A Critical Reflection on the Challenges of Implementing Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

This work-in-progress is a critical reflection on our first offering of an energy course that reimagines what we teach and how we teach using a lens of culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs). As our interdisciplinary team developed and taught this class for second-year engineering students, we encountered challenges about how to best address systemic inequities in energy education in ways reflective of our own positionalities. In this WIP, we describe several missteps, illustrate how our differences in identities led to productive conflict, and reflect on our progression through deeper understanding of how to implement CSPs successfully. We conclude that critical self-reflection and acknowledging the pervasiveness of White, colonial, and masculine knowledge sources in engineering education is a necessary first step to taking an anti-racist position as an educator.