A Loving Critique Forward
DJANGO PARIS and H. SAMY ALIM
In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris’s concept 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.
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Django Paris is an assistant professor of language and literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His teaching and research focus on understanding and sustaining languages, literacies, and literatures among youth of color in changing urban schools and communities. He is particularly concerned with educational and cultural justice as outcomes of inquiry and pedagogy. Paris is the author of Language across Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the coeditor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (with Maisha T. Winn, SAGE Publications, 2014), and he has published in many academic journals, including the Harvard Educational Review and Educational Researcher. He is chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Standing Committee on Research and is a member of the American Educational Research Association Social Justice Action Committee. He is also the associate director of the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate program at Middlebury College.
H. Samy Alim is an associate professor of education and, by courtesy, anthropology and linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL), the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), and the Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS). His work, which has focused on the language and literacy practices of racially and ethnically diverse youth inside and outside of school, locally and globally, has appeared in journals such as Educational Researcher, Review of Research in Education, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of English Linguistics, American Speech, and Pragmatics. Some of Alim’s most recent books include You Know My Steez (Duke University Press, 2004), Roc the Mic Right (Routledge, 2006), Talkin Black Talk (Teachers College Press, 2007), Global Linguistics Flows (Routledge, 2009), and Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (with Geneva Smitherman, Oxford University Press, 2012).