TERESA L. McCARTY and TIFFANY S. LEE
In this article, Teresa L. McCarty and Tiffany S. Lee present critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy as a necessary concept to understand and guide educational practices for Native American learners. Premising their discussion on the fundamental role of tribal sovereignty in Native American schooling, the authors underscore and extend lessons from Indigenous culturally based, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive schooling. Drawing on Paris’s (2012) and Paris and Alim’s (2014) notion of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), McCarty and Lee argue that given the current linguistic, cultural, and educational realities of Native American communities, CSP in these settings must also be understood as culturally revitalizing pedagogy. Using two ethnographic cases as their foundation, they explore what culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy (CSRP) looks like in these settings and consider its possibilities, tensions, and constraints. They highlight the ways in which implementing CSRP necessitates an “inward gaze” (Paris & Alim, 2014), whereby colonizing influences are confronted as a crucial component of language and culture reclamation. Based on this analysis, they advocate for community-based educational accountability that is rooted in Indigenous education sovereignty.
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Teresa L. McCarty is the George F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research, teaching, and outreach focus on educational language policy, Indigenous education, youth language, critical literacy studies, and ethnographic studies of education. She is the current editor of the American Educational Research Journal section on Social and Institutional Analysis, and coeditor of the Journal of American Indian Education. Her books include A Place to Be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (Erlbaum, 2002), Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling (Erlbaum, 2005), “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (with K. T. Lomawaima, Teachers College Press, 2006), Ethnography and Language Policy (Routledge, 2011), Language Planning and Policy in Native America: History, Theory, Praxis (Multilingual Matters, 2013), and Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism (with L. T. Wyman and S. E. Nicholas, Routledge, 2014).
Tiffany S. Lee is Navajo and Oglala Lakota from Crystal, New Mexico, and Pine Ridge, South Dakota. An associate professor in Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico, she studies Native youth perspectives with regard to language reclamation and identity. She also investigates socioculturally centered educational approaches for Native American students. Her work has appeared in journals, such as the American Journal of Education and the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and in books, including Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism: Language Identity, Ideology, and Practice in Dynamic Cultural Worlds (Routledge, 2014) and Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought (University of Arizona Press, 2014). She is the current president of the Navajo Studies Conference, Inc.