Beyond "Cultural Relevance"
By Menen Stroud
In many lay conversations around education (particularly in communities of color), schooling is presented as a “way out” for youth. Schooling is the path to take in order to make it out of their subjugated community and towards upward mobility and capital. These conversations do not account for the racialized violence and Othering experienced by students of color. Although this violence and Othering has been heavily countered by activists, organizers and scholars alike, steps towards undoing this violence typically take the form of reform- and policy-based solutions. While reform may be necessary in order to enact change, it is slow, usually avoids treating problems in favor of treating symptoms, and limits the extent and orientation of action. Alternatively, there are pedagogical tools that educators can employ now to turn institutions of education into sites of liberatory practices.
Pedagogical efforts towards undoing racialized violence in schools often center on cultural relevance. Do a Google search of culturally relevant teaching/pedagogy and you’ll find myriad articles proclaiming to know the secret to educating other people’s kids: How To Engage Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Culturally Relevant Curriculum, and An Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: How to make culturally relevant pedagogy a reality in your classroom. However, efforts to eradicate racialized violence must go further than heavily cited culturally relevant pedagogies, and move towards more critical and liberatory pedagogies.
There is a general lack of criticality in scholarship around cultural relevance. Culturally relevant pedagogies (CRP) often do the opposite of what they intend. In an effort to “understand other cultures,” educators enacting CRP run the risk of essentializing students marked as “other.” Furthermore, orientations of CRP assume a static notion of culture. CRP does not get to the root issues inherent in the institution of schooling. Instead, educators should move towards pedagogies that encourage anti-racist, anti-capitalist orientations. While some aspects of cultural relevance are necessary (such as development of critical consciousness and enacting an ethic of care), pedagogies intended to eradicate racialized violence in schooling need to be expanded upon to move towards a more radical pedagogy that leaves room for non-traversable difference without reifying social hierarchies.
Instead of cultural relevance, educators can engage in other nontraditional pedagogical practices that adopt a more critical lens, such as participatory action research or critical literacy. Teachers can cultivate their classrooms as spaces of restorative justice and encourage students to participate in participatory action research. It is important to focus efforts on classrooms as spaces of activism in order to recognize the possibility for resistance that individual actors hold within the system. As of 2013, 95.9% of children ages 5-17 are enrolled in elementary or secondary school. Of those children, approximately 90% of them are attending public schools. Our children are going to school regardless, so why not work to change their schooling experiences? Teachers and educators can be activists in their classrooms, through their pedagogical practices.
Maxine Greene reflectson:
“what is meant by teaching as possibility in dark and constraining times. It is a matter of awakening and empowering today’s young people to name, to reflect, to imagine, and to act with more and more concrete responsibility in an increasingly multifarious world. At once, it is a matter of enabling them to remain in touch with dread and desire, with the smell of lilacs and the taste of a peach. The light may be uncertain and flickering; but teachers in their lives and works have the remarkable capacity to make it shine in all sorts of corners and, perhaps, to move newcomers to join with others and transform.”
When I tell people I want to teach elementary school, the most common response I get is, “Why?” There’s no money in education. Public schools are failing. Teachers don’t have any agency. Why would you willingly choose a career path in which you won’t be respected? When I hear these responses, I think of four women. My first job out of high school was as an intern at a summer camp. I had very few responsibilities; I mostly made posters and helped with administrative tasks in the office. The most valuable experience of that and the next couple summers was being able to learn from the four black women who were the educators I knew I wanted to be. They are the most passionate, loving, brilliant, dynamic, powerful educators I had ever come across. As we’ve known each other through the years, they’ve moved on to more radical educational endeavors: teaching, leading and learning in spaces that are traditionally hegemonic. They teach with love to black and brown kids. They are being the educators they (and I) needed as kids. These four women are the most inspirational activists I’ve encountered. I think of them, and I see classrooms as light in the darkness of the institutions of schooling.