Decolonizing Traditional Reading Instructional Practices: A Culturally Sustaining View and Approach to Literacy (Room 406)

Decolonize Reading Instructional Practices: A Culturally Sustenance View and Approach to Literacy
as a collective, we have conceptualized a Cultural Sustenance View of Reading (CSVR) based on our evaluation of the literature and through co-examining, over time, the way the practitioner-authors implement culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs) within classroom instructional and assessment practices in two schools.

The CSVR model represents reading as shaped by a reader's culturally and linguistically mediated knowledge (ways of knowing), experiences and relationships (ways of being), and strategic reading processes (ways of reading). We will elucidate the model by focusing on classroom examples illustrating ways of knowing, being, and reading. In offering this model and extending examples, we hope to dialogue with other educators about how with children at the center of reading, learning to read can be a humanizing and culturally sustaining event that centers children’s, families', and communities cultures and lifeways toward decolonizing traditional approach to reading instruction and where cultural sustenance is the norm. 

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