Making Student Voices Matter

This book offers educators actionable models for creating responsive, affirming learning environments that cultivate student agency, joy, and commitment to social transformation.

These essays show how pre-K–12 educators enact culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies (CSLP)—drawing on students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge to foster identity, critical consciousness, and academic skills.

Each chapter features a practitioner coauthor and highlights concrete classroom strategies that challenge whiteness and center the experiences of communities of Color. The authors also provide a practical discussion of how each teaching practice can be levelled across the grades, and what it might look like when used with different age groups. Topics range from family and community literacies to critical language practices and multimodal assessment.

With many user-friendly tools, Making Student Voices Matter is a valuable resource for inservice professional learning, teacher preparation programs, and equity-centered coaching.

Book Features:

• Bridges Critical Theory and Everyday Practice: Theoretical concepts—such as critical consciousness, cultural humility, and reflexivity—are translated into concrete, classroom-tested practices.
• Centers Practitioner Voices and Lived Experience: Teacher-authored chapters offer firsthand accounts of implementing CSLP in real-world school contexts.
• Expands the Definition of Literacy: Offers an interdisciplinary and multimodal understanding of literacy that includes language, arts, digital media, oral traditions, and nature-based literacies.
• Disrupts Whiteness in Instructional Practice: Shows how educators can actively challenge whiteness, white ideology, and curricular erasure by affirming the identities of students from historically marginalized communities.
• Includes User-Friendly Features for Immediate Application: Provides tools such as instructional snapshots, classroom vignettes, student work samples, and reflection prompts.

Rachelle S. Savitz is an associate professor at East Carolina University and a former K–12 literacy coach/interventionist. Judy Paulick is an associate professor at the University of Virginia and a former elementary literacy specialist. Olivia Ann Williams is a literacy researcher and a high school English teacher in Virginia. Brooke Ward Taira is an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Julia A. Lynch is a Black-poet-assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Shuling Yang is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. Sara A. Field is a high school teacher and an adjunct professor at George Mason University.

“This book proves that it is possible to center students’ lives, literacies, and languages across content areas, while also meeting disciplinary learning standards. These chapters, which are based on culturally sustaining literacy pedagogy (CSLP) and critical literacy perspectives, are a portal into what classrooms and schools could and should be for all students.”
—Althier Lazar, professor, Department of Teacher Education, Saint Joseph’s University

“Making Student Voices Matter is the right book at the right moment. This teacher-authored collection bridges theory and practice with concrete, classroom-tested moves to honor students’ languages and identities, design meaningful tasks, and build critical consciousness without sacrificing rigor. In a climate of censorship and policy headwinds, it offers courageous, practical guidance that helps teachers, coaches, and teacher educators listen differently, teach more deliberately, and position students as powerful readers, writers, and change agents.”
—Patricia A. Edwards, university distinguished professor, Michigan State University

“While literacy has served as a source of sustenance for people and peoples across generations of adversity, this book takes Culturally Sustaining Literacy Pedagogy seriously by not only treating literacy as an important space of promise and possibility, but by also providing compelling examples of what can happen in a vast range of classrooms when scholars collaborate with classroom teachers who share their commitment to equity.”
—Catherine Compton-Lilly, John C. Hungerpiller Professor, University of South Carolina

“This book arrives at a critical moment, when educators are navigating curricular mandates and political resistance to equity-driven teaching, and it transforms culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies from abstract ideals into compelling, actionable practice. By inviting teachers to author chapters in which they share their classroom stories, the book provides rich models of how teachers center students’ languages, cultures, and communities as essential foundations for literacy learning. As a teacher educator, I am always searching for texts that bridge theory and practice in ways that resonate deeply with preservice and practicing teachers. This book does exactly that.”
—Susan C. Cantrell, professor and acting associate dean, University of Kentucky

“Making Student Voices Matter is a powerful resource for all those committed to centering and sustaining students and communities in pre-K–12 classrooms.”
—Django Paris, is the James A. & Cherry A. Banks Chair of Multicultural Education and coeditor of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World

Contents

Foreword Doris Walker-Dalhouse  ix

Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction

Olivia Ann Williams, Julia A. Lynch, Brooke Ward Taira, Sara A. Field, Shuling Yang, Judy Paulick, and Rachelle S. Savitz  1

 1.  The Journey to Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Literacy: Using a Critical Community of Practice to Transform Teaching  23

Abigail A. Amoako Kayser, Brian R. Kayser, Carly Dirghangi, Sharlene Chang, and Michele Yeaton

 2.  These Are the Things No One Taught Me: Critical Literacy to Center Black Student Experiences  43

Janell Miller, Caitlin Donovan, and Myriama Smith-Traore

 3.  Centering Criticality in Practice in Special Education: Realizing Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Through Critical Compassion  59

Antonio L. Ellis and Keisha Woods

 4.  Decolonizing the Early Childhood Classroom: Using Critical Language Awareness to Support Identity Development and Sustain Culture  79

Jessica Hiltabidel and Chrystena Hill

 5.  Bridging Privileged Distances: Developing Critical Literacy in a Grade 12 English Literature Class  97

Manuel Lorenzo M. Aldeguer IV

 6.  Making Their Mark: Reading Stamped in 9th-Grade English Language Arts  113

Sarah Fleming and Catherine De Forest* (Pseudonym)

 7.  Strengthening Community Connections Through ‘Āina-Based Education  127

Paul Balazs, Janelle ‘Ānela Matsuura, and Rainbow Pharaon

 8.  Black Oral History Experience: Creating a Culturally Sustaining History Lesson  143

Elizabeth McCauley McDonald and Tara V. R. Dozier

 9.  And They Lived Happily Ever After: Translanguaging Fairy Tales in an International School  159

Catherine McDougall, Sarah Ratcliffe, Katelyn Cuny, and Ashley Sawyer

 10.  Fostering Asset-Based Literacy Practices Through Community Asset Mapping  175

Ching-Ching Lin, Kayla Benton, Youngmi Joo, Cielo Inicio Pezo, Camila Minaya, and Renata Nadia Bajana Yepez

 11.  Centering Students’ Lives in Their Texts: Writing Culturally Relevant Texts With Emerging and Uninspired Readers  193

Gabriella M. Diaz and Mary E. Lyons

Afterword: Vibrating Freely for the Classrooms of Tomorrow Antero Garcia  209

Index  215

About the Editors and Contributors  227