Kahani Literacy Project

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a community literacy project called the “Kahani” project, an approach to teaching diasporic Asian Indian American (AIA) children to write about and preserve their Indigenous (i.e., ethnic) Knowledge (Battiste & Youngblood, 2000). Language Arts curriculum in the US is predominantly Ameri-centric and limiting to children from minoritized communities, who come from complex and rich cultural backgrounds. The inclusive education questions the curriculum in schools for people from the non-mainstream communities. Educators who teach ‘other people's children' (Delpit, 1990) have to be accountable to disrupt the established non-inclusive official pedagogical practices, especially in Language Arts. The Kahani Literacy project model hypothesizes that communal/collective writing is beneficial. Educators must create supportive learning opportunities for diasporic writers to engage in writing about their lived experiences and world view in a shared and social setting through dialogic conferencing.