Teaching reading is more complex than reading, especially when teaching students from minoritized communities. Teaching reading equitably requires educators to integrate their knowledge of skills involved in reading, assisting students to learn to read, and everyday sociocultural practices and identities of readers. In this article, I examine what research has found across methodological traditions regarding teaching reading equitably, as well as what still needs to be explored. For the “science of reading” community, I frame equitable teaching as effective in assisting student reading performance and meaningful in terms of integrating values and practices from minoritized students’ everyday lives. Drawing largely on interpretive research, I identify sociocultural processes in teaching reading that connect with minoritized students’ everyday identities and experiences, support student initiative and expression, and foster collaborative relationships in the classroom to assist student participation and performance in reading. To advance the science of teaching reading equitably, I recommend that pluralistic research build generalizable evidence regarding effects of equitable teaching on reading and language gains for minoritized students, mechanisms in teaching reading equitably, and processes and materials to support teacher learning to sustain implementation of equitable practices to teach reading.

Language in education for children and youth from low-income communities of color, including those learning English as an additional language, has been fraught for decades with ideological entanglements, conceptual ambiguities, and empirical limitations. Meanwhile, the teacher learning challenge to implement equitable teaching practices remains largely unresolved. With an eye towards improving equitable classroom talk (ECT)—i.e., meaningful participation in disciplinary practices through communal and connected language interactions—for all students from minoritized communities, we integrate research on additional language development, disciplinary practices, sociocultural classroom interactions, and teacher learning. We recommend researcher-educator collaborations (a) develop indicators of ECT, (b) use lesson videos to make ECT visible, and (c) develop and test materials to support and scale teacher learning to enact ECT.

Millions of students in the US and Mexico begin their educations in one country and find themselves trying to integrate into the school system of the other. As global migration increases, their numbers are expected to grow and more and more teachers will find these transnational students in their classrooms. The goal of The Students We Share is to prepare educators for this present and future reality. While the US has been developing English as a Second Language programs for decades, Mexican schools do not offer such programs in Spanish and neither the US nor Mexico has prepared its teachers to address the educational, social-psychological, or other personal needs of transnational students. Teachers know little about the circumstances of transnational students’ lives or histories and have little to no knowledge of the school systems of the country from which they or their family come. As such, they are fundamentally unprepared to equitably educate the “students we share,” who often fall through the cracks and end their educations prematurely. Written by both Mexican and US pioneers in the field, chapters in this volume aim to prepare educators on both sides of the US-Mexico border to better understand the circumstances, strengths, and needs of the transnational students we teach. With recommendations for policymakers, administrators, teacher educators, teachers, and researchers in both countries, The Students We Share shows how preparing teachers is our shared responsibility and opportunity. It describes policies, classroom practices, and norms of both systems, as well as examples of ongoing partnerships across borders to prepare the teachers we need for our shared students to thrive.

Debates continue about how to teach young Latinos and other minoritized children in the US. Latinos are a compelling case because of 1) their size and 2) their paradoxical development: strong social competencies yet relatively weak academic development. A suggestion is to provide young Latinos with classroom experiences that resonate with the ways they are socialized at home, yet cultural dimensions of teaching in early education are underspecified and reliable and valid measures do not exist. We frame equitable teacher-child interactions as the combination of generic and cultural aspects, and as a way to utilize the social assets of Latinos in classrooms to amend their developmental paradox. We refine an observation protocol—the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI)—by integrating cultural concepts from the Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI) paradigm with videos of K-1 classrooms in Central Mexico, and conduct a series of psychometric analyses. We find good model fit and moderate reliability for the CASI and discuss research and practice implications to enrich developmental opportunities for Latino children across early education settings.

Some argue that supporting minoritized students’ “academic language” (AL) development fosters equity in education. Others contend that AL is hegemonic, and that attempts to teach it perpetuate inequities across racial, ethnic, social class, immigrant, and related sociocultural and linguistic student differences. In this article, we frame the topic of this special issue—interdisciplinary approaches to equity in teaching AL—and show how authors across positions and analytic methods examine the goals of teaching AL and recommend ways for educators to foster meaningful language awareness for students. Although substantive, unresolved disagreements between positions remain; we identify points of agreement as well, which we present to educators as interdisciplinary principles of equity in teaching. Namely, educators should 1) understand how language is more than just vocabulary; 2) recognize academic features in students’ everyday talk; 3) develop awareness of language and its contexts of use with students, and 4) foster critical language awareness.

We trace the development and analyze the generalizability of the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), an observation system designed to measure cultural dimensions of classroom interactions. We establish CASI measurement properties by analyzing panoramic videos of 4th and 5th grade classrooms from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and argue for its significance in terms of achievement opportunity for minoritized students and needed evidence regarding equitable teaching. We frame ten dimensions of sociocultural interactions within three domains: Life Applications (i.e., connections with what students know and do outside of school); Self in Group (i.e., interdependence to motivate learning and foster social identities); and Agency (i.e., how freedom and choice are managed). We demonstrate how measurement error is associated with raters, lessons, and lesson segments, and discuss implications for CASI refinement, as well as appropriate instrument uses to enrich learning opportunities for minoritized students across a variety of classroom settings.