Communities and homes are inherent parts of the lives of young children. As educators who seek to build on the strengths of the children we teach, instead of judging children’s homes and community practices against our own pre-conceived notions of “appropriate” and “best,” we can make community resources and home literacies central to our teaching and visible in your classrooms. So, in this paper, I present a yearlong case study on the ways in which community resources and home literacies can lead to more equitable, inclusive, and culturally relevant pedagogical spaces in a second grade classroom in a low-income setting in the United States. By doing so, we create educational spaces that are at once rigorous and value the places and practices important to the children we teach, their families, and communities.

Key Perspectives

Home literacy practices and community resources have deep and lasting influences on learning. A comprehensive view of home literacies and community resources recognizes that young children’s languages, literacies, and learning processes are not linear or static—so as teachers, we need to pay close attention to individual children, learning from and with them, their families, and communities (Gregory, Long, & Volk, 2004). It is important to acknowledge that young children are active members of different groups and learn how to function within them—yet when teachers value and build on students’ practices in home and community contexts and bring such practices to the classroom, they can foster more responsive and equitable learning experiences.

Young children live in a variety of contexts and each of these contexts functions according to specific rules and customs. As young children are developing school language and literacy practices and experiencing different linguistic and cultural systems at home, they develop ways of participating in each one of these contexts. Thus, it is important for the teacher to know that these rules of participation vary across specific contexts and can be mediated in ways that build on the strengths of the child’s home and community practices—on what is already familiar to them. Instead of remaining silent and making young children feel that they do not belong or are not competent in school, teachers can cast a positive light onto these often marginalized home languages and literacies.

Teachers can foster more culturally relevant classrooms (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1994) by creating spaces in the curriculum where there is a merging of personal and curricular spaces. The merging between these two spaces allows students to draw on specific ways of knowing within and across contexts. Often the merging does not come to life naturally. It must be negotiated by the teacher who genuinely positions herself/himself as a learner of the children’s home and community practices—realizing that each child will be unique even if from the same community and have shared racial backgrounds as others. Then, these practices can be brought to the classroom—being refined and redesigned in collaboration with students. For this to take place, teachers’ and students’ community resources and home literacies must be respectively identified and examined.

Community resources and home literacies have been called “funds of knowledge,” can “transform classrooms into more advanced contexts for teaching and learning” (Moll & Greenberg, 1990, p. 344) and “contribute substantively to the development of our lessons…[and] to the content and process of classroom learning” (p. 339). From a sociocultural perspective, this approach to teaching requires a broader interpretation of literacy; to include the practices families and communities engage in—practices that inform children’s diverse cultural and linguistic worlds. This view opens the doors to valuing what each child already knows instead of conceptualizing certain children as needing to be fixed. 

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