“Welcome to Room 131”: Putting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies to Practice in a Second-Grade Classroom

In an attempt to help her second-grade students understand why White flight occurred in the late 1960s in Louisville, Kentucky, and why merchants fled an area where the children lived, Janelle Henderson showed a video about the 1968 Race Riot where two African American men were killed. Because of th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTalking points (Urbana, Ill.) Vol. 30; no. 1; pp. 18 - 26
Main Authors Laman, Tasha Tropp, Henderson, Janelle W.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Urbana National Council of Teachers of English 01.10.2018
Subjects
African Americans
Ali, Muhammad (1942-2016)
Children & youth
Classrooms
Core curriculum
Grade 2
Language arts
Learning
Literacy
Multilingualism
Murders & murder attempts
Neighborhoods
Pedagogy
Riots
School districts
Students
Teaching
Urban renewal
Urban Schools
Workshops
Writers
Writing instruction
Young Children
New York
United States > US
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Summary:In an attempt to help her second-grade students understand why White flight occurred in the late 1960s in Louisville, Kentucky, and why merchants fled an area where the children lived, Janelle Henderson showed a video about the 1968 Race Riot where two African American men were killed. Because of this riot and the stigma of what happened, businesses, many owned by White residents, left the neighborhood, which resulted in economic disparity in the now predominantly African American area. While a culturally sustaining language arts classroom emphasizes a curriculum rich in learning, collaboration, and inquiry, many teachers working in urban schools face mandated curriculums that are narrow, where children's lives, interests, and languages are too often missing (Bettini & Park, 2017; McCarthey, 2008).This collaboration allowed us to create curriculum that is possible and not typical in such settings (Mills, 2016). Data Analysis In seeking to answer our research question on how children's identities and perceptions of themselves and others change within a classroom centered on curriculum inclusive ofBlack lives and Black experiences, we engaged in a recursive and iterative analysis of the data. [...]children would often comment, "Ms. Henderson is taking notes again."
ISSN:1522-6115
1943-3085
DOI:10.58680/tp201829855