Professor George Noblit, STED Visitor and UC Canterbury Fellow
Inverting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Lessons about Power, Dominance and Culture

 Date: Thursday 16 August, Wheki 451
Time: 4-6pm. Refreshments available from 3.30pm

Pedagogies that have been proposed for those who are racial and ethnic minorities share a common thrust. They are all proposals for dominant group member teachers—that is, white people in the US and in New Zealand. This means that they are imbued with ideas about the nature of power and domination and with how culture is to be defined.  They can be seen as compromised messages to the more powerful.

In this seminar, I will invert ideas about culturally sustaining pedagogy to see what they say about, and to, dominant, white groups. In particular, I will discuss issues of power that this raises. Power also affects how culture itself is constructed in culturally sustaining pedagogies—transmuting it from taken for granted (and hard to recognize and articulate) beliefs, oppositions, and practices into more explicit and recognizable tropes –culture for the non-native, settler colonist. For me, this, in turn, implies that culturally sustaining pedagogies entail trade-offs that may be as oppressive as they are liberatory. Shifting towards the latter requires the dominant group see deficits as our own and take responsibility for our power and its effects.

There is no cost to attend.

All welcome!

This seminar is sponsored by the Teacher Learning and Innovations Research Hub and the School of Teacher Education, University of Canterbury.

Inquiries: Dr Jane Abbiss jane.abbiss@canterbury.ac.nz.