Culturally Responsive, Sustaining Curriculum and Instruction
Content and teaching practices are informed by powerful social and cultural strengths that students and their communities bring to classrooms.
Defining CRSP
CPS Social Science is grounded in the asset-based pedagogies of both culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies. Social Science promotes all students, families, and communities’ perspectives and experiences to be viewed as central to curriculum and instruction. Leveraging the funds of knowledge of the school community is key as we must work in concert with our communities to prepare young people for democracy.
What, Why, and How
- Who, Me? Biased?: To help you identify, understand, and check your biases, look at this video by the NYTimes. It also provides you links to other videos that help you understand biases and how they are linked to racism.
- Begin Within: After you watch the videos above, check out this poignant Teaching Tolerance article with effective strategies that help teachers build confidence to be able to normalize conversations about race, racism, social inequality, and discrimination.
- Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Changein Stance, Terminology, and Practice: Not sure what Culturally Sustaining is? Read this essay that helps explain CSP as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual students by seeking to perpetuate and sustain, linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.
- 74 Interview: Researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings on Culturally Relevant Teaching: Read this interview of Gloria Ladso-Billings who states, “Culturally relevant education is more than celebrating Black History Month or offering an ethnic studies class...I define it as a threefold approach...a focus on students’ learning, an attempt to develop their cultural competence, and to increase their sociopolitical or critical consciousness...You’ve got to do all three things.”
- Ending Curriculum Violence: An article from Teaching Tolerance that helps teachers understand that despite our best intentions, teachers can create what the author describes as, “curriculum violence,” that can have detrimental effects on our students.
- CSP In Action: Views from Inside a Social Studies Teacher’s Classroom: Read this case study about a USH middle school teacher and 9th grade World Studies teacher from California and how she uses CSP in her classes. For a breakdown of the topics that are covered, use this as a guide.
- Author Interview: “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies”: This interview of Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, authors of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, provides strategies for how teachers can shift their practice to be more culturally sustaining.