Dismantling Carceral Logics in the Urban Early Literacy Classroom: Towards Liberatory Literacy Pedagogies with/for Multiply-Marginalized Young Children

Abstract

Although literacy can be a space for joy and criticality, urban early literacy classrooms are imbued with carceral logics, criminalizing young children along lines of race, disability, and language. To support teachers in enacting liberatory early literacy pedagogies, teacher educators must contend with the harm dominant literacy approaches can produce for multiply-marginalized young children. We describe how early literacy routines are (1) constructed for an imagined “normal child” through white, nondisabled, English-dominant perceiving practices; and (2) enforced through carceral logics. Teacher educators can cultivate urban teachers’ liberatory pedagogical tools, centering multiply-marginalized young children's power and agency so they might flourish.