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Educators of young students who want to invigorate relationships with students' families and boost student literacy can do so by cocreating culturally sustaining texts. A culturally sustaining text seeks to sustain a reader's cultures, literacies, and backgrounds. The author shares step-by-step instructions on how to make a culturally sustaining text with students and their families using photos from the students' neighborhoods and a language experience approach. Four major outcomes were found: School personnel increased their understanding of students' home context, families were more willing to come into school, schools and families built relationships that paved the way for future communication, and students gained a culturally sustaining text to support their literacy learning.

Lack of representation of children from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds continues to be problematic in children's literature, and especially within early literacy texts for beginning readers. One remedy is for children to tell their own stories through the language experience approach, which can then be printed into culturally relevant texts and used for beginning reading material in classrooms. To truly capture a student's story, especially if the student is an emergent bilingual, a teacher must listen very closely and take care when adjusting the child's story. Two Bakhtinian concepts support the careful examination of a teacher's scribing of story in this study: chronotope, used here as the time-space sphere above the text, and revoicing, or the retelling of a child's story that is paraphrased or altered. Findings show that gesture within the chronotope of the story is an especially generative tool for student storytelling and that teachers must reflect closely on intentional or unintentional reasons for revoicing a child's story. Language experience approach holds possibilities for the creation of children's culturally relevant texts. As such, it is important that teachers reflect on their language experience approach techniques so that the book remains true to the child's story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-service teachers often learn to teach in siloed methods courses despite evidence that interdisciplinary pedagogies benefit elementary school students. To address this discrepancy, six teacher educators initiated a two-year self-study to improve their practice. They co-created a shared module to integrate technology, literacy, and science content. The self-study was designed to answer the research question: what are the successes and challenges of implementing an interdisciplinary module within an elementary teacher education program? Findings relate to three main categories: teacher education pedagogies, use of technology tools, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Areas of promise for future integration are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]