Dismantling Carceral Logics in the Urban Early Literacy Classroom: Towards Liberatory Literacy Pedagogies with/for Multiply-Marginalized Young Children

Abstract

Although literacy can be a space for joy and criticality, urban early literacy classrooms are imbued with carceral logics, criminalizing young children along lines of race, disability, and language. To support teachers in enacting liberatory early literacy pedagogies, teacher educators must contend with the harm dominant literacy approaches can produce for multiply-marginalized young children. We describe how early literacy routines are (1) constructed for an imagined “normal child” through white, nondisabled, English-dominant perceiving practices; and (2) enforced through carceral logics. Teacher educators can cultivate urban teachers’ liberatory pedagogical tools, centering multiply-marginalized young children's power and agency so they might flourish.

“Rise Up, Hand in Hand”: Early Childhood Teachers Writing a Liberatory Literacy Pedagogy

“…We also regularly explored texts (e.g., picture books and films) from marginalized creators that centered resistance, joy, and belonging. We continuously sought to destabilize power dynamics between researchers and participants, naming our complicity in inequitable systems (Beneke et al, 2022b). For instance, we critiqued artifacts (e.g., anchor charts) from our former classrooms, putting ourselves in vulnerable positions before asking teachers to do so.…”

“…In a breakout room with Nadia and Jordan, Amrutha shared that her school administration mandated that teachers send welcome letters to families of next year's students. They had supplied her with a formulaic example letter that highlighted a hierarchical classroom management system, reproducing historical narratives that marginalized children need to be controlled (Beneke et al, 2022b). Amrutha told the group, ''I don't like the example welcome letter.…”

“…As they negotiated harmful educational pasts and rewrote the future, their writing also disrupted the expected content of traditional pedagogical genres. For instance, Amrutha grappled with histories that have positioned literacy classrooms as spaces of control (Beneke et al, 2022b) as she resisted the formulaic welcome letter in content and style. Instead, she laid a foundation for a more liberatory literacy classroom as she communicated her values and invited families to do the same, bringing those families into the collective design of alternative futures (Gutie ´rrez et al, 2020).…”

Prison abolition literacies as Pro-Black pedagogy in early childhood education

“…Despite decades of research studies that bring attention to the academic and social needs of Black children, early childhood education teachers remain committed to culturally irrelevant, unresponsive, dehumanizing, and anti-Black literacy practices (Baines et al, 2018; Boutte, 2016; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016; Beneke et al, 2022; Wright and Counsell, 2018). For example, when teachers teach early literacy, they continue to focus on “phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and grammar (which has also been promoted as the hallmark of early childhood education) in isolation from meaningful texts that reflect students’ cultures and identities” (Bryan, 2021: p. 106).…”

Abolition and ethnic studies in early care and education

“…Early care and education systems have been marked by damaging practices, pathologizing portrayals, and carceral pedagogies, which demand radical reimagining (Beneke et al, 2022;Meiners, 2016;Souto-Manning, 2021). Given the entrenched nature of violence against non-dominant communities, we understand that a dismantling of the world is required for us to turn to the ways of knowing, living, and being of those most impacted.…”