Sociopolitical Comprehension Instruction: Using Multicultural Children's Literature to Engage Experiential Knowledge as Intellectual Meaning-Making

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Prioritizing Culture and Community in Literacy Learning (Table 20)

Abstract

The current climate of K-12 education in the U.S. has seen a narrowing of literacy instructional practices, exponential amounts of book bans, and contrived hysteria about liberal indoctrination and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Yet, as the world becomes increasingly connected across difference, space, and time, it is urgent that classroom teachers foreground children’s experiential knowledge in comprehension instruction. In this paper, we address the following question: How do early elementary literacy educators integrate the exploration of sociopolitical issues into children’s reading comprehension development during read-alouds? Three teacher educators of color share findings from three qualitative studies in the U.S. Northeast and Southwest that examine this integration with the use of multicultural children’s literature.

Authors

• Saba Khan Vlach, University of Iowa

• María G. Leija, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Wintre Foxworth Johnson, University of Virginia