ABSTRACT
Through each chapter of this book, we advocated for a transformative lens on early childhood education which values the linguistic and cultural repertoires of learners who speak different languages at home other than at school. In this final chapter, we highlight select findings from the research and practice examined in our book that we believe can move us forward and push the boundaries of our conversation about supporting the rights of emergent bilingual and multilingual learners and families. We challenge the traditional approach of highlighting English as the target language in the classroom, while sacrificing the cultural and linguistic rights of children and their families. We unravel the whitewashedness and middle-class White privilege that penetrates our early childhood centers. We challenge the covert and overt hidden curricular assumption of English being the most important object of learning, which ignores the need for validating the family literacy and home languages of children. We recognize and encourage more research on the critical importance of teaching with cultural humility and being mindful about unconscious bias and stereotyping. Furthermore, we must confront racist, reductionist, and deficit perspectives regarding cultures and languages. We aim to push the boundaries of our thinking, our theories of change, and our theories of learning by challenging ourselves to consider radical change, as Lee-Johnson stated in Chapter 10, to contest inequities that exist in the power structure and hierarchies of our typical U.S. contexts.
