Collaboration in a Culturally Responsive Literacy Pedagogy: Educating Teachers and Latino Children

This article is an analysis of collaboration in a community center’s summer literacy tutoring program for 6–8 year old children, the majority of whom were Puerto Rican, Spanish–English bilinguals. The goal of the program was to increase the children’s motivation to read through engaging literacy activities with high quality, culturally relevant children’s literature. Reflecting a sociocultural perspective, the activities built on the children’s experiences at home with literacy as a collaborative practice. The program as a whole provided for multiple levels of collaboration among the participating adults and between the children and tutors, university students in a teacher preparation program. The focus of the article is on the ways the tutors collaborated and the benefits and challenges of that process. Implications for teacher education are shared, emphasizing the need for explicitly including collaboration as one important element of a literacy pedagogy for teachers of linguistically and culturally diverse children.