In this article, we analyze aspects of the complex literacy lives of three Spanish dominant, mainland Puerto Rican kindergartners who were beginning readers at the time of the study. We investigate literacy as a social and cultural practice in the children's bilingual classroom, homes, and churches, describing the people who supported their developing literacy, their beliefs about literacy, and the characteristics of literacy events that the children coconstructed with them. Our analysis is based on data collected with ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviews, and audio recording. At home and in church, the children's developing literacy was supported by a network of people, many of whom believed that reading was about combining sounds into words and that meaning was inherent in text. Literacy events were often social, collaborative interactions as the families created a syncretic literacy by drawing on the multiple resources in their lives, including their religion, their culture, and their knowledge of two languages as well as their experiences in school. Overall, we found both similarities and differences between literacy in school and literacy in the children's homes and community rather than the matches or mismatches described in the literature.

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This article draws from three ethnographic studies of children playing sociodramatically in multilingual, multicultural contexts. Countering a deficit perspective that focuses on what children from nondominant cultures do not know, we use the concept of syncretism to illuminate children's expertise and intentionality as they blend knowledge from multiple worlds to reinvent cultural practices and create new spaces for learning. Findings encourage educators to learn from the syncretic nature of children's teaching and learning through play.

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This article takes a new look at issues of marginalization and equity in literacy practice by focusing on the concept of syncretism and teachers' creation of opportunities for young children to draw on knowledge from multiple worlds as, together, they construct new texts, contexts and practices. Recognizing that the strengths and needs of too many students from minoritized communities are not being met, this piece draws attention to the importance of teachers' appreciation of syncretism as a powerful learning process for challenging discriminatory and exclusionary practices. Drawing on theories of syncretism, and critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, the authors introduce critical syncretism as a process in which teachers and children privilege traditions and practices typically marginalized in schools for the purpose of supporting achievement and broadening worldviews. The article provides examples from two primary-grade classrooms illustrating ways that the teachers made specific moves to change classroom power structures. Whereas White, middle-class, Standard English ways of knowing had been privileged by the school district's choice of instructional materials and recommendations for teaching practice, the teachers' new practices opened up possibilities for syncretism by embracing knowledge, languages, traditions and practices from students' homes, communities and African heritage, as well as from school.