Telling Tales for Justice and Equity for Young Children

• In Event: The Pandemic as a Portal: On Transformative Ruptures and (Im)Possible Futures for Education

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic led to schools moving to online platforms, I launched Tell-a-Tale, a live-streamed, biweekly read-aloud program for children. I designed and implemented each episode to include diverse children’s literature, followed by a creative response, and finally a discussion about issues of equity and justice. Applying public pedagogy as a theoretical construct, I used this platform to create a space of “public intellectualism and social activism” (Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011, p. 338). In this paper, I will describe how I used “the pandemic as a portal” (Roy, 2020) to let historically marginalized stories and voices take center-stage.

Author

• Ayesha Rabadi-Raol, Sonoma State University