Culture, Relevance, and Schooling

Lisa Scherff is associate professor of secondary English language arts education at the University of Alabama. A former high school English and reading teacher, Lisa's research focuses on opportunity to learn and teacher preparation, induction, and mentoring.Karen Spector is assistant professor of secondary English education and literacy at the University of Alabama. Her research and teaching involves critical literacies across disciplines.

From the foreword and introduction, through each of the essays, this volume reanimates the oft-employed term 'cultural relevance,' bringing it to life through the experiences of children and youth who seek a relevant and meaningful education and teachers who strive, always fallibly and often imperfectly, to offer what their students deserve. Fortunately, there are no recipes for quick-fixes suggested here. Instead, teachers, administrators, and researchers will find rich, complex examples of critical pedagogies in practice that point to relevance as a lived concept that has the potential, in all of its intricacies, to craft school spaces in which students feel connected, valued, and at the center of their own educations.

• Chapter 1 Foreword: The Legitimacy of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Resolved or UnresolvedChapter 2 AcknowledgmentsChapter 3 Spatial, Embodied, and Discursive Boundaries: An IntroductionChapter 4 Opening Vignette: Making Culture Visible through Experience and UnderstandingChapter 5 1. Collective Cultural Relevancy through Hybrid Communities of PracticeChapter 6 2. Seeing Relevance: Using Photography to Understand How School, Curricula, and Pedagogies Matter to Urban YouthChapter 7 3. Expanding Notions of Culturally Responsive Education with Urban Native Youth: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for Equity and Social JusticeChapter 8 4. Weaving Spiritualities into Culturally Responsive PedagogiesChapter 9 5. Staying Fat: Moving Past the Exercise-Industrial ComplexChapter 10 6. Putting "Culturally Relevant" into Professional DevelopmentChapter 11 7. Overcoming (Under)lying Assumptions: Approaching Language Education from a Freirean Perspective