“It’s Important for Them to Know Who They Are”: Teachers’ Efforts to Sustain Students’ Cultural Competence in an Age of High-Stakes Testing

Abstract

This article examines how four urban elementary teachers designed their literacy instruction in ways that sought to sustain students’ cultural competence—maintaining their language and cultural practices while also gaining access to more dominant ones—amid expectations to prepare students for high-stakes testing. A large part of their teaching involved taking their students’ backgrounds into account and selecting classroom texts to provide examples of the contributions made by successful culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse people with space for dialogue about inequity.