Culturally Relevant Content Knowledge: An Invitation to See, Sculpt, and Shift

Fuse culturally relevant pedagogy with creative expression to deepen literacy and critical consciousness in your classroom.

DR. JEN GOWERS
Instructional Specialist

The first weekend of February, our team at CPET had the great pleasure of hosting young people and faculty from Shanghai, China for a weekend of Literacy Unbound. A wonderful co-created space, we built it around placing NYC in conversation with Shanghai via exploring the texts of various NYC neighborhoods. 

Literacy Unbound is a signature CPET approach that brings teachers and students together as creative collaborators to reimagine challenging, classic texts through multiple modalities. This approach to literacy reinvigorates classroom communities using arts-infused, project-based, collaborative curricula developed around a shared text, increasing student engagement and building community in the process.

What follows is one portion of our workshop: what we did to introduce and experience together a bit of the vibrant and beautiful neighborhood of East Harlem. We know that all young people need background knowledge — we know it’s a major access point to success in literacy, and we know that many subjects have “content” to “cover.” We’d like to suggest that opening it up and “uncovering” or “unbinding” it can be both a deeply impactful and culturally relevant alternative to lecturing to introduce that background knowledge, and here is one engaging way to do it.

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Setting the stage

In order to read the poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri, we knew participants would want some knowledge of both the poet and the neighborhood about which he writes.

​We decided giving participants a “walk” through the colorful statement pieces that are the murals of East Harlem would be one visually meaningful way into the vibrance of the poet’s neighborhood. We prepared slides of about 20 of the murals, from the prolific paintings of De La Vega, to the likenesses of Celia Cruz, Che Guevara and our poet himself, to contemporary tile mosaic pieces from Manny Vega. We visually situated Pietri in his neighborhood through exploring its political and powerful art, then asked participants to engage with and co-create their own interpretations of that art before reading.

Since Pietri’s best known piece is at once both a gorgeous elegy and a damning indictment of systemic societal injustices facing Puerto Ricans in America, it was key to situate it in the neighborhood that birthed it.

Our brief but relevant dive into the beautiful culture that shaped Pietri’s poetic works allowed us to engage in the trifold way Gloria Ladson Billings articulated for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: first, through learning, that students are growing morally and intellectually; second, through cultural competence, that students are both appreciating and developing fluency other cultures; and third, through critical consciousness, analyzing real world problems, especially those that result in social inequities. 

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Incorporating art and movement

First, we looked at the murals through a “walking tour” of East Harlem: participants spent about 10-15 minutes viewing and engaging with photographs on slides of murals in East Harlem as we briefly shared background knowledge on the artists and their subjects. Then, they “stopped” in front of one (on the screen or in their packet, for they were in both places) and sketched an element (a person, place, thing, color, idea) of a mural that stayed with them on an index card. 
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Second, we included a Literacy Unbound Sculpture Garden moment, where folks paired up and “sculpted” each other into the images they had created on their index cards, allowing each other to embody elements of the art (especially its tone and mood) walking around the room to see each other’s creations and takeaways from the art they viewed.
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Third, we took a reflective moment to share what we noticed, what would stay with us, and what we learned about East Harlem before engaging with Pietri’s poem. 

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An alternative to lecture

​Rather than offering a brief lecture for students to take notes on Pietri or East Harlem, or both, we punctuated key information about the poet with an image of his mural, and the murals of his neighborhood.

We gave participants a space to:

• examine the art,
  
• engage with it, and
  
• recreate a portion of the art.

Making the neighborhood more accessible before reading the poem — via color and key visuals rather than just words and facts — allowed participants to open themselves up to the work of art/poetry in front of them. Participants shared about the vibrance of the art, the political tensions inherent in the art, and the elements of Puerto Rican culture woven throughout the murals. 

Creating small moments of culturally relevant conditions in lieu of a background lecture for engaging with this powerful poem involved researching key visuals from Pietri’s neighborhood, putting them in conversation with each other and participants, and trusting students to pull out important elements and share them meaningfully with each other before reading the poem.

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We know: time is very tight in your lessons, especially in middle and high school classrooms.

We’d like to suggest that, sometimes, you can swap out a lecture or mini lessons for brief, meaningful cultural explorations. The palpable joy of engaging with beautiful art, color, and each other together with students’ meaningful questions about society, culture, and justice will be a powerful experience, and this pedagogy is more likely to bring about lifelong memorable moments students associate with their understanding of your classroom content.