AJE Feature | Collaboratively developing culturally-grounded curriculum to foster social justice by Joseph Levitan and Kayla M. Johnson

Full-length article “Salir Adelante: Collaboratively Developing Culturally Grounded Curriculum with Marginalized Communities” by Levitan and Johnson published by the American Journal of Education available here.

The Need for Culturally-Grounded Curriculum

Asset-based, identity- and culturally-reflective education practices, such as curricula that build from students’ identities and cultural backgrounds, increases students’ engagement (Ladson-Billings 1992), improves their success (Howard and Terry 2011), and fosters their well-being (Castagno and Brayboy 2008). However, marginalized students around the world often do not have access to quality education that is grounded in their identities and cultures. There are multiple reasons for this—but one important reason is the epistemological gap (i.e., the orientation towards what knowledge is and what knowledge is most important) between curriculum designers and the students who the curriculum designers are (in principle) meant to serve.

When teachers, school boards, and departments of education engage in the typical top-down curriculum development approach, this epistemological gap means that the curriculum they develop is likely not well-aligned with the cultural backgrounds and epistemological orientations of the students. While much groundbreaking research has been done with culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies in specific contexts, in practice, the epistemological gap persists. Work to close this gap raises a number of questions about how to build asset-based curriculum that is grounded in students’ identities and cultures. Generating evidence-driven principles and processes for creating culturally-grounded curricula is, therefore, necessary to provide high quality and socially just education for all students.

Our study in the February 2020 volume of AJE, “Salir Adelante: Collaboratively developing culturally-grounded curriculum with marginalized communities” illustrates our process of building culturally-grounded curriculum. We believe our work can contribute to improving existing approaches to generate more socially just education opportunities with marginalized youth. We see our work as especially relevant for educators and curriculum designers who do not share the same cultural and epistemological backgrounds as their students.

The lack of culturally-grounded curriculum in schools is apparent to many students and teachers. In our case, we each began grappling with the concept and importance of culturally-grounded curriculum through our experiences as students and educators. While teaching in a charter school in Baltimore City, Joe noticed that his predominantly Black, low-income students were not engaged with the school’s White-centric ELA curriculum. Similarly, growing up in Appalachia, Kayla rarely saw herself in the stories that she and her classmates would read in class. While these separate but similar experiences clearly point to the need for curriculum that is more reflective of local cultures and histories, the need became most apparent for us when we started working with students from Quechua-speaking (Indigenous) communities in the Peruvian Andes. We found that, while we were well-situated to facilitate educational opportunities, the students, parents, and community leaders were best suited to decide how and what they wanted to learn. This led us to undertake a reflexive inquiry-based project with students and parents to better understand how to make curricula more grounded in their cultures’, identities, and epistemologies.

Bridging Bodies of Literature: Culturally-Relevant Education, Student Voice, and Action Research

Many seminal scholars have advanced the importance of asset-based education that responds to students’ identities. In our article, we acknowledge and are grateful to the creators of the significant body of scholarship on culturally relevant teaching, culturally responsive curriculum, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Educators such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Bryan Brayboy, James Banks, Nunia Qanatsiaq Anoee, and Django Paris (and others cited in our article) have and continue to push for education that not only doesn’t ignore or belittle marginalized students’ identities and cultures, but actively engages with their identities and cultures as a strength and builds from a foundation of meaningful, positive knowledge. We also learned from and are thankful for scholars in the student voice field and the collaborative action-research field (also cited in our article). We think that these three fields of study intersect in important ways, and we connect these disciplines in our study in order to foster more socially just education initiatives.

We also contribute to these sets of scholarship in ways that are cognizant of our identities and positionalities, which (generally) are of caring outsider-insiders concerned about issues of social justice in education. This work builds from Joe’s previous scholarship (Levitan 2018), which explores how an educator’s theoretical underpinnings can influence how they interpret students’ voices and the decisions that they make when working with students. He discusses how to reflect through a multi-theory lens to become more aware of, and to mitigate, interpretive biases. Joe argues, as do others, that critical awareness and mitigation of biases is important for any educator, but particularly for educators from outsider positionalities. In his article, Joe shows how conversations with Indigenous young women, analyzed through four different and commonly-used theoretical frameworks (feminist, critical, development, and postcolonial), can lead to four vastly different interpretations of students’ voices, and to vastly different educational decisions. Most often, educators use only one framework to interpret community voices, which ultimately may not reflect what the students or parents mean. Therefore, Joe argues, and we collectively believe, that considering multiple theoretical perspectives is essential for understanding students’ voices and for fostering social justice in educational organization. 

In this latest article, we build from Joe’s previous work and deal with the process-oriented and practical aspects of developing culturally-grounded curriculum with marginalized communities through collaborative student and community voice action research. We expand Joe’s previously mentioned case in Peru to examine questions like: How do educators actually do collaborative culturally-grounded curriculum development? And in particular, how do educators who are often from backgrounds that are dissimilar from their students’ productively engage in this work? We use two theoretical frameworks this time—human capital theory and decolonial theory—to illustrate and underscore the importance of multi-theory interpretation of the voices of marginalized community members. We then present our research process as an example of what developing culturally-grounded curriculum could look like. We reflect on this project, the literature, and our own values about socially just education to better understand how this work might be effectively performed in other contexts.

The Principles of Collaboratively Developing Culturally-Grounded Curriculum

Ultimately, our article advances five principles of engaging in the collaborative process of developing culturally-grounded curriculum with marginalized communities:

1. Curriculum development is an iterative process. If culture is dynamic and not static (which is how we view it), then a curriculum that is grounded in students’ culture must also be dynamic. For this reason, we see curriculum development as an iterative process—one that must be engaged in over and over and that is flexible in response to changing conceptions of culture, changing goals, and changing needs.  

• Curricula and objectives are built with the community. Historically (and currently), educators burden marginalized communities with paternalistic and patronizing top-down curricular decision-making processes that lead (often—but not exclusively—well-meaning White) people to do things for students and parents. We purposefully abandon this power dynamic and work with communities. Our collaborative approach shifts the decision-making power to be guided by community members and community knowledge(s). This, in turn, fosters equitable relationships and trust. It also builds agency for community members to contribute to decisions of what knowledge is of the most worth and which outcomes are most desired.
  
  
• Curriculum content is grounded in community epistemologies. Epistemologies are the orientations towards knowledge that individuals hold, and as curriculum development fundamentally addresses the question “What knowledge is of most worth?” (Pinar 2011), socially just education requires that the epistemologies of the community form the foundation of learning. Beyond representation, culturally-grounded curriculum allows students to start from what and how they know, which fosters a more engaging, easier, and empowering learning process.
  
  
• Students are encouraged to critically question and value their realities and (re)make their world as a response to unjust structures. Building on the critical social justice orientations of prior scholars (e.g., Ladson-Billings 1995), we see culturally-grounded education processes as fundamentally liberating. Through this process, students and parents are able to ask and address questions about their current and future realities.
  
  
• Success is defined collaboratively and is meant to (re)make social and economic realities. As our article illustrates, the definition of success cannot be readily understood in fixed terms. Rather, educators must question what success means for their particular students in that particular place and time. And, as Principle #1 states, we must be ready to respond to changing definitions of success over time and space.

We believe these five principles apply to a variety of educational contexts: in the US and internationally, public or private school, and formal or nonformal learning spaces. We think they can serve as a guide for educators who seek to ensure that what they are teaching is aligned with their students’ values, goals, and identities.

The process we illustrate in our article—the research project and our resulting analyses and curricular decisions—is only one example of what can be done, and certainly should not be viewed as the only way in which to do this work. Our process was reflective of traditional Quechua practices like ayni (reciprocity) and community consensus building, which we learned through our collective 15 years of working with Quechua communities in the Peruvian Andes. Appropriate approaches to engage with members of marginalized communities in other contexts will likely look different. Still, we believe that our principles of working with (instead of for) these communities to build a system of education that is iterative and that starts with community strengths, knowledge, voices, and ideas can hold true across cultural contexts and shows promise for facilitating socially-just education opportunities.

Joseph Levitan, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His research focuses on issues of social justice in educational leadership and policy—focusing on identity, well-being, and collaborative community processes to redesign educational organizations.

Kayla M. Johnson, Ph.D., is a visiting assistant professor of higher education at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on student voice for improved educational practice—particularly in international education contexts.

References

Castagno, Angelina E., and Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy. (2008). Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Youth: A Review of the Literature. Review of Educational Research 78 (4): 941–993.

Howard, Tyrone, and Clarence L. Terry, Sr. (2011). Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for African American Students: Promising Programs and Practices for Enhanced Academic Performance. Teaching Education 22 (4): 345–362.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1995). But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Theory into Practice 34 (3): 159–165.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1992). Culturally Relevant Teaching: The Key to Making Multicultural Education Work. Research and Multicultural Education: From the Margins to the Mainstream: 106-121.

Levitan, Joseph. (2018). The Danger of a Single Theory: Understanding Students’ Voices and Social Justice in the Peruvian Andes. Teachers College Record 120 (2): 1–36.

Pinar, William F. (2011). The Character of Curriculum Studies: Bildung, Currere, and the Recurring Question of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.