Filled with day-to-day practices, this book will help elementary school teachers tackle the imbalance of privilege in literacy education. Readers will learn about culturally relevant pedagogies as young children learn literacy and a critical stance through music, oral histories, name stories, intergenerational texts, and heritage lessons—all brought to life through the voices of students, families, community members, and teachers. Based on the premise that learning to teach in culturally relevant ways means affirming and normalizing cultures historically marginalized and/or misrepresented, the authors also share strategies to help teachers examine their own classrooms, histories, and assumptions; understand the need to decolonize practices; start the school year in humanizing ways; build strong reciprocal relationships with families and communities; work within and beyond perceived curricular constraints; support students in transferring knowledge to testing genres; and negotiate challenges that come with innovation. Features includes: Provides a strong foundation and rationale for why equity pedagogies are necessary; Offers strategies to help teachers and schools engage in self-examination to confront how their own educational environments might perpetuate an inequitable status quo; Moves from self-examination to providing detailed descriptions of classroom practices that overturn unjust systems; Describes ways that mutually respectful relationships can be nurtured as teachers affirm and seek the expertise, histories, and experiences of families; Examines culturally relevant teaching with African American children with an emphasis on its value for all students as we reshape pedagogy.