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In this article, Federico R. Waitoller and Kathleen A. King Thorius extend recent discussions on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) in order to explicitly account for student dis/ability. The authors engage in this work as part of an inclusive education agenda. Toward this aim, they discuss how CSP and universal design for learning will benefit from cross-pollination and then conclude by suggesting interdisciplinary dialogue as a means to building emancipatory pedagogies that attend to intersecting markers of difference (e.g., dis/ability, class, gender, race, language, and ethnicity).
In the spring of 2014, the Harvard Educational Review published a symposium on culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), a pedagogy that aims to sustain children's and youth's cultural and linguistic practices (Editors, 2014; LadsonBillings, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). In this article we extend the symposium discussion to account for student dis/ability in addition to race, ethnicity, language, and class. Accordingly, we discuss how CSP and universal design for learning (UDL), a framework that focuses on eliminating educational barriers for students with dis/abilities (CAST, 2012), will benefit from cross-pollination. We draw from the ways cross-pollination has been defined elsewhere in educational research-as an interchange of ideas (e.g., Thorne, 2008) and as a way to embrace the strengths of both CSP and UDL as pedagogical frameworks-to argue that it will enable existing elements of each framework to remain intact while considerations from one framework extend and enhance ways in which elements from the other have been defined and enacted.
We offer this cross-pollination in response to two education scholarship trends. First, a new wave of asset pedgagogies is emerging, as reflected in CSP (Paris, 2012; Paris 8c Alim, 2014). Ladson-Billings (2014) argues that "it is time for a remix" of asset pedagogies to reflect culture's fluid nature and current demographic and policy contexts, and she "welcomes" CSP "as a way to push forward her original goals of engaging critically in the cultural landscapes of classrooms and teacher education programs" (p. 74). Second, there is a growing interest in and need to interrogate and address educational inequities at the intersections of ability, race, language, gender, and class differences, particularly in inclusive education (e.g., Artiles, Kozleski, 8c Waitoller, 2011), disability studies in education (e.g., Annamma, Connor, 8c Ferri, 2013),...
