ABSTRACT

Cultural pedagogy is an umbrella term for a style of education that incorporates minority members’ lived experience into the way knowledge is understood. Cultural pedagogy affi rms diverse cultural experiences, centers on students’ experiential learning, and encourages educators to affi rm distinct students’ cultural and personal strengths. For example, a traditional study of U.S. history might emphasize democracy and economic progress and treat the genocide of indigenous people as a tragic footnote. A cultural pedagogy approach would reject any claim to a neutral history, explore how the genocide was the product of specifi c cultural assumptions, and review alternative cultural beliefs – overlooked by a dominant reading of history – as valuable alternatives. It would explore how contemporary institutions might still bear the mark of historical inequity. While traditionalists view cultural pedagogy as a supplement (largely driven by special interests and fringe cases) to academic content, cultural theorists view culture as central to knowledge production, which is never free from cultural infl uence.