‘You Don’t Need the Words to Be in the Book’: The Cultivation of Textual Agency during Families’ Shared Text Experiences

ABSTRACT: In recent years, there has been significant interest in designing critical, asset-based family literacy and engagement programs that transform systemic racial and economic inequities and affirm and sustain marginalized families' cultural and linguistic practices. This study draws from perspectives on culturally sustaining family literacies to examine the role that shared texts played in co-learning among families in Read Make & Play (RMP), a bilingual family literacy program in Chicago, IL. As a collaborative practitioner-researcher team, we used qualitative methods to study the experience of parents/caregivers in two cohorts from 2021-2022. Our findings suggest that families cultivated a ‘textual agency’ through adapting, re-storying, and integrating texts and materials into everyday routines and rituals, which transformed hierarchies of knowledge between each other and the texts. This study has implications for transformative family literacy and engagement work, research, and theory-building.