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'I Am the Universe': Toward a Reader Model That Centers Culture

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Title: 'I Am the Universe': Toward a Reader Model That Centers Culture
Language: English
Authors: Roderick Peele, Kindel Turner Nash (ORCID 0000-0002-1148-0826)
Source: Reading Teacher. 2025 78(5):258-266.
Availability: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 9
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Descriptors: Reading Research, Reading Processes, Cultural Influences, Reading Teachers, Models, Reading Instruction, Literacy
DOI: 10.1002/trtr.2377
ISSN: 0034-0561
1936-2714
Abstract: Culture and language shape the way people read. Yet, within many popular reading models of reading development, culture is a component, if featured at all. Illustrated through examples of pro-Black, culturally sustaining, emancipatory practices of one teacher, this article highlights the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading, a reader model that can be used by reading teachers to center and sustain culture in children's reading development and their literacy futures.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1461142
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0183953329;ret01mar.25;2025Mar25.06:59;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0183953329-1">"I Am the Universe": Toward a Reader Model That Centers Culture </title> <p>Culture and language shape the way people read. Yet, within many popular reading models of reading development, culture is a component, if featured at all. Illustrated through examples of pro‐Black, culturally sustaining, emancipatory practices of one teacher, this article highlights the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading, a reader model that can be used by reading teachers to center and sustain culture in children's reading development and their literacy futures.</p> <p>Keywords: culturally sustaining pedagogies; culture; reading development; theoretical models of reading</p> <p>"Culture and language shape the way people read. Yet, within many popular reading models of reading development, culture is a component, if featured at all. Illustrated through examples of pro‐Black, culturally sustaining, emancipatory practices of one teacher, this article highlights the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading, a reader model that can be used by reading teachers to center and sustain culture in children's reading development and their literacy futures."</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-2">PAUSE AND PONDER</hd> <p></p> <ulist> <item> What models of reading do you draw on as a reading teacher? In what ways do prominent models of reading account for students' deep cultural knowledge and experiences?</item> <p></p> <item> What are your students' ways of knowing and being and how do they influence their ways of reading?</item> <p></p> <item> How can you mediate children's deep cultural knowledge in the teaching of reading?</item> <p></p> <item> In what ways do your teaching practices sustain, rather than maintain children's ways of knowing and being?</item> </ulist> <p>I am Haiti/I am the place where I/can live in the stars/I remember the nights/I am amazing/I am what I choose to be/I think I am the universe.</p> <p>This poem was written with great effort by Remi (pseudonym), a third grade student who Roderick Peele, his teacher, describes as "full of joy." Remi wrote the poem after Peele engaged his class in a multimodal poetry unit beginning with a read aloud of <emph>The Me I Choose to Be</emph> (Tarpley, Bethencourt, and Bethencourt [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref1">45</reflink>]); for Remi, this book, which features futuristic photo‐like images of Black children, evoked sensory‐loaded images of Haiti, where he and his family were from. Remi, who loved to engage in thoughtful discussions about books, told Peele, "When I was living in Haiti, I would be outside and I could see the stars—I felt like I could reach out and touch the universe, like I was the universe." Although Remi recognized English letters, vowels, and some digraphs, he initially struggled to attend to words as he read, perhaps because of a difficulty connecting English phonemes to those in Alfabé Kreyól/Haitian Creole Alphabet, the language he had heard and spoken at home and in his early school years. This struggle often resulted in word calling and a lack of reading comprehension. However, rooted in his deep interest in space and stargazing experiences, Remi proceeded to read many books. He read about the solar system, space, and the universe; these books, along with the support of a community of school staff who self‐describe as "committed to Black excellence," equipped Remi with necessary skills and strategies <emph>and</emph> motivated Remi to grapple with reading and writing his poem "I am the Universe" using the letter‐sounds in English. With daily reading, writing, and support grounded in his cultural and linguistic knowledge, experiences, and relationships, such as a green screen photoshoot where Remi styled himself as an astronaut, Remi's motivation to write and read about the universe overtook the space of struggle he initially experienced.</p> <p>Remi's story exemplifies the pro‐Black, culturally sustaining teaching practices of one teacher, Roderick Peele. Culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSPs) are teaching practices that strive to normalize rather than erase the ways of being of communities who have been historically ignored and marginalized (Paris [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref2">34</reflink>]). CSPs are important to Peele because he understands that culture guides the way humans perceive relationships and patterns, make meaning to understand and remember information and events, and come to know the world (Hollins [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref3">21</reflink>]; Rogoff [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref4">35</reflink>]; Wang [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref5">43</reflink>]). Cultural knowledge interacts with the cognitive reading processes of word recognition and language comprehension (Burns, Duke, and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref6">7</reflink>]). Furthermore, cultural knowledge and experiences interface with the self‐regulation skills that foster successful reading (Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref7">10</reflink>]; Cartwright et al. [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref8">9</reflink>]; Taboada Barber et al. [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref9">39</reflink>]). In fact, cultural knowledge has been shown to predict reading development more than any other aspect of reading like decoding or comprehension (Burns, Duke, and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref10">7</reflink>]; Hwang and Duke [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref11">23</reflink>]; Talwar, Tighe, and Greenberg [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref12">41</reflink>]). Accounting for the way that culture mediates reading development, this article highlights a Cultural Sustenance View of Reading, which is a reading model we co‐developed for teachers and researchers to illustrate pro‐Black, culturally sustaining teaching practices. Carey ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref13">8</reflink>]) notes that "comprehensive mattering—what allows Black boys and young men to infer that they matter robustly—emerges from reimagined structures that encourage liberating instead of confining practices" (p. 383). This framework imagines a present and a future where Black boys and other historically marginalized children like Remi <emph>comprehensively matter</emph> (Carey [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref14">8</reflink>]).</p> <p>First, we will provide some background about Remi and the study that Roderick Peele and Kindel Turner Nash, along with other teachers and school leaders, have been engaged in.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-3">Remi, His Teacher, and His School</hd> <p>Remi was an inquisitive, joyful, outgoing 8‐year‐old African American male student in Peele's third‐grade class one recent school year. Remi's family had recently emigrated from Haiti to the large metropolitan city in the Northeastern United States where Peele teaches. Growing up in Haiti, Remi had heard Haitian Creole all of his life, as this was the linguistic repertoire of his community and the language his caregivers spoke at home. He loved to share his knowledge of his heritage language and country with Peele and his classmates. He also loved to read and engage in conversations about books with adults. He was a risk taker—he would share his questions and invite correction from adults and peers.</p> <p>Remi had alphabetic knowledge of all letters, and knowledge of most letter‐sounds. He could speak English with some fluency. He had excellent oral language comprehension, most likely related to his love of books and discussions. However, he largely struggled with English reading and writing. At the beginning of the year, he was 2.5 years below a third‐grade level according to the school's standardized literacy screener, and he needed eyeglasses. As a result, Remi began participating in Tier 3 interventions focused on word recognition skills for 50 min per day, and in addition received 20 min of daily intensive phonemic awareness literacy intervention. At first, he did not transfer his knowledge from these intensive interventions. For example, Remi was able to memorize many sight words in his Tier 3 intervention group, but he could not recognize these words in the context of books. He was able to blend and segment phonemes in isolation, but could not at first apply this knowledge to reading the trade books about space he was so very interested in. However, with time, and with efforts to make deep connections between Remi's linguistic and cultural knowledge through purposeful and carefully sequenced literacy activities, Remi experienced a great deal of growth as a reader and writer. By mid‐year, Remi had gained an entire grade level, and was reading at a second‐grade level. By the end of the year, he had grown three grade levels and was reading at grade level.</p> <p>Peele's class of 22 students (14 boys and 8 girls) that year had looped with him from second to third grade (but not Remi). This was an inclusion class, meaning that Peele had 11 students with Individual Education Plans; those students had various cognitive disabilities; one had a hearing impairment. Of his other 11 students, some were reading and writing on a fifth‐grade level, and some were performing on a second‐grade level. Students' ethnicities reflected the larger school population.</p> <p>Peele's and Remi's school is an ethnically, linguistically, racially and otherwise diverse K‐5th grade elementary school in the Northeastern United States. The school has a population of over 600 students, the majority of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch. Many of the children have recently immigrated from Central or South America and the Caribbean, coming from El Salvador, Jamaica, Honduras, Columbia, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. About 60% of students have African or African American heritage, and about 40% have Latinx heritage. A third of children are emerging as bilingual and speak Spanish or Haitian Creole as their heritage language. The school's mission is to foster social justice through creating respectful, responsible, and caring citizens. It has been recognized as a National School of Character and a Turn‐Around School for closing opportunity gaps between students of Color and their White peers.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-4">The Study</hd> <p>Peele is part of a national research study focused on the culturally sustaining literacy practices of high‐performing teachers in US schools initiated by Kindel Turner Nash. As co‐researchers of CSPs since 2016, we have been guided by the research question: <emph>What are the culturally sustaining practices of high‐performing early literacy teachers?</emph> CSPs are not merely about building bridges between school and home, but about building new worlds that account for the rich plurality and the multiple stories that children and communities hold. CSPs view "dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive, rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits" (Paris [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref15">34</reflink>], 263).</p> <p>Together we have studied Peele's enactment of CSPs and what they look like in literacy teaching with students like Remi. Peele, a Black man, has taught elementary and special education in grades two through five for over a decade. Reflecting on his childhood, Peele remembers how every Black family he knew growing up had a complete set of encyclopedias in their homes that they had gone to great lengths to purchase, showing how much they valued literacy. Turner Nash, a teacher educator and researcher, taught elementary grades in largely Black and Latinx communities for a decade. She is a white, monolingual woman connected to the Black community by marriage. She has deep cultural roots in Appalachia.</p> <p>Humanizing, critical methodologies guided our study. Such methods seek an understanding of how ways of knowing, being, and doing unfurl in structurally unjust spaces such as schools (Bhattacharya [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref16">2</reflink>]). They demand attention to how knowledge is historically, socially, and culturally constructed (Bhattacharya [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref17">2</reflink>]; Charmaz [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref18">12</reflink>]) and necessitate working with/in communities to "co‐construct and implement solutions based on local knowledges and realities" (San Pedro and Kinloch [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref19">37</reflink>], 380S).</p> <p>We have engaged in inductive, emergent data collection and analysis methods during the project, which is now in its eighth year (Charmaz [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref20">12</reflink>]). Data collection has included more than 60 regular meetings, a series of semistructured interviews, hundreds of reflective memos, and extensive artifact collection. Turner Nash has spent more than 150 hours in Peele's school over the course of the project for classroom observations. Data analysis has involved constant discussion, creating spaces‐in‐between researcher and researched as we co‐examine emerging themes and patterns (Charmaz [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref21">12</reflink>]; San Pedro and Kinloch [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref22">37</reflink>]). During data meetings, individually preidentified patterns are "constantly compared" and triangulated with other data (Corbin and Strauss [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref23">14</reflink>]). This collaborative, dialogic approach has extended our collective ways of knowing, humanized us, and created space for us to co‐learn and co‐theorize.</p> <p>This study has revealed many findings about Peele's CSPs, such as how he fosters children's agency through morning meetings rooted in African Diaspora literacies (Boutte et al. [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref24">4</reflink>]); how he works with the children in his classes to be in right relation with land/water through interactive read‐aloud; and how he critically centers children's languages and literacies through normalizing multilingualism in writing and everyday talk (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref25">30</reflink>]). The research project has also led to the co‐development of a complex reading model, the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref26">31</reflink>]), that bridges critical research–practice gaps between the research on culturally mediated ways of knowing, being and reading and some reading models (e.g., Simple View of Reading), reading research, and popular media coverage of reading.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-5">Culturally Mediated Ways of Knowing, Being, and Reading</hd> <p>Remi's story showcased at the beginning of this article highlights what we know from extensive research—culture mediates humans' growth and development including reading development (Burns, Duke, and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref27">7</reflink>]; Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref28">31</reflink>]; Nasir et al. [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref29">32</reflink>]; Rogoff [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref30">35</reflink>]). However, dominant models of reading that have been widely discussed in the teaching community may inadvertently negate the value and role of cultural knowledge and experiences in reading development. For example, the Simple View of Reading discusses reading as the product of word recognition and language comprehension. A weakness in one area predicts difficulties in the other (Gough and Tumner [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref31">20</reflink>]). However, decades of research with Indigenous and other multilingual readers show that weaknesses in word recognition do not correlate with challenges in language comprehension in the same way that they do with monolingual learners (Bonifacci and Tobia [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref32">3</reflink>]; Georgiou, Das, and Hayward [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref33">18</reflink>]).</p> <p>Other, more complex models of reading include culture as a part of one component of reading development. Scarborough's Rope Model ([<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref34">38</reflink>]), for example, elevates the role of context and background knowledge as strands of word recognition and language comprehension that are woven together in successful reading. The Active View of Reading (AVR) (Duke and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref35">16</reflink>]) portrays reading as a multidimensional process in which word recognition and language comprehension are intertwined with other important aspects of reading, such as bridging processes and active self‐regulation (Duke and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref36">16</reflink>]). However, culture is one component of one area of language comprehension. A note in the top left corner of the AVR visual reads "This is a reader model. Reading is also impacted by text, task, and sociocultural context" (p. S33).</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-6">Cultural Sustenance View of Reading</hd> <p>In contrast to other models, the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading positions children within their cultural and linguistic ecological communities at the center of the reading process (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref37">31</reflink>]). The CSVR has four overarching constructs: <emph>ways of reading, ways of knowing, culturally mediated cognition</emph>, and <emph>ways of being</emph> (Figure 1).</p> <p> <img src="https://imageserver.ebscohost.com/img/embimages/rdk/RET/01mar25/trtr2377-fig-0001.jpg?ephost1=dGJyMNXb4kSepq84yOvqOLCmsE6epq5Srqa4SK6WxWXS" alt="trtr2377-fig-0001.jpg" title="1 Cultural sustenance view of reading." /> </p> <p></p> <p>In the cultural sustenance view of reading (CSVR), <emph>ways of reading</emph> are concepts that are present in existing reading models—word recognition, language comprehension, active self‐regulation, and bridging processes (see Scarborough's Rope and the AVR). However, the other three concepts in the CSVR, <emph>ways of knowing</emph>, <emph>ways of being</emph>, and <emph>culturally mediated cognition</emph>, were developed by the authors and colleagues by comparing nearly a decade of empirical data with an extensive literature review of cognitive and sociocultural research on reading development.</p> <p>Bettina Love ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref38">26</reflink>]) reminds us, "for dark people, the very basic idea of mattering is sometimes hard to conceptualize" (p. 2). In forwarding the CSVR aligned with Peele's pro‐Black, culturally sustaining teaching practices, we hope to provide a framework and practices that can help teachers advance toward a revolutionary, pro‐Black future where pluralistic, multilingual, Black and Brown cultures comprehensively matter (Bryan [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref39">6</reflink>]; Carey [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref40">8</reflink>]; Wynter‐Hoyte, Boutte, and Bryan [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref41">44</reflink>]). Returning to the opening story, the remainder of this article will foreground Peele's practices and the way they culturally mediated Remi's ways of reading, knowing, and being.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-8">Ways of Reading</hd> <p>Prominent reading models focus on what we call <emph>ways of reading</emph>, the important cognitive and affective processes that influence reading development. The AVR includes word recognition, language comprehension, active self‐regulation, and bridging processes (Duke and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref42">16</reflink>]). Within the AVR, word recognition processes involve phonological awareness, or conscious attention to sounds, along with the alphabetic principle, phonics knowledge, decoding ability, and sight word recognition. Language comprehension processes involve cultural and other knowledge, reading‐specific background knowledge, verbal reasoning, or thinking critically about aspects of text, language structure or understanding how an orthographic system is organized to convey meaning, and theory of mind or the ability to understand that a person's mental state drives their actions. Bridging processes include the print concepts, fluency, vocabulary, morphology, and grapho‐phonological‐semantic flexibility. Active self‐regulation, or the active deployment of the strategies and processes that successful reading demands, along with motivation and engagement and the development of executive functioning skills, are also key to reading development (Duke and Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref43">16</reflink>]).</p> <p>In our study, we documented the many ways in which Remi's (and other students') ways of reading were culturally mediated (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref44">30</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref45">31</reflink>]). Remi's culture was not one part of his language comprehension, it was central to every aspect of his literacy development within the interconnected sequence of activities that Peele designed. Remi's ways of reading were fused with and mediated by Remi's cultural ways of knowing and ways of being to drive his reading development. Thus, in the CSVR, ways of reading touch and flexibly connect to ways of knowing and ways of being, which are all culturally mediated processes. In this way, ways of reading are not component parts, but an interconnected, culturally, and linguistically situated network driving reading development.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-9">Ways of Knowing</hd> <p>Ways of knowing are the way people understand their realities through their ancestral, cultural, and linguistic knowledge. Ancestral knowledge "embodies the developmental progression and collective knowledge of a particular cultural group" (Hollins [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref46">22</reflink>], 46). Cultures transfer ancestral, cultural, and linguistic knowledge through dance, language, music, and visual arts. One example are "Songlines," or images, dances, and songs that transfer ancestral knowledge, and connect Indigenous Australian people to land and water. Crafting a songline that embodied his connection to Haitian skies, Remi was able to tap into his ancestral knowledge through his Green Screen photo shoot, reading widely in books about space, and poetically musing.</p> <p>Cultural knowledge is a group's knowledge construction process. Integrating cultural knowledge into a classroom involves more than merely "adding some books about people of color" to the classroom library (Ladson‐Billings [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref47">25</reflink>], 82). It involves imagining children's interests, preferred storylines, languages, family structures, familiar topography, and more in text selection of books by cultural insiders (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref48">31</reflink>]). For example, Peele's use of <emph>The Me I Choose to Be</emph> (Tarpley, Bethencourt, and Bethencourt [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref49">45</reflink>]) and high‐interest books about the solar system he made available to Remi fostered language comprehension, word recognition, and engaged Remi in developing bridging processes such as vocabulary, while also centering his cultural knowledge. Rooted in his deep interest in space and stargazing experiences, Remi read many books about the universe; these books motivated him to grapple with reading sophisticated vocabulary words, and writing letter‐sounds in English, thinking metacognitively about how they compared to Haitian Creole.</p> <p>Linguistic knowledge is also an important way of knowing. Linguistic knowledge is a way of communicating and understanding that is linked to a specific linguistic community. Language helps people interweave information among the various regions of the brain to interpret the present and past (Rubin [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref50">36</reflink>]). For example, as Remi began crafting his poem, he first thought in Haitian Creole. Peele encouraged him to write in Haitian Creole first, but Remi insisted on writing in English, which proved challenging as Remi had a hard time with English phonetic pronunciation. Along with daily intervention, another way Peele and other supportive staff helped develop Remi's phonemic awareness was to have him select unknown vocabulary words in his daily reading, then record himself pronouncing the challenging words. This helped him gradually gain mainstream English phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge. Ultimately, Remi's motivation to write and read about the universe outpaced the difficulty he initially experienced.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-10">Culturally Mediated Cognition</hd> <p>Culturally mediated cognition describes the way attention, perception, knowledge construction, and memory are grounded in culture as they mediate thinking and learning (Cole, Engeström, and Vasquez [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref51">13</reflink>]; Hollins [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref52">21</reflink>]). Culturally mediated cognition can be illustrated in the way Peele drew Remi's attention to cultural memories, details, and interconnected parts of his cultural and linguistic knowledge in the literacy engagement (Wang [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref53">43</reflink>]). For example, Peele evoked childhood memories of stargazing, so that Remi's attention was activated and sustained throughout the interconnected literacy activities. Furthermore, the Green Screen photoshoot, where Remi was able to be styled as an astronaut, select a space‐like background, and create his poetic verses, helped meaningfully maintain his attention and engage him deeply.</p> <p>Remi participated in intensive phonological awareness and phonics interventions with Peele and the reading specialist where in order to give voice to his experiences in mainstream English and eventually write his poem. To ground these phonological awareness and phonics activities in perceptual patterns that reflected Remi's cultural membership and experiences, Peele and Remi's other teachers helped him compare and contrast Haitian Creole and English during these intervention times. Remi's teachers also flexibly interchanged synthetic phonics approaches which teach individual letter‐sounds with analytic approaches which teach letter‐sounds in the context of words (Glazzard and Stones [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref54">19</reflink>]). While synthetic phonics is commonly used in Western contexts, research demonstrates that both synthetic and analytic phonics teaching are effective (Elson et al. [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref55">17</reflink>]; Glazzard and Stones [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref56">19</reflink>]).</p> <p>Remi had life‐shaping experiences with stargazing in Haiti which drove his construction of knowledge about the solar system. Along with Peele, Remi's family supported Remi's keen interest in space and the universe by providing him with resources (books, videos, elaborate astronaut costumes) that helped him connect cultural and ancestral knowledge gained from stargazing experiences with disciplinary knowledge about space (Muhammad [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref57">29</reflink>]). Having deep disciplinary knowledge along with cultural knowledge furthered Remi's interest and integration of that knowledge in reading, writing, and speaking about space (Cervetti and Wright [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref58">11</reflink>]). This illustrates what researchers have found − that cultural knowledge corresponds with reading ability beyond other single components (Hwang et al. [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref59">24</reflink>]; Talwar, Tighe, and Greenberg [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref60">41</reflink>]) or vocabulary skills (Ahmed et al. [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref61">1</reflink>]).</p> <p>As he read and wrote about the solar system, Remi was able to activate both macro (the topography of Haiti) and micro‐level (stargazing) memories by sharing his cultural knowledge with his classmates (Wang [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref62">43</reflink>]). For example, he shared and discussed Google Earth images of Haiti with his classmates during morning meeting. Remi's cultural memories sustained his attention and facilitated his perception of ideas which he then used in working to decode words in texts and encode words as he wrote about his experiences. Remi may have been disinterested in reading and writing if Peele had invited him to read about Japan and write a different sort of poem such as a Japanese Haiku. Further, when Peele read‐aloud a text with images of Black children dressed and styled in futuristic clothing, this activated and ignited Remi's imagination and cultural memory, which enabled him to engage further with the task of reading and writing. The load on his memory was coherent with his culture. In this instance, as in the research literature, cultural knowledge supported Remi's active self‐regulation of reading—his ability to focus on the complex tasks at hand (Cartwright [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref63">10</reflink>]; Dore et al. [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref64">15</reflink>]). Via these culturally mediated activities, Remi developed crucial ways of reading (word recognition skills, e.g.) and his own cultural memories and knowledge were sustained.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-11">Ways of Being</hd> <p>Ways of being are a critical part of the CSVR. Ways of being are belief systems that guide human behavior, values, ways of knowing, and ways of reading. Ways of being are created in the context of cultural and linguistic membership, life experiences, and relationships. Such experiences, beliefs, relationships, and community membership result in ardent differences in the way people conceive of themselves (Wang [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref65">43</reflink>]) and become readers (Muhammad [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref66">29</reflink>]). In order to understand Remi's culturally and linguistically rooted communities, Peele had to spend time with Remi's family to understand their beliefs and values. Peele visits the homes of each student at the beginning of the school year, and spends time with families before, during (by having families share read‐alouds and cultural traditions, for example), and after school throughout the year (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref67">30</reflink>]).</p> <p>Life experiences shape communities' ways of being. Although there are no fixed cultural orientations (Nasir et al. [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref68">32</reflink>]), some East Asian and African cultural communities may prioritize interdependence and collectivity (Boutte, Wynter‐Hoyte, and Bryan [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref69">5</reflink>]; Markus and Kitayama [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref70">27</reflink>]; Triandis [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref71">40</reflink>]). In fact, interdependent and collective relationships are often prioritized by Peele's students. To connect to these values, each morning Peele gathers his students in a cipher, a circular grouping where he and the class come together to share and to celebrate and honor voices, ideas, and stories (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref72">30</reflink>]). Students often share notes they write on their daily independent reading during this morning meeting. When Remi shared insights about space from his independent reading (especially about a complex subject such as the solar system), his classmates were challenged by his pronunciation in Haitian Creole. However, because they valued interdependence, they listened, asked questions, and provided feedback, helping further develop Remi's speaking abilities.</p> <p>Relationships are interdependent connections that shape human behavior, values, belief systems, and experiences. A network of shared belief systems between Remi, Peele, the class, and school personnel such as the reading specialist and paraprofessionals who worked with Remi before and after school helped shape Remi's successful engagement with reading and writing. For example, in addition to the phonics interventions he received daily from Peele and the reading specialist, either Peele or a paraprofessional would meet with Remi before school to review high‐frequency words. Peele says this was part of their commitment, as Black educators, to fostering excellence within their community. These morning sessions were filled with joy, as Peele, Remi, and the other educators witnessed Remi's gradual success. Their relationships reflected their belief that Remi comprehensively mattered, his reading and language challenges were not viewed as a hindrance but as essential skills he was capable of gaining in order to further his reading and writing development (Carey [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref73">8</reflink>]).</p> <p>By the end of the school year, Remi had grown three grade levels because his culturally mediated ways of being were leveraged as strengths in this collectivist school/classroom environment. Table 1 (below) highlights each component of the cultural sustenance view that has been shared in this article alongside culturally sustaining literacy instructional practices that culturally mediate ways of reading, knowing, and being.</p> <p>1 TABLE Cultural sustenance view of reading and culturally sustaining practices.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead valign="bottom"><tr><th align="left">CSVR construct and definition</th><th align="center">Culturally sustaining practices</th></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td align="left">Ways of reading</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Word recognition—phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, phonics knowledge, sight word knowledge</td><td align="center">Explicitly teaching and comparing letters and letter‐sounds across languages or language varieties</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Language comprehension—cultural and other knowledge, reading‐specific background knowledge, verbal reasoning, theory of mind</td><td align="center">Critically discussing texts that center children's lived experiences, values, languages, communities, and cultures</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Self‐regulation—strategy use, motivation and engagement, and executive functioning skills</td><td align="center">Providing multiple opportunities and explicit strategies for successfully reading controlled and less‐controlled text in books that reflect children's interests, experiences, communities, and cultures</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Bridging processes—print concepts, fluency, vocabulary, morphology, and grapho‐phonological‐semantic flexibility</td><td align="center">Explicitly teaching vocabulary and morphology; providing rich oral language experiences and experiences with print concepts; providing opportunities to read texts that critically center languages, experiences, and values to recode words and phonemes</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Ways of knowing</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Ancestral knowledge—collective knowledge of a cultural group</td><td align="center">Sharing texts, images, dances, songs, etc. that tap into students' ancestral knowledge in daily routines, artwork, read‐alouds, and the classroom library</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Cultural knowledge—collective knowledge construction processes</td><td align="center">Centering cultural knowledge by imagining the ways that books and other classroom materials can reflect interests, storylines, family structures, and topographies that are deeply rooted in cultural knowledge</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Linguistic knowledge—a way of communicating that is linked to a particular community</td><td align="center">Comparing linguistic knowledge across languages in phonological and phonemic awareness instruction; Self‐recording and listening to recordings of oral reading and vocabulary; Reading texts that honor and extend linguistic knowledge; Writing and speaking across languages and language varieties (translanguaging)</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Culturally mediated cognition</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Attention—the extent to which information is retained or encoded in our memories through sustained and meaningful rehearsal, practice, and elaboration</td><td align="center">Drawing attention to cultural memories, details, and interconnected parts of cultural and linguistic knowledge and reading and writing texts that activate cultural memories and knowledge so that the cognitive reading tasks are connected to students' cultures</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Perception—discerning the culturally grounded aspects or patterns of a particular phenomenon</td><td align="center">Developing a deep understanding of students' heritage languages and language varieties; Flexibly interchanging synthetic and analytic phonics teaching approaches</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Knowledge construction—mental operations and processes grounded in cultural experiences</td><td align="center">Connecting reading and writing to culturally grounded experiences and ways of knowing, for example centering identity and skills</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Memory—cognitive structures or schema that enable people to receive and process information</td><td align="center">Evoking cultural memories through literacy activities, texts, and discussions</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Ways of being</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Cultural and linguistic community—Culturally and linguistically rooted systems of beliefs that guide human behavior</td><td align="center">Spending time with families to understand their cultures and languages before the school year starts. Inviting families into the classroom to share cultural and linguistic traditions. Talking with families as partners in their child's education</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Life experiences—experiences that shape belief systems, values, and relationships</td><td align="center">Understanding a community's values and reflecting those values in classroom instruction. For example, designing classroom activities that nurture interdependence rather than individualism</td></tr><tr><td align="left">Relationships—connections that shape belief systems, values, and life experiences</td><td align="center">Building relationships within and amongst students that reflect your belief in their abilities and skills—their comprehensive mattering</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <hd id="AN0183953329-12">To Be the Universe: Conclusions and Implications</hd> <p>The CSVR is a reader model that builds upon Peele and Turner Nash's collective engagement with CSPs over multiple years and an extensive review of the literature on the cognitive and sociocultural roots of reading development (Nash et al. [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref74">30</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref75">31</reflink>]). CSPs are pro‐Black practices that require that our teaching practices be more than "responsive of or relevant to the cultural experiences and practices of young people—it requires that they support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence" (Paris [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref76">33</reflink>], 95). CSPs can help us imagine a literacy future and present where children like Remi comprehensively matter (Carey [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref77">8</reflink>]). Despite a century's worth of research showing otherwise, within reading research, popular ideologies, and media coverage, the cultural and linguistic knowledge and experiences of some are consistently depicted as deficient. Further inhibiting CSPs, current reading models do not depict the role of culture within reading development, or they depict culture as componential. This has led to critical gaps that only deepen educational inequities and ignore our multiethnic, multilingual, and pluralistic reality (Moje et al. [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref78">28</reflink>]; Teale, Whittingham, and Hoffman [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref79">42</reflink>]). Like CSPs, the Cultural Sustenance View requires more than just responsiveness or relevance. Our model requires that teachers turn away from views of culture and/or linguistic differences as deficits.</p> <p>Peele's literacy engagements culturally mediated Remi's <emph>ways of knowing</emph>—his ancestral, linguistic, and cultural knowledge, his <emph>ways of being</emph>—his values, community membership, life experiences, and relationships, with his <emph>ways of reading</emph>—word recognition, bridging processes, language comprehension, and active self‐regulation. By placing Remi's ways being and knowing at the center of his literacy activities, Peele culturally mediated Remi's cognition. The poem Remi eventually wrote reminds us why a CSVR is needed; for children like Remi have often only marginally mattered in schools and in society and have not always been given the chance to be the universe.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-13">TAKE ACTION!</hd> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Evaluate the models of reading (Simple View, Scarborough's Rope, Active View) that you have learned about in your teacher preparation and professional learning, examining the extent to which these models account for children's cultural and linguistic knowledge and experiences.</item> <p></p> <item> Consider the four overlapping constructs within the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading—ways of reading, ways of knowing, culturally mediated cognition, and ways of being—and how Peele centered those through pro‐Black, culturally sustaining practices. How could you center and apply these constructs in your teaching?</item> <p></p> <item> Peele leveraged Remi's Haitian ways of being and knowing to guide his reading and writing development. Think deeply about your own students' ways of knowing and being and how those culturally mediate their ways of reading and writing.</item> </ulist> <hd id="AN0183953329-14">Conflicts of Interest</hd> <p>The authors declare no conflicts of interest.</p> <hd id="AN0183953329-15">MORE TO EXPLORE!</hd> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Understanding Research Articles|Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy</item> <p></p> <item> Stream episode Django Paris|Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies by uweducation podcast|Listen online for free on SoundCloud</item> <p></p> <item> Six Features of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies</item> </ulist> <ref id="AN0183953329-16"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref61" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Ahmed, Y., D. J. Francis, M. York, J. M. Fletcher, M. Barnes, and P. 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  Data: 10.1002/trtr.2377
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0034-0561<br />1936-2714
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Culture and language shape the way people read. Yet, within many popular reading models of reading development, culture is a component, if featured at all. Illustrated through examples of pro-Black, culturally sustaining, emancipatory practices of one teacher, this article highlights the Cultural Sustenance View of Reading, a reader model that can be used by reading teachers to center and sustain culture in children's reading development and their literacy futures.
– Name: AbstractInfo
  Label: Abstractor
  Group: Ab
  Data: As Provided
– Name: DateEntry
  Label: Entry Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2025
– Name: AN
  Label: Accession Number
  Group: ID
  Data: EJ1461142
PLink https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1461142
RecordInfo BibRecord:
  BibEntity:
    Identifiers:
      – Type: doi
        Value: 10.1002/trtr.2377
    Languages:
      – Text: English
    PhysicalDescription:
      Pagination:
        PageCount: 9
        StartPage: 258
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Reading Research
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Reading Processes
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Cultural Influences
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Reading Teachers
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Models
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Reading Instruction
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Literacy
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: 'I Am the Universe': Toward a Reader Model That Centers Culture
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Roderick Peele
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Kindel Turner Nash
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 03
              Type: published
              Y: 2025
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 0034-0561
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 1936-2714
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 78
            – Type: issue
              Value: 5
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: Reading Teacher
              Type: main
ResultId 1