ABSTRACT
Davenport’s chapter is a deeply sensitive account of young children engaging in ecological literacy opportunities in an orchard. The complexity of life, both plant and animal, and of the roles of young observers and their teachers helps us gain insights into the ways in which young children are taught by the context of an environment. Young children are also taught by the cultural contexts into which they are born as they interact with their families and communities who acculturate them into language(s), rites, histories, and traditions. Over the last year, Christine observed with much interest and some trepidation as her grandson, age 5, made the transition from a pre-school day care program to kindergarten. As an American Indian educator, Christine’s concern was not so much whether her grandson was ready for school, but rather whether school was ready for him. Were the teachers ready to receive and accept his rich experiences of learning drawn from his first years of growing up in a Pueblo Indian family and community environment? Or would the hegemony of mainstream education curricula snuff out the unique understandings and emerging cultural literacy he and other Indigenous children were beginning to learn from a Pueblo Indian context? We use the term cultural literacy here to expand and challenge some commonly
held notions of what children should know in anticipation of starting formal schooling. The term is also in response to the overwhelming emphasis placed on “school readiness” for children at increasingly younger ages. One common expectation tied to this notion is the idea that children should have a certain degree of early exposure to English literacy in order to be successful in school. For children who come from diverse backgrounds, languages, and cultures, these expectations imply that children need to be exposed primarily to English-based materials early on in their formative years, in the belief that this will help mitigate some of the “gaps” that put such children “at risk” for failing in school.
