I am fascinated by Shange’s theorization of the metaphor that is used to encapsulate how students of color are put into a disadvantageous spot due to cultural and sociopolitical factors. Various kinds of inequities weave together to challenge Black and Latinx students’ access to resources affording their success. Shange challenges several popular metaphors: school-to-prison pipeline (STPP), school-to-prison neux, and enclosure (55), arguing that these heuristics fail to accurately address the relationship between the educational system and incarceration that, under the context of Robeson Justice Academy, is complicated by its “interrelationships with the non-profit sphere, private philanthropy, and leftist social movements” (55). Even though I cannot fully capture her abstraction without reading the entire ethnography, I feel like her choice of the pathway as the infrastructural metaphor indicates that the complexity of inequity cannot be reduced to a general metaphor because it is situation-specific. Therefore, we need to be cautious of directly plastering classic metaphor that describes a situation-specific environment onto a new one with unique cultural and political specificities.
Moreover, in Shange’s analysis, she mentions culturally sustaining pedagogy, which is similar to the culturally responsive pedagogy I am learning right now. I think it would be helpful to provide one kind of its description. Ladson-Billings (1995) proposed three dimensions of culturally relevant pedagogy: holding high academic expectations and offering appropriate support such as scaffolding; acting on cultural competence by reshaping curriculum, building on students’ funds of knowledge, and establishing relationships with students and their homes; and cultivating students’ critical consciousness regarding power relations (quote from the article: Confronting the Marginalization of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy).