Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in English Language Arts with a Focus on How to Make American Literature Culturally Sustaining and Relevant to Students of Color

This project analyzes the literature that is usually chosen in an English III classroom, which focuses on American literature, and specifically how these choices affect a classroom in a rural area. The literature that is chosen tends to lean towards authors that are white, middle-aged, and middle-class. This lens that teachers are using is limited to students with those experiences and those that can relate to being white, middle-aged, or middle-class. Rural areas often do not relate to this lens, and thus cannot relate to the literature that is provided in their English classrooms.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, which is a new theory in classroom management, encourages teachers to engage student’s backgrounds and cultures that they bring into the classroom. When using it to look specifically at English, this means that teachers must move past the white, middle-aged, middle-class lens they’ve been picking literature with and rather push to provide literature that relates to their students, especially when their students are students of color and/or are from a lower economic class.

Using the theory of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, this project looks at how providing literature with a lens that differs from the students that are reading it could be limiting to the student’s abilities to engage with the class and maintain literacy in the long run. This project then offers different authors that could replace the literature that has been currently chosen, and how to approach the more culturally appropriate literature in the classroom.