ABSTRACT
Many teachers consider read-alouds a critical component of the literacy and social curriculum in their classrooms, and we find increasing evidence that teachers have begun integrating culturally conscious literature into their classroom libraries in an effort to enact culturally responsive and/or critical pedagogy (e.g., Lehr & Thompson, 2000; Leland, et al., 2003; MacPhee, 1997). After the “multicultural literature” is chosen for reading, however, a critical process for promoting responsiveness is too often overlooked. Teachers, who are disproportionately White, tend to read to and with children in ways that fail to acknowledge the depth of diversity in worldviews, attentiveness, and discourses (Bateson, 1994). If the NCTE resolution, “On the Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (SRTOL), is to be followed, one feature of read-alouds worth examining is the degree to which the talk encouraged between children and teachers actually taps into the discourse styles familiar to children and validates the worldviews they, as children and as members of diverse communities, hold. In this chapter, we describe how a study of culturally diverse first graders’ responses to classroom read-alouds helped us identify principles that might guide other teachers’ choices as they work to create culturally responsive read aloud settings for young children.
