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.

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.

Many Black, Latinx, multiracial and ethnically diverse, first-generation college students turned PhDs-tie their academic success, achievements, and ability to navigate the difficult terrain of higher education back to the critical experiences and lessons learned in their home lives and through their cultural backgrounds. For them, culture matters. This book offers an opportunity for an anti-deficit and positive examination of (Black, Latinx, and multiracial) culture and its role in creating educational efficacy among academics of color. Through personal narrative, educational and learning theory, creative writing/poetry, this hybrid text examines the cultural path to the doctorate. Transformative practice should be guided by an understanding of how an appreciation of a faculty member's cultural, life, and social experiences can be used to establish a healthy environment that will better appreciate, engage, and retain faculty of color. Along these lines, this text also considers how cultural, life and social experiences translate into pedagogy, mentorship and value as faculty of color.