Embedding a Culturally Sustaining Pedagogical Lens to Online Learning

The ACRL Distance and Online Learning Sections (DOLS) Anti-racism and EDI Committee invites you to our Spring 2026 program at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET presentation on Wednesday, March 25! Come explore how to embed a culturally-sustaining pedagogical lens to online learning with Sheila Garcia Mazari, Online Learning Librarian at UC Santa Cruz. In this one-hour interactive presentation, Sheila outlines her approach to building information literacy online tutorials that embed a culturally-sustaining pedagogical (CSP) lens. 

CSP approaches seek to address concerns like those Sheila’s students voiced during a comprehensive listening tour, including feelings of exclusion as they observed lived experiences and ancestral knowledge did not seem welcome in academia. By consistently presenting scholarly sources as the top of a hierarchical system of knowledge value, students can be led to believe that their personal literacies and linguistic worlds are rife with bias, and therefore cannot be used in scholarly research. Sheila will discuss how she created online learning materials that elevate cultural knowledge as well as lived experiences, and how her assessment of these materials has shown how students shift their mental models toward critically examining all sources, engaging with a multiplicity of literacies. 

Participants will engage in a reflection activity and discuss how they may actively integrate CSP in their content. This presentation will not be recorded, so: Register via Zoom and set aside time for this important topic today!

Presenter:

Sheila García Mazari (she/her) is the Online Learning Librarian at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sheila has a decade of experience in public and academic libraries and is both a 2016 American Library Association (ALA) Spectrum Scholar and a 2019 ALA Emerging Leader.