Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Higher Education

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Higher Education invites readers to reconceptualize the way they think about teaching, learning, and living together in a pluralistic society.

Co-written by a teacher educator and his students, this practical resource shares the ways a uniquely positioned graduate course implemented key tenets of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy (CRSP) in their teaching and practice, allowing for the reconnection between mind and body, or Embodied CRSP. By weaving together narratives and experiences between the instructor and students, this book not only challenges conventional teaching methods but also underscores the power of stories in creating deep, impactful learning environments. Readers are encouraged to embrace a commitment to storytelling, relational learning, embodied pedagogy, and creating sacred truth spaces—essential and necessary tools for nurturing understanding, empathy, and generative tensions among students from diverse backgrounds.

Book Features:

• Builds on the foundational pedagogical theories of Gloria Ladson-Billing’s Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Django Paris’ Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies by showing the ways their scholarship was enacted in a graduate-level course.
• Offers accessible stories from the instructor and students, showing how they engaged in a meta-reflection upon the ways CRSP were both the focus of the course and the pedagogical grounding for teaching collaboratively.
• Focal chapters feature students’ perspectives that center key details, assignments, concepts, lessons, and strategies that made the learning space so productive and transformative for them.

Lead author Timothy San Pedro is an associate professor of Critical Studies in Education: Race, Justice and Equity at Ohio State University, and author of Protecting the Promise: Indigenous Education Between Mothers and Their Children.

"Nine passionate educators urging us to understand connections among our bodies, minds, and spirits as we engage not only in culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, but also in embodied, reflexive work! And that is the true beauty and impact of this inspiring book for education across the learning continuum."
—Valerie Kinloch, president, Johnson C. Smith University

“Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Higher Education is a powerful, poetic, and deeply necessary intervention in today’s educational landscape. In a time when higher education too often treats knowledge as disembodied and culture as peripheral, this book dares to center stories, relationships, emotions, and embodied experiences as core to transformational learning. Through collaborative authorship, the book itself enacts the very pedagogies it advocates—grounded in love, trust, vulnerability, and community.

Each chapter weaves compelling narratives, pedagogical insights, and theoretical reflections that challenge dominant norms in academia. The flower metaphor that shapes the book’s structure—seeds, soil, roots, petals—mirrors the organic, relational, and evolving nature of truly culturally sustaining teaching. From student-led facilitation and critical storytelling to the politics of language and the ethics of classroom space, this is a guidebook and an invitation: to teach, learn, and live differently.

This book is not just a call to action—it is a model of what is possible. It reminds us that education can be sacred, that classrooms can be spaces of healing and becoming, and that our stories—especially those too often silenced—are knowledge in their own right. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Higher Education is a gift to educators, students, and anyone committed to creating classrooms that sustain culture, dignity, and collective well-being.”

—Mariana Souto-Manning, president, Erikson Institute