Between Cultural Literacy and Cultural Relevance: A Culturally Pragmatic Approach to Reducing the Black-White Achievement Gap

Abstract

This chapter introduces a culturally pragmatic approach to reducing the Black-White achievement gap, which marries Hirsch Jr.’s cultural literacy with Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy. This approach offers African American students the taken-for-granted knowledge required to succeed academically and navigate mainstream society while simultaneously utilizing and validating African American culture in the classroom. In addition, it seeks to encourage students to view the world with a critical consciousness, which questions and challenges the sociopolitical order. The chapter starts by examining the strengths and weaknesses of Hirsch’s approach through a comparative analysis with the ideas of Bourdieu and Freire. Next, the need for a pragmatic approach to the education of African American students, that is free of dogmatic and political constraints, is discussed. The chapter then turns its attention to examining how the culturally pragmatic model, by combining cultural literacy with culturally relevant pedagogy, is able to create synergy between the two approaches and also have each make up for the educational blind spots of the other. The chapter ends by exploring an alternative explanation for the motivating factors that engender oppositional culture among Black American students. Rather than an adaptation to pessimism about African Americans’ prospects on the job market, oppositional culture is presented as a strategy to protect the self-concept in response to an uneven educational playing field, for which culturally pragmatic education is presented as a possible remedy.