The phrase Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, to me, sounds a lot like cultural relevance in the context of intercultural communication - speaking to and engaging with peoples within their own context. Or, in the case of teaching, selecting materials and presenting them with an awareness of how other cultural groups will receive them. I can see how people could interpret it as, “Oh! I should bring in rap for my Black students, because they like rap,” without giving it any further thought. We have been conditioned to see the word cultural relevance and automatically assume a non-critical must-accept-everything stance, when in reality all cultures have their good and bad aspects. An awareness of this should not mean we accept them with a grimace, but use the same tools we employ to shine a light on the problematic structures of the hegemonic culture to reflect on all aspects of society. However, a fine line must be followed here to not let biases and prejudice lead us to simply reify existing inequities that are themselves founded on this line of thinking gone tragically wrong.

I don’t know that relevant, or even sustaining, would be the phrasing I would have elected to use. Perhaps culturally equitable pedagogy?


Ladson-Billings makes an excellent point when she says that students from non-dominant cultural groups have an asymmetrical, or even antagonistic relationship with society at large. Key to beginning to move towards rectifying this asymmetry, she argues, is providing students a space where they can develop cultural competencies in the many contexts they live in, as well as helping them develop a critical consciousness to challenge the status quo and social order. I read this as it is not our job, in this moment, to fix everything that is broken with the world.


This does not mean we do nothing. Maybe we can’t fix it. We are not, after all, saviors. However, we can help to hold it together to give subsequent generations a chance.


We need to stop breaking things further through inaction and ignorance.

We need to be aware of our sociopolitical context, and pass on that awareness to our students.

We need to let them know that this world is broken, but that they do not have to a continuation of this breakage as inevitable.


Culturally Relevant Pedagogy to me then becomes an active engagement with multiple modes of thinking and learning, for both educators and students that continues outside of any single classroom. It doesn’t mean I find “useful” tools in other cultural frames of practice to entice students into learning a mandated curriculum. Instead, it is to show students that they are already coming equipped with an arsenal of ways of thinking and engaging with the tool as real and powerful as anything they might learn in the classroom. Those tools might not be the only ones, or even the best in any given situation, but that is true of anything. It does not diminish their value.


 I have as much to learn from my students, if not even more, than they have to learn from me.



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Akata Witch, American Born Chinese, and Listen, Slowly all showcase young people who are navigating the liminal space between identities. I think this gets to the heart of what Culturally Relevant Pedagogy will mean in my own instructional practice. It is not about reducing students down to one component of who they are, but raising up those aspects that, in the eyes of the White normative educational system are presented as deficits rather than assets. We need to encourage students to be whole people without saying they need to act or think in a certain way to be “true” to themselves, or refrain from the same to be proper students.

Exploring the space between, without privileging one aspect over another, is in my mind an ideal place to be in the classroom. However, in the context of our social reality, a certain privileging of subaltern identities is required to even bring them up to the level of White normative culture. Navigating this, both intellectually and in practice, is something I need to continue to work on for fear of becoming complacent and at any point thinking it is enough. It will likely never be enough.






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