2022/04/04 by Margaret R. Beneke, Emily Machado, Jordan Taitingfong
Social Sciences · #Critical Race Theory in Education #Early Childhood Education and Development #Education Discipline and Inequality
paper · doi:10.1177/00420859221091235
crossref issued 2022/04/04 · crossref published 2022/04/04 · crossref published-online 2022/04/04 · openalex publication_date 2022/04/04 · crossref created 2022/04/04 · crossref published-print 2024/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/05/01 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Although literacy can be a space for joy and criticality, urban early literacy classrooms are imbued with carceral logics, criminalizing young children along lines of race, disability, and language. To support teachers in enacting liberatory early literacy pedagogies, teacher educators must contend with the harm dominant literacy approaches can produce for multiply-marginalized young children. We describe how early literacy routines are (1) constructed for an imagined “normal child” through white, nondisabled, English-dominant perceiving practices; and (2) enforced through carceral logics. Teacher educators can cultivate urban teachers’ liberatory pedagogical tools, centering multiply-marginalized young children's power and agency so they might flourish.