In this review of research, we offer a meta-analysis of young children’s learning and development within and across psychology, education, and linguistics. Engaging with Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, we mapped young children’s learning and development transdisciplinarily, seeking to (re)conceptualize early childhood teaching in ways that are answerable to intersectionally minoritized children, families, and communities of color—those whose voices, values, perspectives, and knowledges have been historically and continue to be contemporarily marginalized. To do so, we identified seven principles with the potential to transform early childhood teaching practice. We posit that together these principles can shift the architecture of early childhood teaching, offering promising possibilities for fostering equity by allowing us to move toward emancipatory praxis and negotiate practical solutions to education’s long history of inequities and oppressions.
In this article, we bring different fields into conversation as a way of expanding understandings about the teaching of reading, centering the communicative practices of multilingual children. Instead of seeking to remedy children whose communicative practices and norms do not align with “academic language,” we traverse fields to show how seemingly innocuous concepts and related undertakings may harm young multilingual children by sponsoring pathological paradigms that frame their ways of communicating as inferior and/or wrong. Challenging the monoglossic gaze that upholds and reifies monolingual ideologies, we consider how teachers might rethink longstanding albeit narrow, restrictive, and exclusionary conceptualizations of language and literacy, moving toward reconceptualizing languages and literacies plurally, expansively, and inclusively. After doing so, we discuss the power and possibility of translanguaging‐‐conceptually and empirically. We conclude by offering resources that can help foster, cultivate, and sustain translanguaging in classrooms and (pre)schools.
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