Toward Culturally Sustaining Teaching: Early Childhood Educators Honor Children with Practices for Equity and Change

Demonstrating equitable practices and strategies that move toward culturally sustaining teaching such as translanguaging, explorations of children’s literature, alternative modes of literacy assessment, photography and arts integration, student-driven poetry units, and more, this book shares the stories of four teacher-teacher dyads who worked together across university-school contexts to study, generate, and evaluate culturally relevant and sustaining literacy practices in early childhood classrooms across the country. Highlighting the voices and roles of children, families, community members, and teachers of Color, this book suggests new ways for all teachers to build and sustain relationships that are relevant and work toward being sustaining; and anticipates and offers solutions for challenges that arise in these contexts. Insightful and instructive, the narratives in this collection model how to create positive and mutually beneficial dynamics among teachers, children, and their families and communities.

This book offers a timely resource for pre-service teachers, teachers, scholars, faculty, and graduate students in language and literacy education, early childhood education, and culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining teaching.