Katy transforms storytime: Culturally sustaining pedagogy in the community

Abstract

The increasingly diverse population of young children in the U.S. requires innovative culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy practices in early childhood education. Through parent-child ethnography, we share two stories of a multilingual and multicultural mother and daughter who created and enacted new storytelling practices in the context of community storytime. We analyze the stories through the dual lenses of sociocultural theory and culturally sustaining pedagogy and find powerful opportunities for culturally sustaining pedagogy when a child and parent are invited to share stories from their heritage cultures and encouraged to take leadership in developing and enacting multilingual pedagogies in educational spaces. We offer implications for future research for a deeper understanding of culturally sustaining pedagogy through sociocultural theory in the field of early childhood education.