Research has shown that culturally sustaining practices, such as expanding youth literacies, centering youth cultural awareness, and including racial knowledges, make language arts instruction relevant and meaningful to students’ lived realities. The emergence of ethnic studies courses in Arizona and California, for example, have shown that connecting cultural and community knowledges within schools allows students of color to have greater academic success in schools. Recent research in language arts contexts offers community- and justice-centered work that provides insight for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to make informed decisions that benefit young people’s learning. In this review, we survey the research literature on the use of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies (CRSPs) in English language arts (ELA) teaching and learning over the last 15 years and offer recommendations for policy and practice.
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