Books can provide compelling invitations for children to explore global cultures, but how those books are used influences whether readers connect information about a particular global community to that culture's deeper values. Our concerns about reducing the cultural richness of a global community and establishing stereotypes led us to explore…

One quarter of children in the United States live with at least one parent who is an immigrant. Immigrants have a variety of backgrounds and situations including families who are refugees from war-torn countries, families living in the country for graduate school, and families who have lived in the US for multiple years. Immigrants' diversity of…

Spanish is the second most common language among US children aged 5-17, with 26.8% speaking it at home. To foster cultural understanding and promote positive relationships, it's crucial to introduce young children to different languages and cultures. Preschool language education can cultivate respect and empathy, building more inclusive…

By implementing carefully selected children's literature into the current reading curriculum, teachers can help students develop into civic-minded citizens who are willing and able to take meaningful action. Much has been written about the need to link learning and culture in our literacy classrooms (Banks, 1995; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995,…

Children in a grade two/three classroom co-designed photographs of each other's important family objects to develop critical empathy and better understand their peers' home cultures. They engaged in visual critical literacy practices. The paper provides a narrative of what happened and a framework for creative collaborative pedagogy.

In exploring critical practices that center Black girls, families, youth, and communities, along with emancipatory literacies and perspectives, we argue for an intentional focus on understanding the pivotal role of "the digital" in these spaces. Specifically, in this article, we examine how Black youth (specifically Black girls) engage…

The authors describe how Middle Eastern Muslims are represented in a text set of award-winning picture books. Most were written by authors with outsider perspectives who wrote about (a) antiquated times and practices and (b) war-stricken countries and dangerous journeys. Although most of the books are not problematic on their own, the large number…

This article addresses a growing call for the use of more culturally relevant texts and pedagogy in classrooms. We present how a teacher sharing power with emergent bilingual (EB) students during read-aloud discussions with culturally relevant texts supports EB students' literacy opportunities. These opportunities include (1) initiating new topics…

The field of reading instruction has long valued storytelling for literacy development, but what kinds of stories are bi/multilingual students exposed to at school? Through the cognitive phenomena of conceptual metonymy and metaphor, this article links language to identity and exposes practices that act to fracture the identities of…

This article features the literacy practices, resources, and strategies reported and observed in two households, by Latina mothers and their children in elementary school. Drawing on asset-based frameworks (funds of knowledge, transnational literacies, and family language policies), the analysis presents case studies of two households, featuring…

Children's literature text sets can be powerful tools for teaching students about diversity and literacy, engaging students in authentic purposes for literacy practices while exploring complex issues such as Islamophobia. The authors discuss how an intermediate public school teacher integrated a children's literature text set project exploring…

The authors explore the intriguing transnational awareness demonstrated by young students from immigrant families. The authors argue that awareness is an important fund of knowledge and the foundation on which some students build an inclusive view of the world, a view that honors the humanity of people around the world. After exploring the…

The author introduces the Editorial Task Force for Children's Books and discusses its mission, created when the task force was launched in the mid-1960s in Taiwan, to publish children's books for young readers. The messages embedded in such a mission for access to books are not only individually pertinent but also nationally and globally…

Walk a Day in My Shoes is a curricular project designed to provide a starting point for teachers to cultivate cross-cultural understanding among elementary-age students. In this curricular project, students created their own digital stories about a day spent in their shoes. Through photography, writing, and digital storytelling, each student…

In the 21st century, our students increasingly communicate, connect, collaborate, and interact with diverse cultures and traditions around the world, so they need to develop global literacy. This department column highlights research and research-to-practice at the international level to bring global best teaching practices to the forefront.…