Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Early Literacy Pedagogies and Our Futures: Dynamic Stories and Practices from PK-6 Communities

Abstract

Culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs) are part of an evolving and collective movement that fundamentally reimagines “a more loving and just” pluralistic future of education. Five features of CSPs in contexts with children from PK-Grade 6, which are always in motion, have been identified by CSP scholars (Eagle-Shield et al., 2020; Nash et al., 2022; Paris, 2017b; Paris, 2021):
1. Critically centering children’s literacies, languages, and knowledge in curriculum
in and out of classroom and community spaces
2. Valuing children’s and communities’ agency and input so that we are accountable
to the communities we serve
3. Historicizing content and instruction to connect learning to the histories of racial,
ethnic, and linguistic communities, neighborhoods and cities, and the larger states and nation-states
4. Building children’s and our own capacity to contend with internalized oppressions
and to counter messages and systems that suggest that marginalized students
and families are the problem and that value White, middle-class, monolingual, monocultural norms
5. Working with children and communities to sustain right, reciprocal relationships
with the land and water
Co-editors of a forthcoming book will briefly provide an overview of each of the five features of CSELPs. Then the symposium panel will offer layered illustrations of each of these features across contexts. Examples of these features are needed ever more now because educational contexts, as part of a white colonizing project and in a time of increasing racial backlash (Patel, 2015b), are spirit-murdering spaces for children of Color (Love, 2016). We see this overt and covert Eurocratic violence reflected in legislated omissions, erasures, and silences about the full histories of this country (King, 2020), the preschool-to-prison-nexus (Bryan et al., 2022), and grossly inequitable (and recently increasing cuts to) public school funding (Epstien, 2011). A primary goal with the proposed book is to create a refreshing and needed counterspace, a shelter from spirit-murdering and curriculum violence, a space for sustenance.

Authors

• Sandra Lucia Osorio, Erikson Institute

• Sakeena Everett, University of Connecticut

• Kindel Turner Nash, Appalachian State University

• Shanan H. Fitts, Appalachian State University

• Bilal Polson, Northern Parkway School

• Greg McClure, Appalachian State University