Paris and Alin :What are we seeking to sustain?

After reading the articles for this week’s topic, please discuss the following regarding the two articles you selected:

• 3 key points from the article

• 2 quotes that speak to you with an analysis of why they are significant to the development

– write a reflection of the article

human development

Harvard Educational Review Vol. 84 No. 1 Spring 2014
Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

What Are We Seeking to Sustain
Through Culturally Sustaining
Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward

DJA NG O PA R IS
Michigan State University

H. SA M Y A LIM
Stanford University

In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris’s con-
cept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and
productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies. Paying particular
attention to asset pedagogy’s failures to remain dynamic and critical in a constantly
evolving global world, they offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past
toward a CSP that keeps pace with the changing lives and practices of youth of color.
The authors argue that CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and
cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed
response to demographic and social change. Building from their critique, Paris
and Alim suggest that CSP’s two most important tenets are a focus on the plural
and evolving nature of youth identity and cultural practices and a commitment to
embracing youth culture’s counterhegemonic potential while maintaining a clear-eyed
critique of the ways in which youth culture can also reproduce systemic inequalities.

In this article we build from Paris’s (2012) conceptualization of culturally sus-
taining pedagogy (CSP) to offer a loving critique forward in three parts. We ori-
ent our critique by building on the crucial asset-based pedagogical work of the
past and use loving critique to denote the position of deep respect from which
we problematize and extend three areas of scholarship and practice:

1. Previous conceptualizations of asset pedagogies
2. Asset pedagogies that foreground the heritage practices of commu-

nities of color without taking into account contemporary/evolving
community practices

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3. Asset pedagogies that do not critically contend with problematic ele-
ments expressed in some youth cultural practices.

Before moving into these critiques, it is important to share where we stand
in this work. First, we recognize that we are implicated in all three of our lov-
ing critiques, as some of our own research and teaching has uncritically taken
up and built on previous notions of asset pedagogies, has at times reified tra-
ditional relationships between race/ethnicity and cultural practice, and has
not directly and generatively enough taken up problematic elements of youth
culture. Indeed, our own experiences as researchers and teachers who need
to push further are foundational to our coming to these critiques. Second, as
scholars committed to educational justice, we live, research, and write with
the understanding that our languages, literacies, histories, and cultural ways
of being as people of color are not pathological. Beginning with this under-
standing—an understanding fought for across the centuries—allows us to see
the fallacy of measuring ourselves and the young people in our communi-
ties solely against the White middle-class norms1 of knowing and being that
continue to dominate notions of educational achievement. Du Bois (1965) of
course, theorized this over a century ago with his conceptualization of double
consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity” (p. 45). In our work here we are committed to envision-
ing and enacting pedagogies that are not filtered through a lens of contempt
and pity (e.g., the “achievement gap”) but, rather, are centered on contending
in complex ways with the rich and innovative linguistic, literate, and cultural
practices of Indigenous American, African American, Latina/o, Asian Ameri-
can, Pacific Islander, and other youth and communities of color.

We move away from the per vasiveness of pedagogies that are too closely
aligned with linguistic, literate, and cultural hegemony and toward develop-
ing a pedagogical agenda that does not concern itself with the seemingly pan-
optic “White gaze” (Morrison, 1998) that permeates educational research and
practice with and for students of color, their teachers, and their schools.2 In
a 1998 inter view, Toni Morrison famously responded to misguided critiques
of her books with the rebuttal, “As though our lives have no meaning and
no depth without the White gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life try-
ing to make sure that the White gaze was not the dominant one in any of my
books.” We ask: What would our pedagogies look like if this gaze weren’t the
dominant one?3 What would liberating ourselves from this gaze and the edu-
cational expectations it forwards mean for our abilities to envision new forms
of teaching and learning? What if, indeed, the goal of teaching and learning
with youth of color was not ultimately to see how closely students could per-
form White middle-class norms but to explore, honor, extend, and, at times,
problematize their heritage and community practices?

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By committing to this focus, we are not putting aside issues of access and
equity for students of color; rather, we are reframing them. For too long, schol-
arship on “access” and “equity” has centered implicitly or explicitly around
the question of how to get working-class students of color to speak and write
more like middle-class White ones. Notwithstanding the continuing need to
equip all young people with skills in Dominant American English (DAE)4 and
other dominant norms of interaction still demanded in schools, we believe
equity and access can best be achieved by centering pedagogies on the heri-
tage and contemporar y practices of students and communities of color. As
Alim (2007a) argues, youth cultural and linguistic practices are of value in
their own right and should be creatively foregrounded rather than merely
viewed as resources to take students from where they are to some presumably
“better” place, or ignored altogether. Furthermore, as a result of continuing
demographic change toward a majority multilingual society of color, fostering
linguistic and cultural flexibility has an instrumental purpose for both stu-
dents of color and White students: multilingualism and multiculturalism are
increasingly linked to access and power in U.S. and global contexts.

CSP in the Tradition of Asset Pedagogies
Paris’s (2012) conceptualization of CSP attempts to shift the term, stance, and
practice of asset pedagogies toward more explicitly pluralist outcomes. Let us
briefly distill and nuance that discussion. Deficit approaches to teaching and
learning have echoed across decades of education in the United States. Such
approaches view the languages, literacies, and cultural ways of being of many
students and communities of color as deficiencies to be overcome if they are
to learn the dominant language, literacy, and cultural ways of being demanded
in schools. Building on and bolstering court rulings and subsequent policies
throughout the 1960s and 1970s that required schools to attend to the lan-
guages (e.g., Spanish, Navajo, Chinese, African American Language) and, less
so, cultures of communities of color (e.g., Lau v. Nichols, MLK Elementar y School
Children v. Ann Arbor School District),5 collaborations between researchers and
teachers proved deficit approaches untenable and unjust (Cazden & Legget,
1976; Heath, 1983; Labov, 1972; Moll, 1992; Smitherman, 1977, 1981). With
this research as a foundation, asset pedagogies were enacted and understood in
ever more complex ways by teachers and researchers throughout the 1990s
and into the 2000s (Ball, 1995; Garcia, 1993; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Lee, 1995;
McCarty & Zepeda, 1995; Moll & Gonzales, 1994; Nieto, 1992; Valdés, 1996).
These pedagogies repositioned the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices
of working-class communities—specifically poor communities of color—as
resources and assets to honor, explore, and extend. Ultimately, such peda-
gogies have also been intended to assist students in accessing DAE language
and literacy skills and other White middle-class dominant cultural norms of

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acting and being that are demanded in schools (e.g., teaching DAE language
and literacy through engaging Hip Hop language and literacy). One of the
most important theoretical statements of this asset pedagogies movement
was Ladson-Billings’s (1995) landmark article “Toward a Theory of Culturally
Relevant Pedagogy.” Indeed, her concept of culturally relevant pedagogy has
become ubiquitous in educational research circles and in teacher education
programs.6 This speaks to the lasting conceptual value of the term and, more
importantly, to Ladson-Billings’s illumination of the concept through her
work with successful teachers of African American students. We, like countless
teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means
to make teaching and learning relevant to the languages, literacies, and cul-
tural practices of students in our communities.

Although it is clear that Ladson-Billings’s formulation laid the groundwork
for maintaining the heritage cultural ways of students of color and also for
encouraging students to critique dominant power structures, we believe much
of the work being done under the umbrella of culturally relevant pedagogy
has come up short of these goals. Indeed, the ver y term relevance does little
to explicitly support these goals. It is quite possible to be relevant to some-
thing without ensuring its continuing presence in students’ “repertoires of
practice” (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) and in our classrooms and communities.
We believe that culturally relevant pedagogy and, specifically, the way it has
been taken up in teacher education and practice should be revised for ward
from the crucial work it has done over the past two decades (Alim, 2007a;
Paris, 2012). We make this call with deep respect for the work we have cited
to this point, for it has allowed us all to move beyond rationalizing the need
to include the linguistic, literate, and cultural practices (e.g., Hip Hop) of our
communities meaningfully in educational spaces. Rather, we begin with this as
a given and ask, for what purposes and with what outcomes?

It is toward this end that Paris (2012) offers the concept and practice of
culturally sustaining pedagogy, which has as its explicit goal supporting mul-
tilingualism and multiculturalism in practice and perspective for students
and teachers. CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, liter-
ate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and
as a needed response to demographic and social change. CSP, then, links a
focus on sustaining pluralism through education to challenges of social justice
and change in ways that previous iterations of asset pedagogies did not.7 We
believe the term, stance, and practice of CSP is increasingly necessar y given
the explicit assimilationist and antidemocratic monolingual/monocultural
educational policies emerging across the nation.

Arizona House Bill 2281 (HB2281) is a particularly egregious example of
such policies (though it is by no means alone in this regard; [“standard”] Eng-
lish Only laws enacted in several states are yet another example). Popularly
known as the “Ethnic Studies Ban,” HB2281 was invoked by the state board
of education and the local school board to close the academically successful

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Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in the Tucson Unified School Dis-
trict. This closing included the removal of, among other texts, Latina/o and
Indigenous American literature and history from classrooms. In addition, the
bill forbade teachers in the program from using remaining canonical texts in
ways that focused on themes of race and oppression (Acosta, 2007, 2012).8

Along with the need to combat such oppressive educational and social poli-
cies, there is also an interrelated rationale for CSP. For too long, arguments
for including the languages, literacies, and cultural ways of being of communi-
ties of color in classroom learning have been centered on the importance of
honoring and valuing our communities. Although we believe in and build on
the research and theory that have shown us that there is inherent value in fos-
tering a pluralist society through education, we also highlight a wholly instru-
mental, contemporar y rationale for CSP. Given current U.S. demographic
shifts toward a majority multilingual, multicultural society of color (Garcia &
Cuellar, 2006; Smelser, Wilson, & Mitchell, 2001; Wang, 2013) embedded in
an ever more globalized world, cultural and linguistic flexibility is not simply
about giving value to all of our communities; it is also about the skills, knowl-
edges, and ways of being needed for success in the present and future. As
our society continues to shift, so does the “culture of power” (Delpit, 1988).
Increasingly, we can no longer assume that the White, middle-class linguis-
tic, literate, and cultural skills and ways of being that were considered the
sole gatekeepers to the opportunity structure in the past will remain so as
our society changes. CSP, then, is increasingly needed not only to promote
equality across racial and ethnic communities but also to ensure access and
opportunity.

Alim and Smitherman (2012) show that over the last decade, shifting
demographics in the United States have quietly ushered in a new relationship
between DAE and power. During the 2012 presidential election, for example,
Mitt Romney’s inability to shift between speech styles was a prime example of
how DAE monolingualism can act as a deficit in certain contexts. On the other
hand, Barack Obama’s linguistic flexibility showed that speaking DAE while
also being fluent in African American Language or knowing some Spanish can
prove effective in certain contexts (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). Traditionally,
we have taught youth of color and their teachers that DAE and White middle-
class cultural practices are the sole key to power. Ironically, there is accumu-
lating evidence that this outdated philosophy will not grant our young people
access to power but rather, in our increasingly diverse society, it might reduce
that access.

To offer youth full access to power, then, we must understand that power
is now based in part on one’s ability to communicate effectively to more than
“standard” English monolinguals/monoculturals, who are becoming a shrink-
ing share of the U.S. population. As youth of color learn DAE (and other
dominant skills and knowledges) and maintain their multiple ways of speaking
and being, it is DAE monolinguals/monoculturals who may increasingly find

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themselves at a disadvantage. CSP, then, is necessary to honor and value the
rich and varied practices of communities of color and is a necessary pedagogy
for supporting access to power in a changing nation.

Sustaining Heritage and Community Practices
Our second loving critique examines how asset pedagogies too often draw
overdeterministic links between race and language, literacy, and cultural prac-
tice. As those of us committed to educational justice seek to perpetuate and
foster a pluralist present and future through our pedagogy, it is crucial that we
understand the ways young people are enacting race, ethnicity, language, lit-
eracy, and cultural practices in both traditional and evolving ways.

The vast majority of asset pedagogy research and practice has focused on
the racialized and culturally situated heritage practices of our communities
(e.g., Indigenous American languages and cultural ways of knowing, African
American Language and cultural ways of knowing) (see Lee, 1995; Lomawaima
& McCarty, 2006; Valdés, 1996). There is good reason for this focus as the
heritage practices and ways of knowing of our communities continue to be
the target of deficit approaches and this research and practice explicitly sup-
ports needed asset approaches. More recently, linguistic, pedagogical, and cul-
tural research has built on this crucial earlier work by pushing against the
tendency of researchers and practitioners to assume unidirectional correspon-
dence between race, ethnicity, language, and cultural ways of being (Alim &
Reyes, 2011; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Irizarr y, 2007; O’Connor & Brown,
2014; Paris, 2011; Wyman, McCarty, & Nicholas, 2014). These scholars have
shown that such assumptions have led to the unfortunate simplification of
asset pedagogies as being solely about considering the heritage or traditional
practices of students of color in teaching while simultaneously ignoring the
shifting and evolving practices of their communities. The result has been the
oversimplification of what teachers are seeking to sustain as only, for example,
African American Language for African American students or Spanish among
Latina/o students (a one-to-one mapping of race and language). This over-
simplification goes beyond language, where communities of cultural practice,
such as Hip Hop, are assumed to be only a cultural resource for teaching with
Black or even with Black and Brown students.

To move us out of this overly deterministic rut while continuing to attend
to sustaining heritage ways, we offer the terms heritage practices and community
practices (Paris, 2012). These terms are based in contemporary understandings
of culture as dynamic, shifting, and encompassing both past-oriented heritage
dimensions and present-oriented community dimensions. These dimensions
in turn are not entirely distinct but take on different salience depending on
how young people live race, ethnicity, language, and culture.

To illustrate what we mean by heritage and community practices, we draw
from our research (Paris, 2011; Alim, 2011) in local and international con-

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texts, part of a recent line of inquir y that has sought to both solidify and
disrupt traditional assumptions about linguistic and cultural ownership and
practice. In this work, we examine how young people both rehearse precon-
ceived versions of racial/ethnic and linguistic difference and, importantly,
offer new ones (Alim & Reyes, 2011; Irizarry, 2007; Martínez, 2012; O’Connor
& Brown, 2014; Paris, 2009, 2011). Paris (2011) worked with youth in a Cali-
fornia high school and community to explore the important ways that African
American students navigate identities through the heritage practices of Afri-
can American Language (AAL) and Hip Hop cultures. What he learned was
that, in addition to African Americans, many Mexicana/o, Mexican American,
and Pacific Islander youth also navigated identities through their participation
in AAL and Hip Hop cultural practices. Moreover, they did so while simulta-
neously participating in their own heritage practices of, for example, Spanish
or Samoan and other cultural practices (clothing, ways of believing), passed
down from the elders in their ethnic communities.

In this way, much like the youth practices documented in Alim’s studies
of global linguistic flows (2009) and global “ill-literacies” (2011), youth were
fashioning new linguistically and culturally dexterous ways of being Latina/o
or Fijian that relied on more than “traditions.” These complex, fluid relation-
ships among race, culture, and language have been overlooked by previous
versions of asset pedagogies, which would most likely deem these cultural
practices associated with African American and Caribbean American culture
(Chang, 2005) and therefore not pedagogically useful beyond those commu-
nities. Furthermore, African American and Pacific Islander youth in Paris’s
(2011) work were also sharing in, and seeking to learn, the Spanish language
with their Latina/o peers is yet another example of forging dexterous lin-
guistic identities that belie easy categorizations of what it means to be Black
or Brown. These fluid identities continue to emerge and evolve in Alim’s
ongoing research in the same community, as evidenced through transcul-
tural participation in musical and verbal artistic forms such as Hip Hop and
Reggaeton.

These examples show that while it is crucial that we work to sustain African
American, Latina/o, Asian American, Pacific Islander American, and Indig-
enous American languages and cultures in our pedagogies, we must be open
to sustaining them in both the traditional and evolving ways they are lived
and used by young people. Our pedagogies must address the well-understood
fact that what it means to be African American or Latina/o or Navajo is con-
tinuing to shift in the ways culture always has. Unfortunately, the most lasting
frameworks for asset pedagogies—the funds of knowledge (Moll & González,
1994), the pedagogical third space (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, Alvarez,
& Chiu, 1999; Gutiérrez, 2008), and culturally relevant pedagogy—have too
often been enacted by teachers and researchers in static ways that focus solely
on the important ways racial and ethnic difference was enacted in the past

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without attending to the dynamic enactments of our equally important pres-
ent or future. As youth continue to inhabit a world where cultural and linguis-
tic recombinations flow with purpose, we need pedagogies that speak to this
new reality—as Pennycook (2007) puts it, pedagogies that “go with the flow.”

Further Inward: Critical Reflexivity
Our first two critiques involved the need for asset pedagogies to sustain the
cultural and linguistic practices of communities of color for a pluralist present
and future and to do so in ways that reflect our increasingly fluid understand-
ing of the evolving relations between language, culture, race, and ethnicity. In
our final loving critique, we turn our gaze inward, on our own communities
and cultural practices as people and scholars of color. Here, we are primarily
interested in creating generative spaces for asset pedagogies to support the
practices of youth and communities of color while maintaining a critical lens
vis-à-vis these practices. Providing the example of Hip Hop as a form of the cul-
tural and community practice that pedagogies should sustain, we argue that,
rather than avoiding problematic practices or keeping them hidden beyond
the White gaze, CSP must work with students to critique regressive practices
(e.g., homophobia, misogyny, racism) and raise critical consciousness.

We are also implicated in this final critique, since our own research on and
practice of Hip Hop pedagogies have not always taken up these problematic
elements in the direct ways that we forward here. And so we migrate further
inward to consider what Alim (2011) calls “ill-literacies”—counterhegemonic
forms of youth literacies—and ask, “What happens when ill-literacies get ill?”
In other words, what happens when, rather than challenging hegemonic ideas
and outcomes, the cultural practices of youth of color actually reproduce
them, or even create new ones? Indeed, most of the research and practice
under the asset pedagogies umbrella, including the frameworks of the funds
of knowledge, the pedagogical third space, and culturally relevant pedagogy,
too often view youth cultures through a purely positive or progressive lens.
This is true as well for the pedagogical traditions founded on these frame-
works, like the hugely influential Hip Hop pedagogy movement.

The vast majority of Hip Hop education research and pedagogy has focused
on the many progressive, justice-oriented aspects of Hip Hop. There is good
reason for this. For one, there is, of course, much in Hip Hop’s past and pres-
ent that is explicitly concerned with social justice. Furthermore, most advo-
cates of Hip Hop pedagogies are consciously engaging in a project that views
deficit thinking as a product of White supremacy and the racism it engenders.
However, it is crucial to build on this work by engaging in reflexive analyses
that are not bound by how educational systems that privilege White middle-
class norms view the practices of communities of color.

In nearly all of the U.S. and international research on Hip Hop pedagogies,
youth’s spoken, rhymed, and written texts are seen only as challenging pre-

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scriptive, restrictive, and antidemocratic notions of culture, citizenship, lan-
guage, literacy, and education. With a few important exceptions (Hill, 2009;
Low, 2011; Petchauer & Hill, 2013), studies rarely look critically at the ways in
which youth might reify existing hegemonic discourses about, as examples,
gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship. In other words, Hip Hop pedago-
gies have tended to be largely celebrator y and have ignored the contradic-
tory forces found within all popular cultural forms (Giroux, 1996). Thus, CSP
must interrogate and critique the simultaneously progressive and oppressive
currents in these innovative youth practices, as has been done consistently for
research on Hip Hop music and culture outside education (Alim, Lee, & Car-
ris, 2010, 2011; Neal, 2006; Perry, 2004; Rose, 1994).

For example, many authors in the field of Hip Hop pedagogy (e.g., Alim,
2004; Emdin, 2010) argue for the use of rap battles (improvised verbal duels)
in classroom learning. Yet, few take up the fact that the Hip Hop battle can
sometimes be a masculinist space that excludes young women, queer youth,
and young men of color who do not identify as Black (even as young women,
queer youth, and youth who are not Black continue to “roc the mic”). To
name a simple example, scholars rarely include a gendered analysis of class-
room participation when using Hip Hop. CSP must contend with the possibil-
ity that while Hip Hop pedagogies that utilize rap battles (as one among many
examples of Hip Hop pedagogical practices) may seemingly ser ve the needs
of many students of color, particularly young men, they may unwittingly repro-
duce forms of exclusion in our classrooms and communities.

To illustrate what CSP must contend with as it seeks to perpetuate and foster
a pluralist and egalitarian present and future, we turn to one representative
example of a rap battle.9 This battle took place between an African American
youth emcee and a Filipino youth emcee during an evening competition at a
small youth performance space in Los Angeles. In these battles more gener-
ally, youth use an array of nonverbal gestures and heterogeneous linguistic
styles to accentuate racialized disses.10 In this battle on this evening, the Afri-
can American youth emcee rapped in mock varieties of English (known as
“Mock Chinglish” in the linguistics literature (Chun, 2004)), made stereotypi-
cal disses about the Asian male body, and employed a variety of other racial-
ized and gendered insults as verbal game pieces against his Filipino opponent.
Meanwhile, the Filipino youth emcee countered in the battle defending him-
self by also hurling his own gendered insults, referring to his opponent’s large
chest as female breasts. This was done in more colorful language than we use
here, of course, which brings up still other challenging issues for CSP as it
seeks to generatively join Hip Hop and other youth practices. Also of note was
the Filipino youth emcee’s—and other youth who were not Black—seeming
unwillingness to use race as a resource for insulting Black opponents in these
rap battles. While a more thorough analysis of the emcees’ remarks is beyond
the scope of this article, the rap battle illustrates aspects of youth culture that
CSP must interrogate.

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In this brief battle, both youth demonstrated incredible linguistic skills,
witty use of humor and ritual insults, and the kind of verbal virtuosity that is
generally associated with the best emcees in Hip Hop—the same kind of lin-
guistic and cultural ingenuity and skill that asset pedagogies (including our
own) tend to highlight. There is no doubt that these young men are talented
verbal artists. But they were also reinscribing racial, ethnic, and gendered ste-
reotypes that, even within the complicated rules of ritual insult and rap bat-
tles, sometimes cross lines of indignity and hurt for participants. In classrooms
that are home to students across race, gender, sexuality, class, language, and
citizenship status, the disses and identity positionings common in Hip Hop
battles can often counter the equity-oriented ideologies and practices that
asset pedagogies espouse. This might especially be the case when such Hip
Hop practices align with dominant U.S. discourses of exclusion, such as when
young men refer to young women with pejorative terms that perpetuate wom-
en’s marginalized status, or when Black youth refer to Latina/o youth in terms
that uphold discriminatory discourses about immigrant status.

The revoicing of racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and xenophobic dis-
courses does occur in some forms of commercial rap as well as in some rap
produced by youth in our communities. We must work toward a CSP that sus-
tains the many practices and traditions of communities of color that forward
equity (like much of Hip Hop does). At the same, our pedagogical stance
should also help youth, teachers, and researchers expose those practices that
must be revised in the project of cultural justice. We believe CSP is ideally
positioned to support this work with its explicit centering on the practices of
youth of color; its emphasis on critical engagement with the dynamic, shifting
nature of race, ethnicity, language, and cultural practice; and its commitment
to critically sustaining our plural present and future. Our goal is to find ways
to support and sustain what we know are remarkable verbal improvisational
skills while at the same time open up spaces for students themselves to critique
the ways that they might be, intentionally or not, reproducing discourses that
marginalize members of our communities. As Low (2011) argues, the very real
and difficult tensions found within youth cultures are not reasons to inhibit
their use in schools but, rather, to demand their use in the development of
more critical approaches.

Of course, we recognize that youth are sometimes conscious of their shared
marginalizations and also of their distinct experiences of racialization and
linguistic hegemony. It is also possible that youth engage in these reinscrip-
tions of stereotypes as part of a long tradition of communities of color turn-
ing pain into humor and using humor to ridicule and expose racist legacies
and ideologies (Carpio, 2008; Paris, 2011). We are also not interested in join-
ing a divide-and-conquer tradition, interpreting the rap battle as an example
of racial division and infighting, not least because the two young men in the
rap battle were active members of a local Hip Hop scene that crossed racial/
ethnic differences and were known to be friendly with each other. Still, the cir-

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culation of problematic discourses can have tangible consequences. In recent
years, the campaign against the use of “illegal” to describe immigrants, for
example, became increasingly urgent as hate crimes against Latinas/os rose to
alarming levels. CSP, then, must engage critically with young people about the
impact of their words and the full range of their funds of knowledge and cre-
ate third spaces that take on both the liberatory and the restrictive. Too often
we invite youth and community practices into the classroom without being
open to their full complexity, even as we know that Hip Hop is as liberatory
as it is problematic. Essentially, we cannot continue to half-step asset-based
pedagogies.11

Reflecting Forward on CSP
What are we seeking to sustain in a culturally sustaining pedagogy? To answer
this question, we find ourselves at the edge of asset-based, critical pedagogies.
While a few scholars have begun to provide rich and varied examples of CSP
across Indigenous, Latina/o, African American, and Asian American commu-
nities (Alim, 2007b; Chang, 2010; Irizarr y, 2011; Kinloch, 2010; McCarty &
Lee, 2014), we offer our three loving critiques as a needed way for ward. It
is an invitation, with the full knowledge that the CSP we are calling for has
very rarely been enacted—by us or by the many extraordinary researchers and
teachers doing this work. The future of CSP must extend the previous visions
of asset pedagogies by demanding explicitly pluralist outcomes that are not
centered on White, middle-class, monolingual, and monocultural norms of
educational achievement. As we reposition our pedagogies to focus on the
practices and knowledges of communities of color, we must do so with the
understanding that fostering linguistic and cultural flexibility has become an
educational imperative, as multilingualism and multiculturalism are increas-
ingly linked to access and power. At the same time, CSP must resist static, uni-
directional notions of culture and race that reinforce traditional versions of
difference and (in)equality without attending to shifting and evolving ones.
Finally, CSP must be willing to seriously contend head-on with the problem-
atic as well as the many progressive aspects of our communities and the young
people they foster.

As we move forward, we recognize that CSP might face an uphill battle, not
just from those invested in status quo monolingual and monocultural pedago-
gies, and the privilege and power such pedagogies seek to perpetuate, but also
from the very communities CSP aims to serve. Research on African American
Language (AAL), for example, has shown that the staunchest opponents of
its use in schools can sometimes be African Americans themselves, including
those who speak AAL fluently. For a host of complicated reasons having to do
with the coupling of internalized oppression and the very real need for access
to material resources, many in the United States view the educational choice
to be between learning only “standard” English for access to power or valuing

Harvard Educational Review

AAL (or Spanish or Tagalog or Navajo) for cultural purposes. We must con-
tinue to be prepared to show that this is a false choice. Pedagogies can and
should teach students to be linguistically and culturally flexible across mul-
tiple language varieties and cultural ways of believing and interacting. All of
us—across race and ethnicity—must understand that the link between DAE
and other dominant cultural norms and access to power continues to shift.

Taking up the three critiques we offer here is difficult, inward-looking, and
uncertain work. But, in all honesty, that has always been the case in the strug-
gle for educational justice for people of color. As the United States continues
to change, and as we continue to think through the promises and challenges
posed by CSP, we ask that youth, educators, and researchers join us to take this
struggle further, with love.

Notes
1. White middle-class norms of language, literacy, and cultural ways of interacting

demanded for access and achievement in school have been documented and con-
trasted with the norms of working-class communities of color (and, less so, working-
class White communities) across four decades of scholarship. Regarding White norms
of “standard,” or Dominant American English, language use, see Alim (2007a), Garcia
(1993), Labov (1972), and Smitherman (1977). Regarding White middle-class literacy
norms, see Ball (1999), Heath (1983), and Kirkland (2013). Regarding White-centered
cultural norms of interacting (including language), see Lee (2005), Leonardo (2009),
Romero (1994), and Valdés (1996).

2. Tuck and Yang (2014) importantly refer to this as the “colonial settler gaze.”
3. While our argument in this article focuses on the racialized, classed, and cultural/

linguistic dimensions of the White gaze as it negatively influences pedagogy, we want
to explicitly name the kindred, interrelated patriarchal, cisheteronormative, English-
monolingual, xenophobic, Judeo-Christian gazes that also dominate and constrain the
possibilities for equitable pedagogies in the United States.

4. Dominant American English is commonly referred to as “standard” English, a term
reframed in Paris (2009) to foreground issues of power and privilege.

5. Lau v. Nichols (1974) was brought and won on behalf of Chinese-speaking Chinese
American students in San Francisco who claimed a lack of equal educational opportu-
nity based on language discrimination. The Supreme Court’s decision for the plaintiffs
relied on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which explicitly banned educational discrimination
based on race or national origin. MLK Elementar y School Children v. Ann Arbor School Dis-
trict (1979), more commonly known as the “Black English Case,” was brought and won
by families of eleven African American students in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had been
diagnosed as “linguistically handicapped” by the district’s speech pathologist. The fami-
lies contended that the children had been misdiagnosed and miseducated as a result of
their strong use of AAL (Smitherman, 1981).

6. Other important terms and formulations that have looked to forge asset pedagogies
with students of color include, but are not limited to, culturally responsive pedagogy
(Gay, 2000), culturally congruent pedagogy (Au & Kawakami, 1994), culturally compat-
ible pedagogy (Jacob & Jordan, 1987), engaged pedagogy (hooks, 1994), and critical
care praxis (Rolón-Dow, 2005). We focus on the term and formulation of culturally rel-
evant pedagogies as it has become the most used, short-handed term and concept in
teacher education, teacher practice, and research on teaching and learning.

What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy?
django paris and h. samy alim

7. We of course understand that all terms and conceptualizations are susceptible to mis-
appropriation and that CSP is no different, even if it is an important shift in the cur-
rent moment. As an example, culturally relevant pedagogy—which as a term has done
as much work toward justice as any—was recently grossly misappropriated by Tucson
School Board member and supporter of HB2281 Mark Stegemen, who was quoted as
saying, “It was ‘important to find a hook of some kind’ to keep students in school, ‘and
culturally relevant pedagogy can be that hook’ as long as the content was ‘politically
neutral’” (Santos, 2013).

8. In fall 2013, after more than two years, the ban on seven of these books was rescinded
by a newly constituted school board. The books are now deemed “supplemental texts.”
As well, a new iteration of the Mexican American Studies program was reinstated in
the fall of 2013 by a federal court desegregation order. The new classes are no longer
called “Mexican American Studies”, but rather are named “Culturally Relevant Classes,”
a term, as we mention in note 7, that some proponents of HB2281 have grossly misap-
propriated. Finally, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal
believed the new courses still violated HB2281. After having the courses investigated, he
gave preliminary state approval (Huicochea, 2013; Robbins, 2013). Given this contested
situation, the content and future of the new courses is by no means certain.

9. See Alim, Lee, and Carris (2010) for a full analysis of this and other battles.
10. We should note that as part of the African American rhetorical tradition of ritual insult

(Smitherman, 1977; Alim, 2004; Paris, 2011), the disses in these battles must not be
seen by Hip Hop outsiders as simply mean-spirited verbal attacks but, rather, as insid-
ers see them: as verbal game pieces in a contest of linguistic and cultural ingenuity and
prowess. Notwithstanding this tradition, however, our point is that some of the belief
systems reinforced in these battles (and in many youth practices) must be critically
interrogated in generative ways with youth.

11. Shout out to Big Daddy Kane (1988) and his classic track “Ain’t no Half-Steppin” for
helping us consider the steps we are not taking with asset pedagogies, and the many
steps we still need to take.

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Acknowledgments
Our thanks to the many educational justice scholars we cite here, especially Gloria Ladson-
Billings, for pushing us forward, and Jason Irizarry, Valerie Kinloch, Tiffany Lee, and Terry
McCarty, for their important influence on this thinking. We also thank the reviewers and
editors, especially Janine de Novais, Adrienne Keene, Ana María Nieto, Eve Ewing, Steph-
any Cuevas, Celia Gomez, and Matthew Shaw, for their thoughtful suggestions during revi-
sion. We alone are responsible for any faults herein.

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