Embracing Critical Literacy Epistemology: Honoring Histories through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 3:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Culturally Sustaining and Decolonial Pedagogies: Transforming Indigenous Education Through Community-Driven Research and Educational Reform

Abstract

Honoring our histories is achieved through culturally sustaining pedagogical practices that embrace praxis that resonates languages and cultures. Integrating culturally sustaining and empowering literacy practices extends the focus of reading research. Cultural empowerment bridges our literacy, language and learning by validating lived experiences. Culturally sustaining pedagogies promote racial and ethnic equality across communities and is fundamental to ensuring access and opportunity to marginalized communities. Through critical literacy epistemology, the researcher sought to conceptualize culturally sustaining pedagogical practices as inclusive literacy practices akin reading and literacy research while simultaneously catapulting literacy practices that abound tradition and heritage as spaces to counter deficit perspectives thus magnifying multilingualism, multiliteracy, and multiculturalism to resolve and catapult rich literacy assets further challenging the status quo.

Author

• Isela Almaguer, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley