ABSTRACT
The subtle and seemingly inconsequential decisions that teachers make daily can profoundly affect the learning of culturally diverse children. Understanding the home literacy environments of children from diverse cultural and linguistic groups can help teachers understand how the everyday lessons, environment, and activities they create for children contribute to or impede literacy development. The starting point for making decisions about literacy must be for teachers to assume a stance of inquiry (Edelsky, 1991), which recognizes that the school's way of knowing may not be the way of knowing for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Rodríguez and Berryman (2002) argued that teachers may be resistant and opposed to “student-centered, inquiry-based, or social constructivist pedagogical strategies” because they may be opposed to “teaching as a vehicle for establishing social justice in our society; that is, teaching as a vehicle for students to use knowledge for self-empowerment and transformative action” (p. 1018) The task, then, for teachers is to understand their commitment to culturally sensitive teaching, to listen to stu-dents, to find out about their lives and culture, and to make space for their literacy practices. The single most important aspect of culturally sensitive teaching is for teachers to learn about the educational resources the children bring with them as well as the literacy practices of their cultures (Moll, 1992; Weinstein-Shr, 1995).
