Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy as Framework for Creative Musical Collaboration

Although Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) exists under the umbrella of asset pedagogies, it expands on the purpose, function, and scope of previous conceptions of other asset approaches in education at large and in music education in particular. To begin, educationists Django Paris and Samy Alim, who initiated Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy as an alternative or development of earlier pedagogies, provide three main critiques of earlier education pedagogies. First, they suggest that the concepts such as culturally relevant and culturally responsive do not “do enough to support the goals of maintenance and social critique” (Alim & Paris, 2017, p. 4).

They assert that while curriculum and pedagogical strategies might be relevant or responsive to student needs when using these frameworks, the power structures that persist to alienate Black, Brown and Indigenous students remain unexamined and, in many ways, concealed. When reenvisioning curriculum to be in line with the goals of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, Alim and Paris (2017) suggest that teachers expand the question from first asking what to include to “for what purposes and what outcomes” (p. 4). Similar to the social action approach to multicultural curriculum reform (Banks, 2004), CSP focuses on engaging students by encouraging them to become active agents of change by examining the power dynamics that affect their lives.

The second critique by Alim and Paris (2017) of other asset pedagogies is that culture is presented as static and based on scholars and educators’ abstract understandings of culture. Instead, Alim and Paris suggest that the lives that contemporary youth live need to be viewed as “emerging, intersectional, and dynamic” (p. 9). This means that all aspects of education need to be rooted in the lived experiences of students as people rather than in monolithic understandings of their cultures as abstractions that obscure the “racialized, gendered, classed, dis/abilitied, language (and so on) bodies of the [students] enacting them” (p. 9).

Alim and Paris (2017) offer a third critique, in that previous asset pedagogies did not focus enough on providing individuals with the tools to critically examine certain practices within Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. They further suggest that educators have too often uncritically embraced these practices as “positive or progressive” (p. 10) simply because they emerged in non-Whitestream spaces. As such, the goal of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy is to forward practices challenging discourses within these communities that perpetuate marginalization of its members.

The landscape of educational equity is constantly being refined and, as a moral imperative, it thus becomes necessary for music educators to stay abreast of these developments. New methods of musical engagement must also be sought that will allow students to be honored in all of their complexity while providing moments where true creative collaboration can occur. Moreover, these methods must provide a space where asymmetric power structures can be critiqued while simultaneously allowing for students to be positioned as active agents of change in their communities. We advocate for using the Collective Songwriting Process as a compositional tool that can help educators to develop creative spaces that are in line with the tenets of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy.