Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

As I critically reflect on these questions, and countless others like it, I am reminded that there are no shortcuts, no checklists, and no guidelines to culturally sustaining literacy instruction for young learners. One cannot merely ascribe to a list of characteristics, strategies, principles and practices and emerge victorious in the substance of culture for students. The deeply personal, dynamic, evolving, and nonconforming nature of CSP requires one to be curious, combative, and committed to CSP as a conceptual and empirical project (Paris & Alim, 2017). And though I offer strategies below for moving toward culturally sustaining practice in early childhood literacy, to be clear, these ideas represent merely a single leaf within the family tree that guides the ongoing, necessary, transformative, and exhilarating work towards culturally sustaining pedagogy. Storytelling with Young Learners Although common in early childhood classrooms, stories and storytelling- like other prevalent early literacy practices- are often couched within the context of exclusionary school curricula and based on the practices and values of the dominant culture (Hollins, 2015; Long, Souto-Manning & Vasquez, 2016). The stories that are most frequently told, and the ways in which they are relayed in the early childhood classroom, serve to reinforce mainstream ideology, elevate Whiteness and send messages of inferiority about people of Color (Hollins, 2015). Opportunities to make connections to culture through storytelling within the curriculum are often overlooked, ignored or vaguely referenced (Hibbin, 2016). According to Hibbin (2016) this hegemony of literacy devalues language and literacy forms that are closely connected to the cultural practice of storytelling that is ubiquitous within communities of Color. Since literacy acquisition is closely tied to the authentic learning experiences within one’s community (Heath, 1983; Ochs, 1988) multi-dimensional conceptions of literacy are necessary to recognize the rich and varied linguistic repertories children bring to the classroom (Gee, 2004; Hibbin, 2016). Storytelling allows us to sustain and expand those innate abilities. In the following sections, I describe three types of stories that can be used to support culturally sustaining literacy instruction in early childhood classrooms. Identity Stories Identity stories are native to the early childhood classroom. Young children enjoy and naturally gravitate towards stories with which they can relate, compare and connect. Identity stories, or personal stories written about one’s self, “blend languages, dialects, images, and sound that reflect the hybrid ways that children make sense of the world” (Machado, 2017, p. 318). For a young child whose concepts of self and community are in progress, an identity text can act as an ambassador, holding a mirror up to the child and reflecting her identity in a positive light (Cummins et al., 2006). When teachers draw on the breadth of children’s linguistic and cultural repertoires through the use of identity stories, they are able to “support students in strategically accessing knowledge, language, and literacy practices from their homes, schools, and communities” (Machado, 2017, p. 318).

Toward Culturally Sustaining Literacy in Early Childhood Literacy Our family tree situates culturally sustaining pedagogy as leaves or fruit produced from a healthy, vibrant, and vigorous system of deeply embedded roots of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous thought, branches of asset theories and based pedagogies, and the legal reforms and sociopolitical movements that sprout from a sturdy, metaphorical trunk . Firmly planted in the rich and fertile soil sown by the stories of our scholarly ancestors, culturally sustaining pedagogy “seeks to perpetuate and foster- to sustain- linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation and revitalization.” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 1). It acts as a “counterstory to the myth of acultural teaching” (Souto-Manning & Rabidi-Raol, 2018, p. 213) and calls for schools to be “site(s) for sustaining -rather than eradicating- the cultural ways of being of communities of Color.” (Paris & Alim, 2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogy calls on educators to recognize the knowledge, agency, and ability of children to confront the oppressive and internalized messages they receive in school and society (Gutiérrez & Johnson, 2017). In choosing to focus on CSP, we shift “the discourse of who the mainstream is” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 6), and who in turn yields power within the community, by normalizing and centering early literacy practices that allow equal access and opportunity for children of Color while decentering the White, middle-class linguistic, literate, and cultural ways of being as a singular gatekeeper to success (Delpit, 1988; Paris & Alim, 2014). In upholding the key features of CSP we heed the call to: 1) center multilingual, multicultural practices and knowledge within communities of Color; 2) promote and support agency and input from children, their families, and communities, 3) connect classroom learning to the histories of racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities, as well as the histories of neighborhoods, cities, states and nation states in which they live, 4) acknowledge and contend with internalized oppression, counter messages, and systems that view marginalized as the problem, and 5) integrate these features into the early classrooms with which we study, work, learn, and grow. As I journey toward CSP, my story is shaped by its features and emboldened by its challenge to question, to interrogate, to disrupt and to problematize schools as complicit in the continuation of the colonial project. I am driven by the call to reimagine schools “as crucial sites of advocacy for freedom and legitimization of the continued struggles of all marginalized people” (Turner Nash, Polite Glover, & Polson, 2020, p. 9). Going about that work requires that I yield to the gentle nudge of my ancestral scholars who ask? What is it that we seek to sustain through CSP? ( Paris & Alim, 2014) What is the purpose of schooling in a pluralistic society? (Paris & Alim, 2017) How do we eradicate systems of injustice and “honor, leverage, and sustain the infinite capacity of young children of Color?” (Souto-Manning & Rabadi, 2018, p. 214).

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