263 Collaborative Voices Exploring Culturally and Socially Responsive Literacies Language Arts ● Vol. 87 ● No. 4 ● March 2010 Carmen L. Medina and María del Rocío Costa Collaborative Voices Exploring Culturally and Socially Responsive Literacies Introducing preservice teachers to literacy as social, cultural, and critical practices raises important debates about what is valued in language arts education. [Editors’ Note: Throughout, the dialogue in Spanish is followed by its translation in English.] Ivonne: Luego de haber pasado por la experiencia de este trabajo, puedo decir que partir de los intereses del niño va más allá [de lo que pensaba] anteriormente. Es investigar, analizar el trasfondo de cada estudiante, entrevistar a los padres, involucrar a la familia en el aprendizaje. Es conocer la cultura y sociedad donde se mueve ese alumno, estudiar los textos, cuestionarlos, crear estrategias que promuevan la reflexión. Eso si es realmente partir de los intereses de nuestros estudiantes. Ivonne: After going through the experience of this project, I can say that using the students’ interests as points of departure goes beyond [what I thought] before. This is about investigating, analyzing each child’s background, interviewing parents, getting the family involved in learning. It is getting to know the culture and society where that student navigates, studying texts, questioning those texts, creating strategies that encourage reflection. This is what it really means to begin from our students’ interests. During the year 2006, Carmen had the opportu- nity to teach for a year as visiting professor in the Elementary Education program at the University of Puerto Rico, Bayamón, where Rocío has been a professor of literacy and language arts since 1996. In that year, we worked collaboratively to reimagine the ways we teach language arts courses in teacher preparation programs. Here we present some aspects of our collaborative effort and describe our journey working with teacher candidates within a culturally and socially responsive pedagogy. The above quote came from a focus group dis- cussion during which teacher candidates reflected on their perceptions of a course on Spanish lan- guage arts teaching methods in Puerto Rico that we redesigned to focus on interrelated curricu- lar and pedagogical aspects. The new compo- nents included literacies as situated social practice, funds of knowledge, popular culture, and criti- cal literacy. By redesigning the course, the instruc- tor, Maria del Rocío (known as Rocío), and colleague/co-researcher, Carmen, engaged with teacher candidates in inquiry approaches and prac- tices (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to exam- ine the collective experience within the course and the political nature of the work we do in liter- acy education. As a result, we opened up a space for everyday knowledge (ours, the teacher candi- dates’, and children’s) to merge with our under- standing of literacy education as situated practices. In our inquiry, the everyday turned out to be both a terrain of possibilities and a risky terrain, where the familiar, or what we know from outside of school, became problematic when we thought of it within the school context. Furthermore, we believe that working with teacher candidates who come from similar backgrounds or communities as the children they teach does not necessarily imply a smooth path to understanding culturally relevant pedagogies and literacies. In some ways, cultural competency was not an issue, and, as Ivonne’s quote above shows, there were reflective moments that demonstrated connections to a view of literacy as social and critical practice. However, larger ide- ological beliefs supporting an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 2004) still framed some of the teacher candidates’ views of literacy. We believe that what we share here as “local knowledge of practice” has implications for larger “theories of practice” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) that could be useful in other educational contexts in relation to educators’ understanding of the social and political nature of literacy in schools. In addition, we share our work in Puerto Rico because our journey throughout this course was filled with uncertainties, as was the teacher can- didates’ path as they participated in the course. Looking back, we believe that the most valuable Copyright © 2010 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.