Taking a Journey to The Land of All: Using Children’s Literature to Explore Gender Identity and Expression with Young Children

Children’s literature is a powerful tool that helps shape young children’s understandings of themselves and the world. As such, children’s literature can help young children develop deeper and more nuanced understandings about gender, gender identity, and gender expression. This article shares how teacher Kerry Elson planned and implemented a curriculum with first-grade students that focused on gender identity and expression. In this curriculum, she carefully selected children’s literature to explore gender identity and expression with young children

Engaging Children and Families in Culturally Relevant Literacies

This article offers theoretical and practical strategies for engaging families, communities, and young children in culturally relevant and responsive early literacies. The authors highlight findings from data collected in their own classrooms and with families and communities for the Professional Dyads in Culturally Relevant (PDCRT) teaching project,[1] a collaborative research partnership (2013-2015) between teacher educator-teacher dads [2] aimed at generating, investigating, and documenting culturally relevant/responsive practices for early childhood contexts. [1]The PDCRT was initiated by Affirmative Action Committee of the Early Childhood Education Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). [2]University-School Partner

This is not the Urban Cohort: A Performance Narrative in Four Acts

  This performance narrative, and the analysis and implications that follow, was constructed from data collected during a year-long critical ethnography of foregrounding race and racism in a preservice literacy methods course. It was written as a medium to create anti-racist interventions within thirdspaces (Soja, 2010) in higher education classrooms, spaces where possibilities for understanding and changing the way race and racism shape and distort educational contexts can emerge