A common model for connecting theory to practice within literacy teacher preparation programs involves preservice teachers (PTs) working in field-based courses to contextualize their learning. Field-based courses create hybrid spaces for personalizing curricula and following students’ lead outside of the pressures of normal classrooms. Researchers note that although PTs have found field-based courses in diverse, minority school settings helpful, many PTs feel unprepared to work with diverse populations. There is a need for literacy teacher preparation programs to enhance field experiences and incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) within coursework. Few studies, however, have explicitly examined the role of CSP in literacy courses or field-based coursework. Moreover, even coursework intended to prepare teachers to work in diverse settings often centers the experiences of White PTs and reinforces pedagogical practices associated with White cultural and academic norms. In this qualitative case study, we explore the potential of experiences in field-based teacher education courses to disrupt White values, traditions, and curricular norms when CSP is centered and when PTs have the opportunity to work with, and learn from, young students. Findings highlight innovative ways three PTs worked in community with young students and built innovative curricula around their students’ funds of knowledge: by restorying deficit narratives about students’ literacies, following students’ lead into multimodal literacies, and bridging linguistic differences through translanguaging.

Reading teachers and teacher educators are the latest to blame in public discourse for reading failure in the United States. In March 2019, Pearson Education released the draft of the Science of Teaching Reading Examination Framework for Texas, and the state’s teachers and teacher educators were called on to revise courses and programs in alignment. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the narratives drawn on to position teachers and teacher educators as struggling and the partiality of these narratives from our perspective as both professionally responsible and anti‐racist educators. The authors present three counterstories that exhibit how teachers and teacher educators are exceeding the expectations of the framework by foregrounding more complex, social justice–focused perspectives on readers and reading. The authors argue for the inclusion of professionals using anti‐oppressive and contextualized professional knowledge and practices to move the field forward.

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Changes in the U.S. demographics over the past few decades reflect the growing diversity in American classrooms as more students come to school speaking, reading, or writing two or more languages. By building on students’ full repertoire of linguistic and cultural resources, educators have the potential to transform literacy instruction in multilingual classrooms. This article showcases four tenets of culturally sustaining teaching and details how preservice teachers in a reading practicum enacted these four tenets by recognizing and building on bi/multilingual students’ linguistic and cultural strengths. The article concludes with a discussion of how these enactments suggest new possibilities for literacy educators in similar contexts.

The pandemic revealed inequities facing educators; in response, a district/university partnership hired seven external mentor/teacher leaders (TLs) to support 100+ early career teachers (ECTs). Drawing on sociocultural theories and a critical discourse analysis of 10 hour-long discussions among mentors, we sought to understand their collectively constructed understandings of systemic inequities facing ECTs. Findings indicate TLs collectively constructed meaning by evoking differing perspectives to make sense of these inequities and working to define their locus of control or ways they could provide support to the ECTs. Implications indicate what is necessary for mentoring in response to professional inequities in schools.