About

Django Paris is the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Education and serves as the director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice in the College of Education at the University of Washington. His teaching and research focus on centering and sustaining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander youth and communities within the context of ongoing resurgence, decolonization, liberation, and justice movements in and beyond schools. Paris's work emphasizes equity studies, literacy, qualitative research methods, and teacher education, with a particular commitment to culturally sustaining pedagogies and justice-oriented education. He is the author of Language across Difference: Ethnicity, Communication, and Youth Identities in Changing Urban Schools and co-editor of several influential works including Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, and Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square. Paris also edits the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies series with Teachers College Press and hosts the conversation series An Educational Otherwise. His scholarship has been published in numerous academic journals, including the Harvard Educational Review and Educational Researcher. His work centers on fostering educational justice and supporting Indigenous and marginalized communities through research, teaching, and community engagement.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Environmental ethics
• Law
• Geography
• Communication
• Business
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures Themed Issue Guest Introduction

  Reading Research Quarterly · 2025-02-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Preschool teacher Haydée Dohrn-Melendez Morgan expressed her belief that “children come full, they come as full humans, full people” (Nash et al., 2022, p. 1). Her ideas resonate with all of us and embody the multilayered story this themed issue, CulturallySustainingEarlyLiteracyPedagogiesandOurFutures offers. Herein, authors share research findings on culturally sustaining early literacy pedagogies across a range of contexts. Scholar-activists have identified features of culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs) in practice (Eagle-Shield et al., 2020; Paris et al., 2017). Offering vivid illustrations of these features from the burgeoning body of scholarship situating CSPs within early childhood contexts, this issue strives to contribute to a “more loving and just” future of culturally sustaining early literacy pedagogies (Paris, 2021). Refusing current discourse about literacy which has been overly focused on deficits and on linear approaches to literacy teaching and learning, the authors hope that readers will be able to interpret and contextualize learnings about reading that fosters cultural sustenance, about Black living-ness and multilingualism, about abolitionism, about revolutionary love, about human displacement, about stories and histories and languages in their own contexts—as we collectively work toward a future where culturally sustaining early literacy pedagogies see, honor, and extend children in their fullness. The following introduction to the issue, authored by two distinguished scholars, Drs. Django Paris and Gloria Boutte, lovingly invites readers to approach the articles that will follow with critical reflexivity about reading, research, and the future of culturally sustaining early literacy pedagogies. I want to invite us to remember how important reading has been across our lives, especially recalling our early reading years. Maybe we can sit with memories of our earliest favorite books, the people who read them to and with us. Maybe our minds focus on the where, how, who of learning to read. Maybe our memories are filled with joy and laughter, maybe with pain or anger, maybe regret or longing, or all of these and still other things. We might think about the stakes for reading in our own childhoods. What was the world like? Our worlds, the worlds of our families, friends, neighbors, and communities? Whatever memories come to us, if you are reading this, I know you understand reading, the teaching, learning and doing of reading, to be foundational to our lives. The powerful set of articles in this issue, Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures, ask us to think about why and how reading matters in sustaining the lives of the young people and families at the heart of our work. They ask us to consider what the stakes are for the teaching and learning of reading, and the role of reading in creating more just futures. These articles find us enduring such dire times. Indeed, the young people we teach and learn with are experiencing their early worlds amidst the confluence of pandemic, climate catastrophe, genocides, emboldened white supremacy, resurging fascism, and profound economic and social abandonment. Although each of these have been features across the history of the United States and other settler colonial nation-states, I think we all recognize that this past decade has been particularly unrelenting. And yet when we think of the children and families we teach and learn with, I know we think of the joy, care, love, and fierce vision for the future offered by families, communities, and critical educators. This has always been the case for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, and all Global Majority families and communities faced with resisting the violences of racial settler capitalism. We face the world as it is while seeking to build the world as it could and should be. In this pressing context, what does reading—learning to read and using reading—mean in lives of children and families? How can reading, and particularly teaching and researching reading, be part of sustaining the valued lifeways, the very lives and futures of young people and communities? We find answers in the articles that follow in this special issue, and I am so thankful our work on culturally sustaining pedagogies has been useful in forging these answers. Consider the concepts and enactments forwarded in this special issue: From McMurtry (this issue) comes a focus on “Culturally sustaining, Black-centric texts that center Black livingness” Bryan & McMillan (this issue) offer the necessary concept of culturally sustaining prison abolition literacies, and map for us the ways prisons share characteristics with culturally unsustaining early childhood classrooms. We learn, too, about the ways a culturally sustaining revolutionary love framework describes how loving teachers do their work (Braden, Myers, Thornton, Rodriguez, and Wynter-Hoyte, this issue). We are encouraged to remember homelands through a piercing analysis of representations of refugees and displacement in children's literature (Strekalova-Hughes, Peterman & Minanya, this issue). Johnson, Vlach, and Leija (this issue) show us how to recenter critical, sociopolitical knowledge through children's literature, “especially in the current educational climate that is characterized by harsh legislation that silences critical and culturally relevant discussion through book bans and LGBT QIA+ erasure.” And Frieson (this issue) reminds us of what it looks and feels like to offer “a seat at the table” by curating culturally sustaining spaces for Black children in multilingual classrooms. Each of these offerings are nuanced, community-anchored enactments of what Nash, Peele, Elson, Arce, Sumner, and Polson (this issue) conceptualize as a Cultural Sustenance View of Reading. In their framework, “children are full people, full humans, full of a universe of ways of knowing, being, and engaging in reading that are mediated by their social, linguistic, and cultural worlds.” As we learn alongside these articles, I hope we keep our memories of our full young reading selves close. I hope we remember, too, the world as it is and the world as it should and must be. Let's join these articles in helping to build that world through the ways we read, teach, learn, and live together. As I write this culturally sustaining love letter to you, I want to assure you that you are in for a treat with these carefully selected, priceless articles on culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies. Editors and authors for this special issue, Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures, envision educational settings where children and families can bring their whole selves. Against the ill-intentional political backdrop of narrow conceptions of reading, bans on Black history (and humanity), and children's books which center culture, these scholars provide a pathway for culturally sustaining early literacy pedagogies. Let me expatiate briefly on each question. If our purpose is to be culturally sustaining literacy pedagogues, then our literacy practices must necessarily situate children's identities as central and critically address power issues. We must not be deterred and misled by overstatements and distortions of research on reading. We have to necessarily problematize pervasive narrow, deficit views of reading instruction advocated by some Science of Reading proponents. That is to say that numerous variables contribute to conclusions drawn by researchers, and research findings are mixed, indicating that there is no clear “one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching reading. From a culturally sustaining perspective, we do know that children's culture, humanity, and spirits should not be destroyed in the literacy learning process. If our purpose is to demonstrate how literacy can be both pedagogical and healing, then this welcomed and special issue fills a deep void that has been created and sustained for centuries. This issue beautifully addresses so-called taboo issues (police profiling; forced displacement; Pro-Black and Pro-Latinx identity; and other topics) that are sometimes deemed ‘developmentally inappropriate’ by misguided commentators who underestimate young children's ability to understand complex issues. Interestingly, the same may rely on traditional children's stories filled with violence (e.g., issues like murder in Snow White; violence in rhymes like Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater). All this is to say that as culturally sustaining literacy educators, we must stay the course. To answer this question, we can examine our instruction and curricula against the backdrop of articles in this volume and against the healthy knowledge base on the topic. If culturally sustaining literacy practices are occasional or an add-on, it is time to up our game. Culturally sustaining literacy practices are an essential mindset, not just fashionably performative when it's popular (e.g., after the so-called racial awakening in 2020). We are not really who we think we are (culturally sustaining pedagogues) if we follow the whims of political change which intimate that the culture and spirits of children of color and other minoritized groups do not matter. We are all works in progress. This collection of articles demonstrates that children can, do, and should learn literacy using Black-centric, abolitionist, and other culturally sustaining approaches. As we network with other culturally sustaining educators, the research, conceptions, and practices presented in this volume can guide us. Employ fugitivity (nod to Givens, 2021) if needed, and any other means necessary to ensure that children's literacies and cultures are intact. A huge thank you to Reading Research Quarterly for its vision and courage for promoting this special issue, Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures. We hope readers will draw from this issue in their early childhood classrooms and teacher education courses. Stay strong on behalf of the children. Cheers! Django Paris is the James A and Cherry A Banks Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Washington on Coast Salish Homelands, Seattle, Washington, USA; email: [email protected]. Gloria S. Boutte is a Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA; email: [email protected]. Kindel Turner Nash is the Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USA; email: [email protected].

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Past, Present, and Future of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: An Invitation to Teachers, Researchers, and Communities

  Harvard Educational Review · 2024-01-01 · 19 citations

  article

  In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, H. Samy Alim, and Na’ilah Suad Nasir speak to the past, present, and future of culturally sustaining pedagogies. This dialogue marks the tenth anniversary of the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Symposium, published in the Harvard Educational Review in 2014, where the authors illustrated how culturally relevant, sustaining, and revitalizing pedagogies are part of a long tradition seeking to center culture and justice in teaching and learning. This conversation also builds on dialogues initiated by HER in 2017 on cross-pollinating culturally sustaining pedagogy with disability studies. In this current dialogue, which has been edited for publication, the authors reflect on key developments in the field over the past ten years and engage with culturally sustaining pedagogy in light of ongoing global movements and issues of the current moment. They offer directions forward for research and practice, including rethinking culture and theorizing alongside communities.

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• 10. “Where the Beat Drops”: Culturally Relevant and Culturally Sustaining Hip Hop Pedagogies

  2022-10-28 · 1 citations

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• “Where the Beat Drops”:

  2022-12-16

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• Singing Counterstories to Imagine an Otherwise

  The English Journal · 2021-03-01 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author

  Preview this article: Singing Counterstories to Imagine an Otherwise, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ej/110/4/englishjournal31124-1.gif

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• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Our Futures

  The Educational Forum · 2021 · 145 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  What does culturally sustaining pedagogy mean in the context of a global pandemic, uprisings for racial and decolonial justice, and an ongoing climate crisis? In this essay, I build from decades of strength-centered pedagogical research and practice as well as the work of contemporary organizers to engage how educators can join communities in sustaining valued lifeways through education to ensure possible futures for all peoples and lands.

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• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in the Current Moment: A Conversation With Django Paris and H. Samy Alim

  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy · 2020 · 20 citations

  • Sociology
  • Pedagogy
  • Sociology

  Abstract This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 190 citations

  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

  Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms “relevant” and “responsive” are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy ...

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• Naming beyond the white settler colonial gaze in educational research

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2019-03-16 · 95 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I describe the ways educational research often calls us out our names, meaning that educational researchers often name communities not as they are but as the academy needs them to be along damaging logics of erasure and deficiency. I use Morrison’s concept of the White gaze, Tuck’s concepts of damage-centered and desire-based research, and other contemporary scholarship on settler colonialism, White supremacy, and education to offer ways of naming in educational research beyond the White settler gaze. Finally, I look to hashtag naming in current social movements (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter, #DearNativeYouth #NotYourModelMinority) to imagine educational research that understands the naming of the communities of our work as informed by movement speech, the sort of naming that can save lives and show us and others who we are and desire to be.

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• A Pedagogy of Linguistic Justice

  2019-09-17 · 1 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• H. Samy Alim

  7 shared

• Gloria Ladson‐Billings

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  4 shared

• H. Samy Alim

  2 shared

• Lorena Gutiérrez

  University of California, Riverside

  2 shared

• Susan D. Blum

  1 shared

• Maisha T. Winn

  1 shared

• Casey Philip Wong

  1 shared

• Netta Avineri

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• James A. and Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Educatio…