Kindel Turner Nash is an associate professor of early childhood education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. With Alicia Arce-Boardman, Roderick D. Peele, and Kerry Elson, she is the author of Culturally Sustaining Language and Literacy Practices for Pre-K–3 Classrooms: The Children Come Full.
In October of 2021 I was masked-up, sitting in my co-author Alicia Arce’s 2nd grade bilingual classroom at Northern Parkway school. It was one of my final research visits to the school as we put together a book manuscript based on six years of exploring the ways she and other classroom teachers build on and extend children’s cultures in school learning. As I looked around me, I saw vibrant bulletin boards featuring the children’s authentic writing about their lives. One of these bulletin boards depicted a mosaic-like rainbow. When I asked her about it, Alicia described how, after reading Angela Joy and Ekua Holmes’ children’s book Black Is a Rainbow Color, she had partnered with the school’s art teacher Erik J. Sumner to co-create the bulletin board. On the spot, I asked Alicia what she thought about approaching him to create the cover art for our forthcoming book. This is how we came to have Erik’s colorful and vibrant work gracing the cover.
Anticipating the book’s publication, I interviewed Erik about his art, teaching, and the cover. We, Erik and Kindel, hope you enjoy reading and learning!
—Kindel Turner Nash and Erik J. Sumner
KN: How long have you been creating art? Where do you teach?
ES: I’ve been creating art since I was about six years old. I currently teach in Uniondale, NY at Northern Parkway School but I have also taught at California Avenue School and Hempstead High School. I’ve been teaching with my mother since I was 15 years old but as a NYS certified teacher I’ve been teaching for 28 years.
KN: How long have you been teaching art? What led you to that career path?
ES: I’ve been teaching art for 27 years. What led me to this career path was my mother and father. My mother and father’s careers as a teacher and a layout artist, respectively, are my foundation. My father worked as a layout artist for DDB Worldwide, and I was always at my mother’s side as she taught reading for CUNY. I also worked at her privately owned elementary school and tutoring center. I decided to put the two together and became an art teacher. I later went on to complete one of my mother’s longtime unfinished goals and received my Masters in Literacy Studies from Hofstra University.
KN: Who or what inspires you?
ES: Graffiti artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and all artists who tell the stories of the African diaspora inspire me. Those are my artistic advisors, and the history of Black and Brown people are my inspiration.
KN: Describe your process of creating the cover art for the book.
ES: First I have to give thanks to two of the four authors of this book, Alicia Arce and Dr. Kindel Nash, for presenting me with the wonderful opportunity of creating the cover art for this landmark textbook. I also would like to thank artist/illustrator Angela Joy [author of Black Is a Rainbow Color] for inspiring me to create a rainbow that will forever more include the colors black and brown.
The process of creating the cover art for this book is based on how I teach and learn from my BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students and other school community members. My initial ideas and sketches derived from the working title of the book at the time, “The Children Come Full.” The Children Come Full is a theory of teaching by one of the contributors, Haydée Dohrn-Melendez Morgan, in which she theorizes that our scholars come to us “full with many different experiences.” Taking those sentiments as a cue, I included in the cover design precocious looking students reading and speaking their full lives out loud to educators.
Having a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a masters in literacy studies, I’m always searching for ways to incorporate both disciplines into my art educator backpack. In this case I used art and literacy to combine indigenous cultures of the BIPOC young artists I teach into a pictograph. To do this I combined pictographs from the Nsidibi Indigenous language writing system of far Southern Nigeria and fired-clay Indigenous storytellers into one pictograph. There are two Nsidibi symbols embedded in the cover illustration, which represent passing on information to the people, progress and journey, as well as love and unity. The Indigenous storyteller figure represents educators, more specifically the authors of this book, and how through this text, their classroom experiences and knowledge will be passed onto future generations. More importantly, the children’s stories are being told so that present and future educators who are affected by this text will better recognize their scholars as “full people.” Finally I sprinkled a little bit of all that inspires Erik J. Sumner‘s love of art and life into the design of the picture and voilà, the cover of what we hope to be the best-selling early literacy textbook of 2023 was made!
KN: What are some of your current projects?
ES: Using the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as an inspiration, my 4th and 5th grade students are turning their crayon-based self-portraits into Maasai warriors with a paper-based leather and ostrich feather headdress. Similarly, the 2nd and 3rd graders are turning their portraits into Maya warrior queens with a paper-based quetzal feather headdress. Lastly, grades K and 1 are studying and creating the America’s first written language, epi-Olmec hieroglyphs, with crayons and watercolors.
KN: Describe a favorite lesson that you taught with kids.
ES: During the pandemic, I was blessed with the greatest administrative team that showed me how to lean into teaching through cultivating genius and joy (Gholdy Muhammad, 2020). Instead of expecting my young artists to create traditional art projects with art supplies they may not have access to, they used supplies that were readily available to them. For example, with my 4th and 5th grade artists, we explored an element of design with each new project. Using the element color, I asked them to choose one of six different artistic techniques (illustration, photography, culinary arts, game design, fashion design, and DIY/maker). They then had to apply the given element to the overall focus of their creation. In some instances, I offered 6 different art projects from each of the artistic techniques and asked the young artists to choose and create the project they liked the most.
The results were out of this world! Some of my favorites were: understanding architecture through homemade tent building, using the iPad to take family photos based on Cara Romero’s (Chemehuevi) Indigenous Goddess Gang photographs, and making Happy New Year “2021” cupcakes using a chosen set of complementary colors. Allowing my students the freedom to create thought-provoking and happy moments during the pandemic was truly an act of cultivating genius and joy.
KN: Where can we find more information about your work?
Culturally Sustaining Language and Literacy Practices for Pre-K–3 Classrooms
The Children Come Full
Kindel Turner Nash, Alicia Arce-Boardman, Roderick D. Peele, and Kerry Elson