Re-envisioning Family Engagement and Literacy in Early Childhood Classrooms

Families are resources that are extremely powerful and important for young learners from minoritized backgrounds, yet such families are often overlooked, silenced, or ostracized. This book presents a much-needed framework for family and community engagement in the early childhood and elementary literacy classroom that embraces and foregrounds students' unique cultural backgrounds. This book spotlights the families of minoritized learners and the crucial role that they play in building dynamic and inspiring environments for learning. To re-envision the engagement of these families in the early childhood classroom, the book provides an accessible understanding of Yosso's theory of community cultural wealth. Covering key topics such as children's literature and digital tools, the book features strategies for implementing culturally responsive classroom practices to create positive home-school partnerships. Each chapter highlights one type of capital in community cultural wealth-aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant-and gives teachers guidance on working with and supporting the efforts of families both inside and outside of the classroom. This book is an essential resource to inform current and future early childhood educators on how to gain deeper understandings of what families-especially from Communities of Color-already are doing for the education of their children, and how best to support them.

Julia López-Robertson is Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina, USA. Melissa Summer Wells is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Mary Washington, USA.

Author Biographies Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Al principio: Knowing Teachers, Knowing Families Our Cuentos Chapter 2: Porque hací ya conocemos: Re-envisioning Family Engagement and Literacy in Early Childhood Classrooms Chapter 3: Sueños for Our Children's Future: Aspirational Capital Chapter 4: Language from el corazón: Linguistic Capital Chapter 5: Familial Capital: The Richness of familia Chapter 6: Together in comunidad: Social Capital Chapter 7: Making mapas: Navigational Capital Chapter 8: Sí se puede: Resistant Capital Chapter 9: Conclusion: Voces in Action: Using Community Cultural Wealth to Engage in Action Appendix A: Analysis of CCW Themes in Selected Children's Literature