Language teaching in the 21st century: incorporating culturally sustaining pedagogies for social and cognitive justice in education

Abstract Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies introduce the hidden curriculum of marginalized youth into the classroom, ensuring the presence and sustainability of the languages and cultures of these communities. Within this theoretical and pedagogical framework, both translanguaging and Hip-Hop Pedagogies challenge the traditional institutional norms that have historically viewed linguistically and culturally diverse students as deficient. Instead, they promote the utilization of students’ linguistic and cultural capital in the classroom. To this end, we designed and implemented a workshop for a linguistically and culturally diverse public school in Vitoria-Gasteiz in the Basque Autonomous Community. The workshop’s design was based on prior interventions that analyzed students’ multilingual identities through Hip-Hop Pedagogies. Specifically, our aim was to examine whether incorporating home languages by using translanguaging as a teaching approach, along with integrating content of interest to them, would enhance their self-conception. Results reveal that introducing a culturally sustaining approach in the classroom led to increased student engagement, manifested through more active participation in class discussions. The content introduced enabled them, moreover, to reconsider their multilingual identities and focus on topics of personal interest.