Research Spotlight: Instructor Corey Winchester on Exploring Culturally Revitalizing Pedagogy
Alumnus Corey Winchester (BS10 & MA20) is an instructor and PhD Candidate at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. He also teaches history and social science at Evanston Township High School, where he was a winner of the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Corey Winchester is developing a dissertation project that explores history, identity, and relationships among young people in learning environments. He is currently collecting data in extracurricular settings, which are outside the traditional classroom environment (e.g., student organizations). In his research, Winchester considers how history and identity shape the way young people learn from and with each other in these non-traditional spaces. His work reflects an important shift in our collective understanding of how students’ identities and personal histories interact across educational contexts. Winchester's investigation of pedagogical practices that account for history and identity draws on several learning, sociocultural and pedagogical theories, extending upon contributions most notably proposed by Gloria Ladson-Billings.
Ladson-Billings is Professor Emeritus and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is known for her theory of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), offering educators empirically supported research asserting that good teaching acknowledges and builds on the cultural backgrounds and life experiences students bring into the classroom.
In discussing his research, Winchester highlights how CRP can be used to create a “generative learning environment.” For example, CRP supports educators in cultivating the genius of young peoples’ unique skills and talents when, in years prior, those same skills might have been seen as deficits. At the same time, Winchester notes that CRP has its limitations. “We need culturally sustaining and revitalizing practices, not just responsive ones,” he says. In MSED 402, which will be co-taught by Winchester and Paula Hooper this fall, students complete an Autobiography of Learning. Through this quarter-long project, students reflect on their experiences as learners in and out of the classroom. The task is, in part, an example of a culturally revitalizing and sustaining practice because it offers students the opportunity to reflect deeply on how their identities, lived experiences, and cultural practices have, and continue to shape, their learning, and vice versa. Reflective exercises are not only important for students, but educators, too. In MSED 402, Winchester encourages teacher candidates to unpack their personal narratives and how they are deeply intertwined with, and informed by, their students’ histories in the classroom.
To address the importance of revitalizing and sustaining teaching, Winchester considers how young peoples’ histories within learning environments actively shape the learning environment itself and, in contrast, how that learning environment shapes individual lived experience and long-term learning trajectories. Winchester refers to this as the “process of becoming.” In other words, the process of becoming refers to the ways that young people’s identity development occurs in relationships with others – such as peers, educators, and broader communities. By witnessing this process as a core member of the learning environment that he dually co-facilitates and conducts research in, Winchester is making sense of how past and present interactions inform a developing collective of young people.
“As a traditionally trained high school history teacher, I’m experiencing research as exciting, joyful, and full of promise, especially as we live through the compounding, complex, and challenging realities of this social and political moment,” he said. Building on this, we need research that extends beyond the boundaries of traditional social science teaching and learning that has historically focused on textbooks and rote memorization. Winchester’s research studies the lived possibilities evidenced in understanding individual and collective histories of space, and how we, as educators, can cultivate transformative engagements and interactions for young people and their futures.
To learn more about the intersections of culture and pedagogy, consider taking MS_ED 402/TEACH_ED 302: Social, Cultural, and Linguistic Contexts of Education.