A Latina Teacher's Journal: Reflections on Language, Culture, Literacy, and Discourse Practices

Shortly after I started teaching, I realized there were plenty of parents, like me, crying for their children's cultures, languages, discourses, and literacies to be valued in the classroom. Teaching elementary school students, learning from and with them, I saw that children from culturally and linguistically diverse groups had difficulty achieving school success because the dominant pedagogical approaches were based on the dominant discourse (Gee, 1996). In this article, I reflect on my perceptions of the impact of dominant discourses on teaching in American schools and on culturally and linguistically diverse children's lives.