Prioritizing Learners’ Cultural Assets and Multimodal Literacies During Preservice Teachers’ Community Literacy Experience

As teacher educators, we believe it is critical for preservice teachers (PSTs) to recognize the many cultural assets that learners bring to today’s diverse classrooms and to use these assets in their instruction. It is key to the literacy success of all students, particularly children of low socioeconomic status, multilingual learners, children of color, and children who continue to have limited literacy success in school. Our teacher preparation program in childhood includes out-of-school community literacy experiences for teaching diverse Grade 1–6 learners because these hybrid spaces provide rich opportunities for our candidates to learn about and with children and their families. This study explored the following question: What impact does a focus on diverse, multicultural texts and multimodal literacies—with our community learners’ cultural assets in mind—have on PSTs as they teach their first English language arts lessons? Findings indicate that the majority of PSTs showed growth in valuing the significance of using diverse/multimodal texts and learners’ cultural assets, including translanguaging opportunities, although a small percentage of PSTs exhibited beginning stages of cultural competence (e.g., Christ & Sharma, 2018). Overall, these community literacy experiences proved effective in developing PSTs’ cultural competence and culturally responsive and multimodal practices.