Episode 43: Episode 43. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

SPEAKERSApril Jones, Venus Watson, Boden Robertson, Ryn Bornhoft Boden Robertson  00:00Hello everyone and welcome to qualitative conversations the podcast series hosted by the qualitative research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association. My name is Boden Robertson and I'm a PhD candidate in educational research at the University of Alabama specializing in qualitative methodologies and will serve as the moderator for our episode. Our focus today will be the recent conference on culturally sustaining pedagogy to critique and reimagine teaching qualitative research that was hosted by the College of Education Department of Educational Studies, psychology research methodology, and counseling and funded through the Spencer Foundation. Drs. Stephanie Shelton and Kelly Guyotte at the University of Alabama received a grant for the conference. Put tons of planning and coordination into it and along with invaluable support of April Jones and Carlson Coogler, who are both graduate students here at the University of Alabama. The conference brought an array of scholars to examine culturally sustaining approaches teaching and conducting qualitative research. Our episodes guests today are graduate students in the educational research PhD program at the University of Alabama who are also specializing in qualitative methodologies, and who attended the conference and will and will focus on their experiences from the conference and their process of understanding culturally sustaining pedagogies and their impact. We're very happy to be participating in this today. And we'll start with introductions from our guests, April Jones, Venus Watkins, and Ryn Bornhoft, if you'd please introduce yourselves. April Jones  01:30Hi, everybody. I'm so glad to be here. My name is April Jones. I am a doctoral candidate in the program at the University of Alabama that Boden has just mentioned. My research interests centers, areas of child welfare and juvenile justice specifically surrounding issues of social work and social justice, social justice, along with the marginalized communities that engage with and intersect with those particular systems. Venus Watson  02:01Hi, my name is Venus Watson and I am a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama with a focus on qualitative methodologies. And my research interests include black girlhood, black womanhood, and identity. I'm super excited to be here with you guys today. Ryn Bornhoft  02:22Hello, my name is Renbourn haft I am excited to be here. This is my first time ever recording a podcast. So I am focusing on issues surrounding disability and educational access in informal education settings, such as museums sort of covering both K through 12 and adult to a certain extent since museums have mixed audiences. So I'm looking forward to all our discussions. And I'm a PhD student. Boden Robertson  03:01That's also that's also important, right. Well, thank you. Thank you guys. All for. Thank you all for joining us. So we'll start with, we'll start with the first question, which is, I guess kind of obvious. So in, in your opinion, what does culturally sustaining pedagogy mean? Venus Watson  03:21So in my opinion, culturally sustaining pedagogies, their teaching methods that do more than just accept or include a student's cultural backgrounds in the classroom. So they aim to support and keep those cultural practices and identities alive and growing. This approach understands that students come from diverse cultural backgrounds, and that these differences are valuable. And