Abstract
When we teach, we must look beyond the students in front of us and at the environment in which students will eventually live and work. Teachers in K-5 institutions in major urban centers face language barriers when engaging with parents. Preservice teachers and second language learners need practical, applicable experience in connecting with parents and improving their shared reading strategy. Instructors need to include authentic, culturally diverse children's literature into the teacher candidates' world. Instructors can apply classroom knowledge to provide a product to solve a problem for current teachers. Benefits in this community engagement project are numerous for all the players involved. This chapter details a community engagement project that includes lesson plans to integrate culturally diverse children's literature, lesson plans for instructions in interactive read alouds, provides research-based evidence behind the benefits of interactive read alouds, culturally diverse literature, and parent/students interactions for translations.
TopBackground
In an attempt to meet the needs of the diverse student populations in America’s classrooms, two university professors from two different institutions of higher education came together to implement a strategy to help young elementary students improve their early reading skills and connect with adults who care for them. This project involved multicultural children's literature, an evidence-based read aloud strategy called Dialogic Reading (DR) (IES, 2007; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998), translation of English into Spanish, and community service for a large urban inner city school. This chapter is based on several semesters of collaboration between the two instructors and is written as an amalgamation of completing the project. Each semester can be different depending on the circumstances, number of students enrolled, and the courses each instructor is teaching.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Heritage Speaker: An individual raised in a home where the language is other than that of the society in which they live; they most likely speak and understand the home language but do not have mastery over it, and are somewhat bilingual in the home language and the societal language.
Dialogic Reading: A systematic interactive read aloud with specific teacher actions and questions ( Flynn, 2011 ; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998 ).
Multicultural Literature: Literature other than that associated with the predominant ethnicity, race, or culture prevalent in the community ( Boyd et al., 2015 ).
Community Service: Is unpaid work performed by a person or group of people for the benefit and betterment of their community without any form of compensation.