A Family Affair: Supporting the Communicative Capital and Writerly Identities of Young Children

This study investigates the ways in which multilingual parents/caregivers support their young children’s emerging identities as writers and communicators at home, within the context of a virtual early literacy program for families of a historically marginalized community near the U.S. border with Mexico. The study’s focus is on a set of multimodal compositions that four-year-old children authored during one of the virtual, videoconference sessions. The researchers employed a discourse analysis approach in examining the transcripts of the virtual sessions, which was guided by the theoretical concepts of community cultural wealth and the pedagogical concept of accompaniment. Their analysis offers a counter narrative to the deficit governmental descriptors (e.g., low-income; low-achieving) assigned to children and families of historically marginalized communities. The parents in their study were well-equipped to enact pedagogies of accompaniment that cultivate their children’s communicative capital and foster their children’s identities as capable communicators

Enlaces in Reflections and (Re)memberings as Latina Border-Crossers: Journeys of Childhood and Professional Un/Welcomings

We are humbled to be part of this special issue honoring the life work of Jonathan Silin. His scholarship and activism have opened spaces for future generations, like our own, to share our testimonios. We are straddling between being former early childhood teachers and current teacher educators—between our profe lives and our everyday lived experiences as Latina border crossers. Testimonios, which we engage in for this piece, have herstorically captured intimate tellings that connect individual struggles and strengths to the larger collective (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001). It is in these testimonios that women of color (and in our case, Latina) scholars have felt hospitality and welcoming. Although our tellings may be painful to write and read, Lorde (1984) and Anzaldúa (1987) remind us that we must write for survival and tell our stories in our own words. In that way, we acknowledge the deep intergenerational wounds felt by Latinx peoples and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), while providing a means for conocimiento/healing