Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Higher Education

Storying the Connection of Self, Community, and Embodied Learning
Transforming diverse classrooms, innovative pedagogical practices blend critical reflection with embodied learning. Rich narrative insights from a graduate course showcase storytelling and relational teaching that create sacred truth spaces, nurturing empathy, understanding, and meaningful connections.

This book builds on the foundational pedagogical theories of Gloria Ladson-Billing’s Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Django Paris’ Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies to inform teaching in the higher education classroom.

Co-written by a teacher educator and his students, this practical resource shares the ways a uniquely positioned graduate course implemented key tenets of Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy (CRSP) in their teaching and practice, allowing for the reconnection between mind and body, or Embodied CRSP.

By weaving together narratives and experiences between the instructor and students, this book not only challenges conventional teaching methods but also underscores the power of stories in creating deep, impactful learning environments. Readers are encouraged to embrace a commitment to storytelling, relational learning, embodied pedagogy, and creating sacred truth spaces—essential and necessary tools for nurturing understanding, empathy, and generative tensions among students from diverse backgrounds.

Book Features:

• Builds on the foundational pedagogical theories of Gloria Ladson-Billing’s Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Django Paris’ Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies by showing the ways their scholarship was enacted in a graduate-level course.
• Offers accessible stories from the instructor and students, showing how they engaged in a meta-reflection upon the ways CRSP were both the focus of the course and the pedagogical grounding for teaching collaboratively.
• Focal chapters feature students’ perspectives that center key details, assignments, concepts, lessons, and strategies that made the learning space so productive and transformative for them.