Unlearning Confusing Constructs of Literacy and Cultivating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in the Early Literacy Classroom

• In Event: Toward a Future of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Early Literacy Classrooms

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
Our current literacy climate is saturated with scripted curricula, the rhetoric of “pandemic learning loss,” book bans, and anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) policies against the backdrop of the U.S. federal celebration of Juneteenth. Teachers are facing increasing and confusing pressures to limit, yet expand opportunities to teach in and learn from a pluralistic society like the U.S. The current literacy climate makes Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy or CSP (Author, 2012) particularly vital, especially among early literacy educators, who work with our youngest learners in schools and communities. Therefore, this conceptual paper explores the following question: What is required of early literacy teachers who strive to enact CSP in their early literacy teaching contexts? Furthermore, I extend Authors’ (2017) question: “What is the purpose of schooling in pluralistic societies?” to include, “What is the purpose of early literacy schooling in pluralistic societies for early literacy educators?

Theoretical Perspectives
Building from Gloria Ladson-Billings’ 1995 “landmark article, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” Author (2012), discussed how “culturally relevant pedagogy,” gave coherence to resource pedagogies, which had been building in the 1970s and 1980s, thereby honoring the decades of teaching and learning for justice work that preceded him. Resource pedagogies, Author (2012) articulated, are concerned with being “relevant” and “responsive” to the teaching and learning needs in “languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality” (p. 93). Resource pedagogies center, value, and learn from Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian ways of being, knowing, and doing in schools and communities (Ball, 1995; Garcia, 1993; Lee, 1995; McCarty & Zepeda, 1995; Moll & Gonzales, 1994; Valdes, 1996). Resource pedagogies also unapologetically reject deficit constructs that dominate education discourse as well as teaching and learning practices and policies that are undergirded by the maintenance of white supremacy through state-sanctioned standardization and assimilation. Thus, Author (2012) argued for a change in stance, terminology, and practice to extend the work of culturally relevant pedagogies. By way of stance, CSP (Author, 2012) actively attends to “the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society” (p. 93). In both theory and practice, CSP “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (p. 93). In doing so, CSP makes space for linguistic and cultural pluralism in schools and communities.

Scholarly Relevance/Significance
I enter this conversation as a literacy educator and teacher educator with almost two decades of teaching and learning experiences across K-12 and university contexts in various regions of the U.S. In exploring the two aforementioned questions, I offer insights and implications for how U.S regional context shapes if and how early literacy educators approach early literacy as a pluralistic project in schools and communities. Future pathways toward consequential early research directions are also explored.

Author

• Sakeena Everett, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author