“I Wanted to Know How They Perceived Jail”: Studying How One Early Educator Brought Her Students’ Worlds into Her Standardized Teaching Context

Policymakers’ demands for standardization and improved student achievement increasingly define what early childhood educators working in publicly funded programs teach. Doing so has made it difficult for educators to engage in practices with children that incorporate their sociocultural worlds into their instruction. To begin to address this challenge, this article examines the experiences of one pre-kindergarten teacher who participated in a professional development course that asked her and her colleagues to implement culturally relevant lessons with their students in their high-stakes urban teaching context. She took up this challenge by examining the issue of parental incarceration with her culturally and linguistically talented students. Analyzing her and her students’ experiences in this investigation provides insight into how early educators can begin to address their students’ sociocultural worlds through culturally relevant pedagogical practices within their standardized teaching contexts.