“Were There Any Black People in Johnstown?” An Investigation of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Service of Supporting Disciplinary Literacy Learning in History

• Published in: Urban education (Beverly Hills, Calif.) Vol. 57; no. 6; pp. 1079 - 1106
• Main Authors: Kucan, Linda, Cho, Byeong-Young
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.07.2022; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Black people; Case studies; Content Area Reading; Content Area Writing; Culturally Relevant Education; Grade 7; Grade 8; History education; History Instruction; Instructional Development; Learning; Literacy; Literacy Education; Middle School Students; Middle School Teachers; Middle Schools; Multicultural education; Narratives; Pedagogy; Student teacher relationship; Teaching; Thinking Skills; Units of Study; Urban Education; Urban schools; Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh); case studies; culturally relevant pedagogy; middle school; subjects
• ISSN: 0042-0859; 1552-8340
• DOI: 10.1177/0042085918804011

This case study describes how culturally relevant pedagogy can be used in disciplinary rigorous ways in an urban middle school history classroom. The focus is on a unit about the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which provided a setting for teaching about the event as well as the historical thinking practices of contextualizing, sourcing, and corroborating. The teacher supported students’ cultural and academic competence for learning both historical content and historical thinking about that content by capitalizing on their funds of knowledge, making use of accessible cultural referents, and sharing personal narratives.