What Might Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Mean for the Spanish Classroom?

As a World Language teacher, I often focus my efforts on students’ language development. However, I have struggled to help students find relevance and meaning in the cultures of people from distant countries and communities. My Spanish classes were full of teenagers with different backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. For my students, race, gender, and sexual orientation were more central to their lives than any celebration in Spain or tradition in Guatemala. Using a social justice framework and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP), teachers can help students not only learn languages but also grow as critical and global citizens who help affirm and sustain cultures and peoples of the world. In this paper, I will share how I changed the way I approached teaching about culture as a way to help other educators think about how they may do so in their classrooms.

Teaching Languages for Social Justice Framework

As part of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), Glynn et al. (2018) developed a framework for teaching languages for social justice that confronts normalized, systemic inequities with the aim of creating a more equitable society. To do this, they drew on Sonia Nieto’s (2010) work to define social justice and to outline the components of social justice in education. Following Nieto, social justice is “a philosophy, an approach, and actions that embody treating all people with fairness, respect, dignity, and generosity” (46). In the educational context this means: 1) challenging, confronting, and disrupting misconceptions, misinformation, and stereotypes that result in inequality and discrimination; 2) providing all students with the resources necessary to learn to their full potential; 3) drawing on the abilities of students; and 4) promoting critical thinking and agency for social change.

Glynn et al. (2018) build on this foundation, identifying equality, equity, privilege, marginalization, oppression, and dehumanization as the concepts central to discussing social justice. Further, they explain that the foreign language classroom is the appropriate venue for such discussions because they foster global competence and intercultural communicative competence. Teachers can use this framework to rethink foreign language education as a space to promote equity and to develop the skills students need in a globalized society.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

CSP is a pedagogy within the framework of teaching languages for social justice, one that evolved from Ladson-Billings’ (1995) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP). According to this seminal work, CRP requires that practitioners 1) acknowledge the importance of academic achievement and center their efforts on supporting student achievement; 2) support students by affirming their cultural identities; and 3) acknowledge that social inequity is a reality and actively work toward a more equitable society while developing students’ sociopolitical and critical consciousness (469). CSP took this further, calling for teachers to “support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence” (Paris 95).

CSP pushes back against the traditional assimilationist role that school has played throughout history and instead positions school as a site to effect social change through an additive view of minoritized groups and the intentional celebrating and sustaining of their cultures (Alim and Paris 1–3). This theory values the continuously evolving cultures that comprise a pluralistic society and rejects the deficit ideologies surrounding minoritized populations. CSP creates space for teachers to empower students by making connections to their lived experiences, de-centering the teacher through the co-construction of curriculum based on student interest, and moving away from a dominant, white, standard English-speaking culture-centered classroom.

CSP in Practice

As language teachers, we have a regular opportunity to incorporate culture into our lessons, so CSP is a natural way to make these lessons more meaningful while helping to sustain the various cultures represented in our classrooms. That said, it is easy to include culture without truly developing students’ critical cultural competency. Sleeter (2012) cautions teachers against discussing and celebrating culture at its most surface level, and likewise warns them against believing they are using CRP, and, by extension, CSP (569). A brief study of holidays and traditions...