Dialogue 1: Literacies for Liberation

• In Event: Reimagining Diversity, Equity, and Justice in Early Childhood

Abstract

Literacy – the modes one uses to communicate – can be a powerful tool for connection, belonging, and agency. At the same time, evaluations and measures of competence continue to marginalize the way multilingual (e.g. language, dialects, vernaculars) children are read. In this dialogue, contributors will discuss the ways reading, writing, and other communicative tools are deployed by young children in early childhood classrooms. Through writing, play, and visual materials, contributors challenge where and when literacy is acquired and cultivated. Expanding the frame to include children’s funds of knowledge – church, home, after school programs, books, popular culture, neighborhoods/communities – this dialogue reframes deficit views of children’s capacities and centers the sustained and repeated ways that children participate in communities of practice with families, peers, and community members.

With reignited debates about the “science” of reading, the conversation here aims to document how multilingual children maneuver and learn language. With bans of specific curricula to the standardization of language arts instruction, the contributors in this section draw from research in schools that demonstrate children enacting rich vernaculars, dialects, and communicative repertoires of ethnic and racial diasporic communities. Yet, beyond understanding children’s capacities, how do we design curricula that supports children’s varied linguistic dimensions while simultaneously providing them access to the language of power? How do researchers and educators speak to these on-going debates? We wonder if at the nexus of multiliterate practices, including “schooled” literacies as one of those elements, we contribute to expanding what counts as literacy.

Authors

• Anne Haas Dyson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Brittany Frieson, University of Texas at Austin

• Roberta P. Gardner, Kennesaw State University

• Carmen Lugo Llerena, Teachers College, Columbia University