and national histories.

• Recognition of and willingness to grapple with internalized oppressions

Educators push back against the default narrative of white cultural supremacy and the cultural deficiency of others by purposefully showing the value of communities and their practice beyond the “white gaze.”

As an academic dean, the site at which I hold the most influence is the classroom (virtual, in-person, etc.). For my project, I am interested in exploring how the structure of teaching and learning can be transformed into a more indigenous space through a multimodal approach to implementing culturally sustaining pedagogy.

References

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11-13, 74-75.

Ferlazzo, L. (2017, July 6). Author Interview: “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies”. EdWeek. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-author-interview-culturally-sustaining-pedagogies/2017/07