Rooted in culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally sustaining literacy practices (CSLP) focus on equity in education (Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012). Our view of CSLP emphasizes integrating the arts into literacy instruction to leverage students' cultural assets, stimulating their cognitive processes and recognizing literacy's interdisciplinary role in learning. As we align literacy practices with state standards, high-stakes testing, and research-based methods, it's crucial for educators and society to embrace them. Traditionally, literacy instruction has prioritized written language, creating hierarchical structures that lead to learning gaps and inequitable opportunities. An arts-based CSLP framework addresses these issues by ensuring literacy includes diverse forms of expression, helping students engage with complex concepts and ideas. This approach not only enhances cognitive development but also fosters a comprehensive understanding of the world, and decentralizes the hierarchy of literacy instruction.
Author Bio
Dr. Julia A. Lynch is a visiting assistant professor at The University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a public educator, Julia’s tenure was focused primarily on under-resourced rural schools that served Black, Latiné, Indigenous, and multilingual communities. There, she became a teacher leader in her district, building critical communities around conversations of culturally sustaining practices for advancing Black and brown student success. Julia’s interests are guided by a focus on teacher identity development and arts-based inquiry as a teaching practice. Generally speaking, her scholarship explores teacher identity and pedagogical practices within rural education contexts. She operates primarily from a BlackMothering epistemology with a critical sociocultural framework to engage in education that promotes equity and social justice in rural education teaching and learning. Using culturally responsive pedagogy as a foundation, Julia’s teaching/scholarship allows students to construct, perform, and assess their knowledge as they engage in critical reflection that challenges them to (re)imagine equitable teaching that may counter their cultural identity and interrogate race and racism. As a Black poet scholar, she also engages in arts-based qualitative research that attempts to center the lives and experiences of other multiplied-marginalized scholars while also disrupting normative research that doesn’t honor the authenticity of the researcher or culturally sustain the community of participants. Julia enjoys spending time with her family, traveling, writing, and singing! She can be reached at drjuliaalynch@ gmail.com.
Andrea Perrone is a Lecturer in Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is interested in Arts-integration, Multimodal literacy, and the intersection of Universal Design for Learning, culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies, and the arts. She can be reached at perronea@uncw.edu.
Recommended Citation
Lynch, Julia and Perrone, Andrea
(2024)
"Understanding the “L” in CSLP Within the Literacy Conundrum,"
Michigan Reading Journal: Vol. 57:
Iss.
1, Article 10.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/mrj/vol57/iss1/10
