From Cultural Hegemony to Cultural Celebration: A Journey with My Students

When I first entered the classroom as an educator—and as an immigrant who had experienced a rigid, test-driven schooling system in India—I carried a deep respect for academic rigor. But over time, I began to see how education could also be used to silence, erase, or “correct” students whose languages and identities didn’t match the dominant narrative. This realization led me to the work of Antonio Gramsci, particularly his concept of cultural hegemony—the subtle ways dominant groups maintain power by making their worldview seem like “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971).

In many schools, this shows up in how English is positioned as the only valid language for learning, or how curriculum centers Eurocentric perspectives. English learners are often asked to leave parts of themselves at the classroom door. I started asking myself: What if my classroom could be a space where students don’t have to trade in their culture or language to be “successful”?

Over the past year, I’ve worked intentionally to shift from reinforcing cultural hegemony to actively celebrating cultural diversity. We use translanguaging strategies, share stories from home, and co-create bilingual word walls. Students teach each other words from their languages, and family interviews become tools for learning social studies. What I’ve found is that when students see their own culture reflected in the classroom, their confidence, voice, and curiosity grow exponentially.

This shift is deeply informed by culturally sustaining pedagogy, which aims not just to “include” diverse cultures, but to support students in sustaining and growing their linguistic and cultural practices (Paris & Alim, 2017). As Freire (1970/2000) argued, education should be a practice of freedom—not assimilation.

This shift hasn’t always been easy. It means rethinking resources, challenging assumptions, and sometimes facing resistance. But it also means planting seeds of liberation. As Gramsci reminds us, change happens slowly—but it starts when we stop treating school as a neutral space and start seeing it as a place of possibility.

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1970)

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. Teachers College Press.