RESEARCH PRESENTATION: Prof. Django Paris
Fall 2014 marks the first time students of color are the majority in U.S. public schools. What do these ongoing shifts mean for the future of teaching, learning, and educational justice? In this talk Paris describes the evolving conceptual and empirical projects defining culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP)—teaching and learning that 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. Drawing on humanizing research with African American, Indigenous, Latina/o, and Pacific Islander youth and their English Language Arts teachers, he argues that CSP must extend previous visions of asset pedagogies by demanding explicitly critical and pluralist outcomes that are not centered on narrow, monolingual and monocultural norms of educational achievement. Paris offers English Language Arts as an ideal location from which to envision and enact the CSP we need.
Django Paris is an associate professor of language and literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He is also a core faculty member in the African American and African Studies Program and affiliated faculty in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures. His teaching and research focus on understanding and sustaining languages, literacies, and literatures among youth of color in the context of demographic and social change. Paris is author of Language across Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools (2011), co-editor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (2014), and 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 (NCTE) Standing Committee on Research and is on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate program of Middlebury College.
