Susi Long

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of South Carolina

This article responds to the endemic, intergenerational, and pervasive racism endured by Black children in the USA and the need to reimagine classrooms as cultures of peace where Black histories, literatures, accomplishment, oppression, resistance, resilience, and joy are taught as central to the curriculum. To do so, the article shares a five-year...

The legacy of colonization includes stereotypes and misinformation about African and African descendant people as well as a void in an understanding the vast contributions of precolonial Africa to the world’s knowledge impacting knowledge, languages, music, art, and sciences that we take for granted today. This misinformation remains pervasive thro...

This article is written for educators who serve as teachers, administrators, policy-makers in childcare settings, schools, classrooms, teacher preparation programs, programs that prepare educational researchers, and universities. Its purpose is to provide background, rationale, and support for individuals within those institutions to address the ne...

In this article, the authors honor the legacy of W.E.B Du Bois by paying tribute to the Brownies’ Book on its 100th anniversary. In a time when racial inequities continue to flourish and textbooks and curriculum lack a commitment to sharing stories of Black brilliance, we demonstrate how the Brownies’ Book holds a critical place in children’s liter...

This article provides strategies to prepare prospective teachers to teach joyously and confidently in pro-Black ways. We organize our sharing around: (a) confronting anti- Blackness with pro-Black pedagogy; (b) teacher's growth; and (c) sustaining pro- Blackness in classrooms. Although we describe our work with preservice teachers, we make connecti...

This article examines the role of play-based early childhood programs in perpetuating or interrupting messages of white supremacy which murder the spirits of Black children while reinforcing a sense of entitlement in white children. We ask educators to consider what children’s play might look like if pro-Black teaching and anti-racist teaching that...

This article addresses characteristics of effective Praxis Core support for African American preservice teachers as they negotiate a standardized test that regularly denies Black students’ entry into the teaching profession. While recognizing the need to eliminate racist gatekeepers from the profession, this article focuses on providing effective P...

This chapter provides a profile of an urban education collective that fosters relationships among preservice teachers, university faculty, and a local school district. The partnership supports preservice and in-service teachers serving marginalized communities using culturally relevant, humanizing, and decolonizing pedagogies. Drawing from decoloni...

Background/Context Praxis Core, an ETS general knowledge examination, is required for teaching licensure in many states. However, it exists within a history of racist testing from time of the first IQ and SAT tests. Because of Praxis Core, Preservice Teachers of Color are regularly denied entry into the teaching profession, a reality incongruent wi...

Four teacher educators describe their work to establish Afrocentric foundations through integrating literacy and linguistic pluralism courses. We build on realities that teachers and children “do not learn, systematically and deeply, about Black genius and worth” (Baines, Tisdale, & Long, 2018 Baines, J. , Tisdale, C. , & Long, S. (2018). “We’ve be...

Profiling human beings occurs daily throughout our society, typically grounded in inaccuracies, misperceptions, and biases related to race, faith, sexual orientation, language, family structure, and other factors. This article appropriates discriminatory profiling in conjunction with conceptualization of diversity as a verb to vividly convey the ne...

This article takes a new look at issues of marginalization and equity in literacy practice by focusing on the concept of syncretism and teachers’ creation of opportunities for young children to draw on knowledge from multiple worlds as, together, they construct new texts, contexts and practices. Recognizing that the strengths and needs of too many...

The books reviewed here communicate that as educators, we can support academic success for all students by expanding understandings about home/community literacies. We can do this by tapping into the valuable resources that communities and families can provide. In particular, these texts focus on the expertise in communities too often marginalized...

This column highlights books that provide practical and theoretical approaches for “going green.” Some of the strategies include school gardens, eco literacies, and how to address environmental issues both locally and globally. These books foster students’ critical thinking about ways to save their world by becoming eco-conscious.

Each book reviewed in this issue moves the field of literacy forward in important ways. De la Reyes’s collection of narratives provides insights into the institutional and instructional barriers faced by many students of color and strategies they used to overcome them as they sought to develop biliterate identities in the monolingual cultures of sc...

Teachers and preservice teachers offered initial assumptions about children and families from backgrounds different from their own, “Letting them speak Spanish in school will hinder their ability to learn English and also hold back the other children” and “His house will be messy and dirty.” Through experiences in the children’s homes and communiti...

While we say we believe in every child, the teachers in this article demonstrate that we each have hidden biases that require examination, and it is diffi cult to recognize those biases when we know so little about our children's lives outside of school. I pictured Latina women in such roles as housekeepers and maids. Letting them speak Spanish in...

This article draws from three ethnographic studies of children playing sociodramatically in multilingual, multicultural contexts. Countering a deficit perspective that focuses on what children from nondominant cultures do not know, we use the concept of syncretism to illuminate children's expertise and intentionality as they blend knowledge from mu...

This article draws from three ethnographic studies of children playing sociodramatically in multilingual, multicultural contexts. Countering a deficit perspective that focuses on what children from nondominant cultures do not know, we use the concept of syncretism to illuminate children's expertise and intentionality as they blend knowledge from mu...

The South Carolina Reading Initiative is a statewide, long-term, site-based professional development project designed to improve children’s literacy achievement by increasing teachers’ knowledge of reading and literacy instruction. Three specific bodies of research informed this project: (1) research on effective staff development, (2) research on...

The theoretical framework guiding these studies draws from the work of Paulo Freire (1989) who argues that transformation in schools and in society is possible when teachers value and utilize the diverse cultural schema of every student. Our work is further informed by critiques of the deficit perspective that dominates many school settings (Bartol...

Across the country, new and experienced teachers find themselves losing the confidence and energy it takes to challenge an unacceptable status quo. Too often, dynamic educators disappear within systems that are antithetical to what they envisioned when they entered the profession or they leave the profession altogether. This article describes the e...

This unique and visionary text is a compilation of fascinating studies conducted in a variety of cross-cultural settings where children learn language and literacy with siblings, grandparents, peers and community members. Focusing on the knowledge and skills of children often invisible to educators, these illuminating studies highlight how children...

This article presents findings from a 9–month ethnographic study of cross–cultural learning for the purpose of helping teachers better understand classroom conditions and behaviors that support and hinder students’ comprehension of teachers’ spoken language. Data from a close, observational study of an 8–year–old learning to get along in a new lang...

For nine months I studied the experiences of my eight-year-old American daughter as she learned to get along in new cultural settings following our move from the United States to Iceland. This article focuses on language acquisition and literacy development as elements that were interwoven within other aspects of her new cultural experience (peer g...