Dialogically Constructing a Culturally Sustaining Multilingual Family Literacies Approach in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

This paper explores a family literacies approach that is being co-constructed in a critical participatory action research project. The project is situated in two culturally and linguistically diverse early childhood settings where the researchers are collaborating with educators and with children and families who have recently arrived in Australia and are learning English as an additional language. In a quest to support and sustain children’s language, literacy, and cultural practices in their home/community languages and in English, we have focused on co-creating multilingual books with the children and their families that are in their languages and about their worlds. This paper examines the affordances and complexities of dialogically co-creating these books for supporting culturally and linguistically sustaining practices in diverse early childhood settings.

1. Introduction

Children’s opportunities to engage with and sustain their home/community languages and cultures is a fundamental human right, as affirmed in Article 30 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:

‘In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or persons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language.’ (United Nations 1989, URL).

For children of families learning English as an additional language, denying them this right silences their languages and heritages and the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which languages and language learning are situated (García and Kleifgen 2018; International Literacy Association 2019). Such is the imperative behind the multilingual family literacies approach on which this article reports. We are collaboratively developing this approach with children and their families who have recently arrived in Australia and with educators in culturally and linguistically diverse early childhood settings.

Amongst such families, language loss concerns constitute a complex issue. Parents may express strong desire for their children to learn and maintain their home/community languages and cultural heritages (Anderson et al. 2015; Baralt et al. 2022; Barnes et al. 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Singh et al. 2015); yet, they also want their children to learn English where English is their new nation’s dominant language (Barnes et al. 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Ng’asike 2019). Some parents can be concerned that their children would be disadvantaged by using their home languages (Ng’asike 2019), while others see their children learning two languages (home language and English) or three languages (home language, English, and another language) as highly desirable (Anderson et al. 2015; Baralt et al. 2022; Gonzalez et al. 2022).

Amidst these complex concerns, the issue at stake is families’ right to sustain home languages and cultures whilst gaining access to the dominant culture. In educational settings, culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) has been advanced as a strengths-based pedagogic approach that emphasizes the importance of preserving, revitalizing, and promoting the cultural and linguistic identities, experiences, and ways of knowing of diverse students and communities (Alim et al. 2020; Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017).

Yet, there is a dearth of research into using CSP in multilingual family literacies approaches in early childhood settings. Being mindful of the disruptions families face when moving to live in another country, and in the interests of equity, access, and human rights, we believe it is vital to apply CSP to how we frame a multilingual family literacies approach that not only recognises and validates, but also proactively works to sustain, families’ cultural and linguistic practices.

Hence, this article reports on an action research study implementing CSP as an approach to collaboratively develop a multilingual family literacies approach with families and children and their educators in culturally and linguistically diverse early childhood settings. This account begins with a literature review on multilingual family literacies approaches in early childhood settings. We then explicate the study’s conceptual framework and research design. The findings follow, with the article concluding with a discussion of implications for practice and further research.

2. Multilingual Family Literacies Approaches in Early Childhood Settings

When writing of multilingual family literacies approaches in early childhood settings, we are projecting approaches that incorporate children’s and their families’ home and community experiences in interactive literacy activities between parents/caregivers and children that support child and adult learning, including opportunities for fostering children’s literacies in their home/community languages and in English (Mertala 2018). Such approaches should ‘build on the strengths that families bring and provide an intersubjective space where children and their families and educators can share knowledge in a reciprocal, respectful manner’ (Anderson et al. 2015, p. 41; see also Pahl and Kelly 2005).

This project has been informed by an extensive literature review of multilingual family literacies approaches in early childhood settings published in scholarly, peer-reviewed book chapters, books, and journal articles in the range of 2013–2023. This review revealed a paucity of research that has explicitly reported on enacting CSP in this space. The one such study that was found was one we conducted directly with children and their families in their multilingual homes and in community settings where there was no access to early childhood services, in a nation with three official languages (Harris et al. 2020). This article’s study is situated in a different context—culturally and linguistically diverse early childhood education and care settings in Australia, where one language, English, is the official language.

Yet, parents of children learning English as an additional language who are involved in a family literacies program in early childhood settings continue to express concern that their children would lose their home language(s) in English language -dominant host communities. These parents want their children to maintain their cultural heritages whilst also being prepared for the future (Anderson et al. 2015; Baralt et al. 2022; Barnes et al. 2022; Gonzalez et al. 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Ng’asike 2019; Singh et al. 2015). It was therefore critical in this project to engage in dialogue with families about their language concerns and priorities for their children.

Other parental priorities for multilingual family literacy programs have included parents’ desire to improve their own literacy and teaching of their children (Singh et al. 2015), as well as nurturing a sense of connectedness and belonging by creating opportunities for families to connect with one another (Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Singh et al. 2015; Wessels 2014). These desires resonate with this project’s intentions to collectively create a community of learning and practices where researchers and participants share knowledge and learn with and from one another.

3. Practices That Enable Families’ Participation in Multilingual Family Literacies Programs in Early Childhood Settings

There is strong consensus in the literature that programs conducive to families’ engagement involve multilingual materials and experiences and/or encourage participants to use their home/community languages (e.g., Anderson et al. 2015; August et al. 2023; Baralt et al. 2022; Barnes et al. 2022; Barratt-Pugh and Haig 2020; Bolt et al. 2019; Compton-Lilly et al. 2023; Guiberson and Ferris 2019; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Ng’asike 2019; Pollard-Durodola et al. 2017; Singh et al. 2015; Wagner 2023; Wessels 2014).

Engaging programs also build connections between families’ homes, communities, and the early childhood setting (Harris et al. 2020, 2021), such as connecting with families’ household activities and items (Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Nunez 2019). In making these connections, children’s voices, agency, and interests are key (Cun 2022; Dicataldo and Roch 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Lee et al. 2018; Wagner 2023). Voice and agency are germane, too, in understanding children’s and their families’ practices and trajectories in CSP (Harris et al. 2020, 2021) and its implementation in this project.

In terms of practical considerations for families, programs conducive to families’ engagement are held at accessible locations (Iruka et al. 2018; McLachlan and Arrow 2017), including virtual spaces (Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022). Set times of sessions are convenient for families (Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Justice et al. 2020), with such sessions including demonstrations, support, feedback, and/or training (August et al. 2023; Mesa and Restrepo 2019; Nunez 2019; Pollard-Durodola et al. 2017; Wagner 2023).

Books figure prominently in successful multilingual family literacies approaches in early childhood settings, particularly books that are authentically inclusive of families’ languages and cultures (August et al. 2023), such as global children’s literature (e.g., Acevedo 2019; Short 2019). Related activities include interactive book reading (e.g., Deitcher et al. 2021; Derby 2023; Mesa and Restrepo 2019) and children, families, and educators co-creating books (Compton-Lilly et al. 2023; Guiberson and Ferris 2019; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Lee et al. 2018; Ng’asike 2019). Some programs also involve dialogic reasoning and conversations between parents and children during literacy activities (Bolt et al. 2019; Cun 2022; Dicataldo and Roch 2022).

A range of activities, including book walks, art activities, songs, puppet making, treasure hunts, show and tell, and discussions, further supports families’, and their children’s, engagement and literacies (Anderson et al. 2015; Baralt et al. 2022; Bolt et al. 2019; Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Nicola et al. 2014; Wagner 2023; Wessels 2014). Such activities may be incorporated in play-based sessions (Harris et al. 2020; Nunez 2019) and may use audio versions of books recorded in multiple languages (Cun 2022).

Enacting equitable relationships with families is core to successful multilingual family literacies approaches in early childhood settings (Compton-Lilly et al. 2023; Cycyk et al. 2021) and are at the heart of implementing CSP in this project. Equitable relationships are based on strengths-based views of families and children that challenge deficit views and value their backgrounds (Compton-Lilly et al. 2023; Cycyk et al. 2021). Such relationships are enacted, for example, through involving the families in designing the program and documenting their engagement and sharing this with other people (Baralt et al. 2022; Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Lee et al. 2018) and accommodating families’ needs and priorities (Baralt et al. 2022; Cycyk et al. 2021; Guiberson and Ferris 2019; Iruka et al. 2018; Millora 2023; Nunez 2019). Importantly, these practices pave the way for developing shared understandings and drawing on children’s and families’ funds of knowledge (e.g., Bolt et al. 2019; Guiberson and Ferris 2019). Engaging programs also include open sessions in their planning to discuss issues as they arise (Anderson et al. 2015) and provide opportunities for families to provide feedback on the program (Rabkin et al. 2018). This project is informed by such considerations in its approach.

Access to digital technology has been found to be a key enabler that, in its absence, along with Internet and technological challenges, can limit or even prevent families’ engagement (Cycyk et al. 2021; Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Lee et al. 2018).

4. Constraints on Families’ Participation in Multilingual Family Literacies Programs in Early Childhood Settings

Parents’ levels of certainty and confidence that they bring to the family literacies space, including concern with their own English-speaking abilities (Barnes et al. 2022; Barratt-Pugh and Haig 2020; Harris et al. 2020), can constrain their participation. The researchers therefore sought to spend time in dialogue with families to affirm their strengths and the value of the cultural and language practices they bring. In doing so, the researchers positioned themselves as learners and families as their cultural and language mentors. Dialogue is key and, in this dialogue, the researchers have sought to construct and negotiate shared understandings and reassurances on an ongoing basis.

Practical considerations such as families’ financial situations, time constraints, transport issues, family responsibilities, parental working hours, and childcare accessibility (e.g., Cycyk et al. 2021; Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Gonzalez et al. 2022; Moinolmolki et al. 2017; McLachlan and Arrow 2017; Mesa and Restrepo 2019), combined with conduciveness of the program’s structure to families’ participation (McTavish and Lenters 2015), must also be taken into account. The researchers therefore planned to remain flexible whilst centring the family literacies approach in each children’s services site.

Issues of relevance and appropriateness of a family literacies program can also hinder families’ engagement. Key constraints include disconnects between home and the early childhood setting or a program’s neglect of families’ contexts and funds of knowledge; and families’ perceived irrelevance or inappropriateness of the program for themselves (Cycyk et al. 2021; Moinolmolki et al. 2017; McLachlan and Arrow 2017; Purcell-Gates 2013). We therefore envisaged that co-creating books with children and their families in their languages and about their worlds would ensure relevance and the inclusion of families’ funds of knowledge.

Another key constraint impacting families is limited or no access to culturally and linguistically diverse books, including those inclusive of the families’ languages and cultures (Baralt et al. 2022; Barratt-Pugh and Haig 2020; Mesa and Restrepo 2019; Singh et al. 2015). The core activity of our approach to date has been co-creating such books with children and their families, containing stories led by the children with their families, related to their lives and written in their home/community languages and English. We have framed the making of these books as culturally sustaining pedagogy enacted through authentic dialogic encounters, as now explained below.

5. Conceptual Framework and Related Research

5.1. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

CSP is a strengths-based education approach to sustaining and advancing the linguistic and cultural practices and identities inherent in the diverse lives and communities of young people’s (under 18) worlds (Alim et al. 2020; Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017). Education settings are constructed as places where the cultural ways of being in communities are sustained, rather than diminished or eliminated, by valuing and incorporating communities’ languages, practices, and ways of knowing and being (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017).

CSP was developed to assist communities disrupted by external forces such as colonisation, conflict, and displacement (Jenkins 2019). CSP advocates recognising cultures as dynamic collections of values, beliefs, and practices that differ among young people’s social identities in terms of diversities in cultural, socio-economic, age, generational, ability, neurological, gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and faith-related backgrounds; and experiences. At the same time, CSP seeks to ensure access and opportunity across diversities and redress inequities in opportunities, rights, and access brought forth by historical, societal, political, and economic factors (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017).

To realise these aspirations, CSP scholars (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017) promote four key tenets that are shown in

Table 1. Tenets of CSP.

Tenet 1	CSP is based on pluralist outcomes that connect with and sustain cultural and linguistic practices while providing access to the dominant culture.
Tenet 2	CSP attends to children’s cultural/community practices and knowledges and works with and generates nuanced, dynamic understandings of cultures, avoiding static stereotypes.
Tenet 3	CSP values and seeks to understand traditional cultural practices but acknowledges children’s and young people’s roles in shifting cultural traditions, recognising how they experience and change their cultures in contemporary worlds.
Tenet 4	CSP uses practices that promote children’s trajectories and communities’ cultural lifeways and asks for communities to critically reflect on the efficacy of practices for greater cultural good.

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Educators who enact these tenets with diverse groups of students have been found to support and encourage the agency and input of students, families, and communities across generations; affirm positive relationships with the land and the people of the land; position communities and their languages, practices, and knowledges at the centre of their pedagogic work; and provide opportunities to engage with, challenge, and counteract oppressive systems and structures (Alim et al. 2020). To these practices, we add engagement in authentic dialogic encounters, as explored below.

5.2. Authentic Dialogic Encounters (ADEs)

Because CSP is centred on the diverse lives of children and their families and communities, we argue that dialogue with children and their families is integral to CSP (Harris et al. 2020, 2021). To explain ‘dialogue’ or ‘dialogic’, we draw on Freire’s (1970) seminal work on authentic dialogic encounters as encounters with people in and about their worlds to transform their reality through collective reflection and action. Adapted from Freire’s adult focus to early childhood education (Harris and Manatakis 2013), and working with children and their families in their homes and communities (Harris et al. 2020, 2021), authentic dialogic encounters are framed by the principles shown in

Table 2. Principles of authentic dialogic encounters (after Harris and Manatakis 2013; Harris et al. 2020).

Relational context	Dialogic encounters occur in and generate relational contexts characterised by an ethics of caring and commitment, including equitable relationships and dispositions such as trust, respect, humility, empathy, compassion, kindness, optimism, reciprocity, and open-mindedness.
Apposite settings	Dialogic encounters occur in familiar settings that are conducive to the focus at hand.
Appropriateness	Dialogic encounters are conducted in ways that are appropriate for the participants, including cultural and communicative/linguistic appropriateness, responsive to participants’ ways of making meaning, expressing self, and communicating with others.
Meaningful engagement	Dialogic encounters involve the negotiation and clarification of shared goals, processes, and outcomes; and translations, mediation, and scaffolding as needed to support participation.
Deep, visible listening	Dialogic encounters involve generative listening through tuning in with all our senses to what participants say and how they say it, including intonation, facial expressions, gestures, body language, and gaze.
Multiple languages and modes	Dialogic encounters attend to and embrace participants’ languages and multiple modes of exploring, expressing, and communicating meaning (e.g., drawing, painting, music, song, photography, embodied expression, face and gesture, spoken and written words).
Agency	Dialogic encounters are framed as co-construction, in which participants are viewed as active constructors of and participants in their social lives, worlds, meaning, and learning.
Inclusion	Dialogic encounters ensure that all participants’ voices are heard, with time and structures that allow and sustain dialogue.
Trustworthy documentation	Dialogic encounters entail trustworthy documentation that make participants’ voices visible and involve cross-checking interpretations with participants.
Consequence	Dialogic encounters generate mutually desired change and benefit in participants’ lives.

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The principles of ADEs within a CSP framework align with and express the principles of trauma-informed practice, -safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural, historical, and gender consideration (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 2014). This alignment encompasses the breadth of experiences brought by families and their children in their transitions to living in Australia and the need to adapt to new intercultural spaces and practices and navigate new identities and relationships with the host culture. Respectful mutual engagements sharing children’s and families’ representations of their lifeworlds in ADEs provide pathways for new learning and understanding for children, families, educators, and researchers.

In this project, the researchers engaged in dialogic encounters with families to develop cultural understandings about: children’s and families’ community lives and the place of literacies therein; their multilingual literacy and language practices and the value they attached to these; and what, more broadly, they valued and aspired to. These understandings informed the collective development and implementation of CSP practices that focused on dialogically co-creating books with children and their families about their worlds. These books contain content led by the children with their families, related to their lives and written in their home/community languages and in English.

The decision to focus on dialogically co-creating these books was informed by the researchers’ previous studies (Harris et al. 2020, 2021) and was confirmed in their conversations with this project’s families and educators. Dialogically co-creating these books enabled the researchers and participants to collectively harness the power of authoring and sharing one’s own stories for social bonding and belonging, inter- and intra-cultural understandings, finding one’s place and identity in stories, and engendering a story-telling community amongst children and their families and educators (see also Arizpe et al. 2014; Clarke 2020; Dutro and Haberl 2018).

The idea of creating texts that contain words and images in and about the children’s worlds and languages is not new in and of itself. For example, Ashton-Warner’s (1963) notable literacy work with Māori children directly built on the children’s own words and experiences. However, in this project, how we collectively and dialogically went about this work with children and their families and educators is significant for its culturally sustaining possibilities. This collective action is firmly embedded in children’s and their families’ worlds and opens doors to ways that families’ knowledge and values can support their children’s multilingual literacies.

5.3. Literacies

Consistent with the project’s CSP approach, this project is framed by a sociocultural perspective of literacies that provides a broad, strengths-based lens for recognising the literacies in which children are immersed in their homes and the communities that are part of their funds of knowledge (González et al. 2005). Literacies are viewed as diverse lived practices situated in and shaped by social, cultural, political, environmental, historic, and economic contexts (Green et al. 1997; Street 2017). For example, differences between multilingual and monolingual children’s literate identities have been found to be connected with different kinds of literacy practices afforded by their respective linguistic communities (e.g., Barac et al. 2014; Hammer et al. 2014). These contextual differences have been found to influence children’s perspectives of multilingualism; beliefs about literacy and learning in more than one language; and choices about what languages to use for literacy, and under what circumstances (Martínez-Roldán and Malavé 2004; Norton 2013).

Literacy practices travel and change across time and space (Pahl and Rowsell 2020) and involve (de-)encoding texts; making meaning with and through texts; critically analysing texts; and using/producing texts to fulfil social purposes—as posited in the Four Resources Model (Freebody and Luke 2003)—across wide-ranging texts, platforms, media, and modes, including spoken, written, visual, auditory, spatial, corporeal, digital, haptic, and multimodal (McVee and Boyd 2016).

Recent Australian multilingual literacies research in early childhood settings with children and their families has emphasised three to four-year-old children’s multimodal communicative capital while ‘storying’ various multilingual text productions, such as annotated posters of drawings and recorded pretend play with props. Multilingual children were observed to combine modes of drawing (visual/spatial), role playing (gestural), and speaking in family/community languages and in English (linguistic-verbal) while collaborating with parents and bilingually matched educators who transcribed and translated children’s imagined verbal story accounts (linguistic-writing), thus providing opportunities for translanguaging (Farndale and Reichelt 2023). Programs in Nigeria, Mexico, and Nepal (Millora 2023) highlight literacy as social practices (not only limited to reading and writing), including activities/practices that are meaningful to families such as cooking, watching television together, engaging in religious texts (discussing faith), dance classes, and origami, incorporating Indigenous and family languages. Faith practices facilitate rich multilingual, multiscriptal, and multimodal literacy, as identified in research with Afghan Muslim families (Aghayeva 2023).

Culturally sustaining engagement with multilingual texts containing children’s home languages, we argue, validates and promotes multilingual literate identities and helps redress hegemonic effects created by privileging dominant languages over minoritised languages (Flores and García 2013; Martínez-Roldán 2015).

5.4. Research Design

This project involves critical participatory action research (CPAR) (Kemmis et al. 2014)—that is, research undertaken with and by participants in their settings to collectively build knowledge for understanding and transforming practice. In this project, children, families, educators, and university researchers collaborated as co-investigators to build knowledge for constructing a culturally sustaining family literacies approach.

CPAR supports the research purpose by (1) providing a framework of processes for making practices more productive, sustainable, and inclusive; (2) creating conditions for participants to understand and develop practices from within contexts that shape and inform them; (3) developing a shared language grounded in the study’s shared context; (4) involving action, interaction, and reflection about and in the context of the practices under focus; and (5) engaging participants in transforming practices to meet the needs of changing times and circumstances (Kemmis et al. 2014).

Embedded in the participatory research paradigm (Lincoln et al. 2011), this approach assumes a participative ontology whereby participants engage with the researchers in collective reflection and action on their world in order to understand and potentially transform it. This study also assumes a participative epistemology whereby participants co-construct experiential, propositional, and practical ways of knowing.

5.5. Sites and Participants

This project is situated in a metropolitan crèche and a metropolitan childcare centre. These sites were chosen as they are highly culturally and linguistically diverse, servicing families that include those who have recently arrived in Australia and who are learning English as an additional language.

The crèche services families who have newly or recently arrived as migrants or refugees in Australia for the time that a child’s parent/s are attending an accredited adult migrant education program at a TAFE college.1 The crèche has 14 staff members and 63 enrolled children aged 6 weeks to five years. The children attend mornings to early afternoons three days a week, either Monday to Wednesday or Wednesday to Friday. The childcare centre is culturally and linguistically diverse and provides long daycare and pre-school (kindergarten) services for children from six weeks to school age, and it is open from 6.30 am to 6.30 pm five days a week. The centre has places for 110 children, with 105 children currently enrolled and 30 staff members.

Children and their families were invited to participate in the project based on being recent arrivals to Australia who are learning English as an additional language. To date, we have engaged with 12 families, as overviewed in

Table 3. Families participating in the study.

Participant Child’s Name (Pseudonym in Brackets)	Country of Birth	Family’s Home/Community Language(s)	Child’s Age at Outset of Participation
Mulan Yulan	China	Mandarin	Yulan—infant Mulan—preschooler
Aren and Ayden (twins)	Iran	Persian/Farsi	3 y/o
Raoul	Mother—Europe Father—Australia	Spanish	2 y/o
Miles	Mother—Indonesia Father—Australia	Indonesian	2 y/o
Anna	Mother—Russia Father—Germany	Russian	3.5 y/o
Nora James	Mother—Thailand Father—Australia	Thai	Nora—4 y/o James—1 y/o
Sara	Afghanistan	Persian/Dari	2.3 y/o
Noah	Mother—Japan Father—Australia	Japanese	2.3 y/o
Avante	Mother—Taiwan Father—Malaysia	Mandarin	2.1 y/o
Alex	Venezuela	Spanish	4.2 y/o
Olya	Afghanistan	Persian/Hazaragi	2 y/o
Ali Akbar	Afghanistan	Persian/Hazaragi	4.5 y/o

Data collection methods are shown in Table 4.

. Recruitment began with discussions with staff and interested families, followed by discussions with parents to ensure informed consent. Six families were initially recruited, and university research team members were paired with families. This small number allowed for the project to evolve and be shared with other parents and caregivers, inspiring others to join.

Due to families’ various circumstances and busy schedules, it became clear that the best way to work with the families in this project is on a one-to-one basis rather than in groups, as initially envisaged. Thus, each family worked with a researcher through the families’ preferred means, including face-to-face in person or virtually over Zoom, and in writing via email, messaging, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp. These encounters were interspersed with informal sharing circles run monthly at the children’s childcare setting.

The researchers’ initial interactions with the families revealed that the families were highly adept and well equipped with digital technologies and linguistic resources that they used for translations and staying in touch with their relatives overseas. Families preferred to use these resources for participating in the project rather than hiring translators from project funds as originally planned. The educators working at both sites were a linguistically diverse group and acted as translators and mediators with the particular families whose languages they spoke, aided by their established relationships with the families.

Data analysis is ongoing and involves iterative processes in which the researchers identify, thematise, and categorise emergent meanings (Glesne 2014), drawing on sensitising concepts (Ryan and Bernard 2003) related to culturally sustaining pedagogy and authentic dialogic encounters to identify and categorise themes emerging in the data. These analyses are triangulated across data methods, across researchers, and across participants (Lincoln et al. 2011); and consolidated through developing an account about each thematic category (Charmaz and Belgrave 2012). These processes to date have led to an interpretive case study for each family in the context of implementing principles of authentic dialogic encounter to collectively develop a culturally and linguistically sustaining family literacies approach. Three such case studies are presented under ‘Findings’.

In accordance with this study’s participatory paradigm (Lincoln et al. 2011), the researchers are maintaining the study’s trustworthiness as follows:

• Dependability: audio-/video-recordings of interviews and FGDs; still photos/copies of observations and artefacts;
• Credibility: member-checking of data records; triangulation across data sources;
• Confirmability: audit trails to check soundness of research steps, and reflexive researcher journals to check bias;
• Transferability: detailed accounts and thick descriptions of findings and all other aspects of study.

This study adheres to the researchers’ university ethics protocols, ensuring voluntary, respectful, safe and inclusive participation. Participating adults have provided their informed written consent for themselves and their children, linguistically mediated by educators, while children have provided their informed verbal assent. Participants’ agreement was monitored throughout the study.

6. Findings

Framed by principles of authentic dialogic encounters shown in Table 2, three interpretive case study accounts are provided below. These accounts illuminate how principles of authentic dialogic encounters were implemented with families over time, as well as the affordances and complexities of dialogically co-creating books with children and their families for supporting CSP practices in a multilingual family literacies approach.

The educators and site leader, with whom the researchers worked at the crèche in which the three case studies are based, made the relational context in which we encountered the children and their families very welcoming. Staff introduced the researchers to families, mediated families’ recruitment and consent processes, invited researchers and families to use their staff room for dialogue and interviews, and shared and displayed the co-created books. The site leader’s comments below underscore the criticality of educators’ roles in providing for relational contexts in which authentic dialogic encounters could occur:

‘I think potentially you would’ve lost something in … not having the staff members or the educators with those languages in the encouragement and the support and the negotiations that kind of happen behind the scenes and the explanations of how this was to play out between educators and families.’

Conversely, the site leader noted benefits of the project in terms of how the educators connect with the families:

‘… the educators who chose to be involved, it gave them the ownership of something beyond what they do on a daily basis and I think that was actually quite beneficial from my point of view in encouraging them to build relationships and to build that support network, which actually reaches far beyond this project, it actually reaches into the students’ and the children’s lives beyond what happens in the crèche … [The project] has given the educators a way of just starting their solid and focused conversations with the families, which actually leads to a lot more in depth about the development, about their culture, their diversity, about even within our own culture.’

These words were underscored by the fact that most of the educators were themselves recent arrivals to Australia:

‘Most of our educators are also quite new into the country and probably may be hesitant to start a conversation with another person and don’t want to step outside the bounds. But the project has given them a reason, a topic to talk to the people with the same language and then build their relationship.’

In this relational context, the educators brokered the researchers’ relationships with the families with whom they worked directly, while the educators supported this work at a close distance. The researchers began dialogic encounters with the families about making books together, which continued to evolve across time and spaces, as explored in the three case studies below. These case studies focus on the book-making processes with families, acknowledging that the processes involving educators are still evolving as they receive copies of the books to engage with the authoring children and others and become more actively involved in the book-making processes that evolved over time.

7. Nim, Nora, and James—Case Study 1

Nim, mother of four-year-old Nora and one-year-old James, entered the research space by attending a meeting at the crèche where James was enrolled while she attended English classes. Crèche educators and researchers had planned the meeting to talk with currently enrolled children’s families who may be interested in participating in the project. The meeting provided an open relational context for families, educators, and researchers to engage in mutual introductions, questions, and discussions about plans for the research and how families could be involved.

Nim volunteered her interest in the project and provided informed written consent for the family’s participation, commenting, ‘When you said the kids will have their own book, I feel, “Why not? Just do it for them.”’ Nim wanted her children to understand Thai language and to be able to communicate with family members in Thailand. Multilingual books in both Thai and English would help Nora’s and James’s language skills:

‘I speak Thai with them all the time. I feel he [James] understand. I just start [speaking in Thai] the same time with James. So, she [Nora] might… not understand…and hopefully she can speak so it is going to be easy when we go to Thailand to see my family…she can communicate with my parent, by herself.’

These conversations laid the foundations for meaningful engagement through co-constructing shared understanding of the family’s priorities germane to making the books and the book-making’s goals and processes, which we continued to monitor through our ongoing interactions. Nim explained that her family would soon be travelling to visit her home country and thought the family travels could provide experiences informing their books. She envisaged three books featuring different grandparents and selected the option to use her family’s first names in the research, along with their images.

Adapting to the family’s travel plans and timelines was necessary for facilitating their inclusion in the project. After 12 weeks, the family returned to Australia. Having obtained Nim’s mobile phone number, a researcher messaged her to follow up the research invitation to discuss book making. Messaging was found to enable recipients to respond at their convenience in a considered way, leaving space to attend to other demands. Nim responded, noting that James was no longer enrolled at the crèche, and she could only access a desktop computer at the TAFE college. Nim and the researcher worked together in various ways by SMS and email to share photos and accompanying texts in Thai and English.

In addition to digital exchanges that provided a virtual apposite setting for engagement, Nim and the researcher met face to face in the TAFE College library computer bank, where Nim could display photographs and text and discuss her family’s experiences with the book-making process. The family’s books featured family celebrations in their homes of Easter and a grandfather’s birthday.

We ensured that these encounters were culturally and linguistically appropriate by deeply listening to what was of value and importance to Nim and her family and following her lead. Raising her children in Australia meant that Nim had to make a conscious effort for her children to be aware of aspects of their Thai heritage and to be able to choose their beliefs:

‘I don’t forget about my culture. Like you know, my husband and me…we have the same culture, but I just let the kids decide themselves, like, whatever they’re comfy [with]. But I take them to the Thai temple here. To see like, Thai people do it. But I can’t force them. “You have to have Thai religion, Buddha religion” or something...I can’t force them, but whatever they decide in the future I don’t mind. I want to keep, but I can’t force.’

Implicit in Nim’s words is an acknowledgment of children’s roles in the evolving nature of cultural worlds as children live, experience, and make choices about their cultures in their contemporary lives. For Nim, having her children remain connected with and relating to family at a distance and when visiting in person was also a priority. She therefore saw the books as a vital means for capturing memories as enduring legacies:

‘I wanted to make it about their grandparents so they can look back at the past and say, “I did that. I was there.” That way they have an amazing memory, and they love it.’

Nim was given scope to enact her priorities through her agency. As the project unfolded, there emerged a need for a scaffold to support researchers’ conversations with families and ensure ongoing meaningful engagement. The researchers subsequently developed a guide, shown in Figure 1, which identified steps involved in the book-making process and provided a scope for each family and educator to determine their roles and responsibilities in making books with the children. Nim elected to take responsibility for organising the books with her family, identifying topics and taking, selecting, and ordering photographs and writing texts in Thai and English.

Her interest in sustaining their children’s multilingual heritage, combined with a family interest in books, saw her engage with the project activity over several months.

Families negotiated with their own children regarding what and how their child(ren) wished to be involved. Indeed, a key complexity throughout this project concerned supporting the young child’s agency in making a book with their family—how might parents best tune in to their child(ren)’s voices and capture their voices in the books? Nim interacted with four-year-old Nora and one-year-old James to support their agency in generating the photographs and texts captured in their books, thereby exercising her own voice and agency in support of the voices and actions of James and Nora. Nim photographed activities and experiences in which her children were involved and used these to build a book’s narrative account. Nim explained:

‘I remember when I see the book picture, I realise what she doing, what’s she going to do or what is it, the picture tell me to write that word. So, I remember that, her actions …’

‘[Researcher]: So, turning to your children’s experience of the books, when you were making the book what did they think when they—when you said, “I’m making these pictures into a book?”’

‘They always say, “This is me. What is this? Me. Where you? Where is my picture? Is here.”’

Nim selected how she represented her family, ensuring the settings, images, and texts formed a narrative of their family lives, such as the example depicted in Figure 2, enabling the children to see, recall, and name themselves in their experiences. In these ways, the books depicted their family identity, showing ways the children encountered activities, significant people in their lives, and ongoing developing understanding of their lifeworlds—which further ensures the cultural and linguistic appropriateness of this work.

Working with multilingual text was complex. As Nim noted, ‘It’s hard for me to make a book, because I study English as well, because English is my second language to learn. It’s hard, but I’m happy to do that.’ Nim provided the first draft of each book in English and later inserted Thai text, laughing that the results of an online English-into-Thai translator accessed by the researcher did not make any sense. The researcher proofread the English text with any suggested changes provided to Nim to accept or reject to arrive at a final English script. With easier access to digital equipment, the researcher took responsibility for organising page layout and hard copy production of an A4 spiral bound book with laminated pages, which was then posted to the family. In the second book, the positioning of the two languages was reversed to foreground the Thai language and thus honour the family’s linguistic heritage.

Nim’s Thai language skills were vital to producing accurate translations of Thai and English, further ensuring linguistic appropriateness as well as trustworthy documentation. Being married to an Australian, Nim and the children were generally immersed in an English-speaking culture at home and in childcare. Developing the children’s abilities for understanding, speaking, and reading Thai thus largely rested with Nim’s everyday use of the language with the children. Nim had spoken Thai regularly with her one-year-old son but had not done so with her four-year-old daughter. The books provided a tool to give voice to the first languages of each of their parents and to develop the children’s knowledge of the different sounds, sayings, and scripts of each language. Nim reported that her son understood the spoken Thai when she read the books to the children each night, but her daughter had also learned specific words and could recognise them in the text. Her husband could read Thai but was also motivated by the books to learn to speak Thai so he could readily converse with Nim’s parents. Nim noted that the book-making process had also helped to develop her English expression skills:

‘It’s hard for me to make a book because I am still learning English…It’s easy in Thai but it’s hard in English.’

Nim used an English dictionary and drew on her English class resources to assist her expression, also inviting the researcher to review and amend text as needed. The researcher amended expressive errors and suggested minor changes for Nim’s approval to use language appropriate for pre-school age children’s vocabulary.

Nim’s decisions to ground the books’ narratives in day-to-day family life and celebrations ensured that the children were able to recognise and locate themselves in their images in their grandfather’s house, in their kitchen, and in their garden—supporting meaningful engagement: ‘I see the pictures and think how I am going to make the story.’

Nora took the books to family visitors to read and spoke of them as “my books”, pointing to herself and her brother in the photographs and recalling the events documented in the book: ‘She [Nora] points to Thai words and asks, “What that mean?” So, she’s learning.’ This observation was congruent with hopes Nim had expressed that creating books with her children would help them to share her own love of books and reading:

‘I love reading of books… because we read a book every night, right. They might like [to] learn how to read by themselves.’

The repetition of the words of the texts alongside their images helped the children remember key terms in each language and recognise themselves as having two languages and cultures—a key consequence of this project for this family. The books also promoted the children’s enthusiastic engagement with reading books, as pictured in Figure 3 that shows Nora reading one of her books with her father. This project therefore met Nim’s goals for her children to know their Thai heritage while growing up in Australia and to have confidence in their intercultural identities whilst feeling connected to each country. As Nim said, ‘What I hope is, this mean[s] like my child’s got a … tie to me… I just wanted to interest them with the book. Like when they saw… they have their own book, they feel “Hey, that’s me in there”.’

8. Bahareh, Ali, Ayden, and Aren—Case Study 2

Bahareh and Ali, the mother and father of Ayden and Aren, twin brothers, initially attended the face-to-face project meeting that gathered researchers, educators, and families who were interested to participate in the project at the crèche. Bahareh and Ali perused the samples of books previously produced in our project. The relational context of the parents’ and researchers’ first meeting in person enabled bonding to occur, where trust was built, respect was demonstrated (via tones of voice and body language), and empathy was expressed through eyes and spoken intentions. Connecting with families in person enabled plans for reciprocity in creating the books, together. Connecting digitally to seek such personal involvement would have been difficult without first having built trust in person.

Bahareh and Ali exchanged contact details with the researcher who would be working with them. There was agreement to communicate in writing via email or WhatsApp to be culturally and linguistically appropriate. Many travellers use WhatsApp for international communication; thus, it provided an apposite setting that was familiar to the family. The application also compiled trustworthy documentation by recording timed/dated texts, audio calls, and pre-recorded messaging and document exchanges. Texting also enabled more time for translation and understanding English without navigating different accents.

During the introductory meeting, Ali asked the researchers about supporting multilingualism through the collaboration with the university and introduced his twin toddlers. He sought a copy of the book template from the project’s previous book samples to use as a guide for his family’s book. The researchers had developed this template when recognising the need to support the families’ agency in making the books in PowerPoint. The template was made available to all of the families if they so wished to use or adapt it. The template provides spaces for photos to be chosen by the family; the text box welcomes the family’s home community language(s) on top and English below; and speech bubbles and thought clouds encourage the inclusion of children’s voices.

Bahareh and Ali adapted the book template and initially wrote both languages in one text box. However, having the two languages together led to the Farsi text initially being misaligned and justified to the left. To ensure inclusion of Persian/Farsi literacy, the researcher queried the alignment and binding of the book via WhatsApp discussion to be able to correctly represent Persian formatting/page turning before laminating and binding. Ali explained, ‘For Persian/Farsi text, it’s traditionally aligned to the right side in paragraph orientation, following the right-to-left writing direction of the language.’ Due to this alignment alteration, the two languages were separated into their own text boxes to enable the directionality and appropriate styling for each language’s paragraphing. Several encounters took place in person to negotiate and edit the drafted printouts before laminating and binding. Codeswitched words such as ‘crèche’ also needed to be pasted in overlap to the Persian text as the two scripts did not work together in directionality simultaneously.

In this exchange about aligning the two languages, Ali went on to highlight the mutual language learning with and from one another in his family:

‘We are talking in the home the Persian/Farsi and also, they’re [their children] all learning Persian and in the TAFE they are learning the English… they [their children] can help us to talking in the future, help us to talking fluent English. Especially native accent.’

The family had agency in deciding that the genre of their book would be an informative biography including routines and recounts of the twins’ experiences and celebrations with their family. Ali and Bahareh had a collection of photographs in their phones and data storage, stating, ‘We have a 12 thousand picture of them’. They compiled a selection of these images with associated Farsi/English wordings to develop the multimodal and multilingual features of ‘Ayden and Aren’s Book’. Seeing Ali and Bahareh feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing from so many photos, the researcher encouraged, ‘Maybe the boys can decide as well which photos they want when they look at those pictures with you to make a book’—thereby mobilising the children’s agency whilst making the task more manageable.

Ali and Bahareh used emotional connection to encourage their children’s meaningful engagement, deliberately ‘choosing images and words that evoke emotions and strengthen the connection with our children’. The parents also valued authenticity to support their children’s engagement, noting that the book they created with their children was endowed with ‘authenticity … because it was created based on their [the children’s] activities, needs and daily life.’ It was an affordance to have both parents involved in various modes, spoken and written, alongside the incorporation of images selected as a family, supported by digital and in-place interactions.

The researcher deeply and visibly listened to the family through the encounters with them and asked for clarification when needed, such as when she noticed that the word ‘ما’ (meaning ‘we’) started many sentences in the twins’ book, as seen in Figure 4. Ali responded on WhatsApp and provided pronunciation support as well as more information on Yalda, depicted in the children’s book (see Figure 5). Via his WhatsApp text, Ali taught us:

‘Yalda, also known as Shab-e Yalda or Shab-e Chellah, is an ancient Persian festival that celebrates the longest night of the year, which usually falls on December 20th or 21st. It is celebrated by gathering with family and friends, staying up late, eating special foods, and reciting poetry. So, the correct date for Yalda can vary depending on the year, but it is generally around December 20th or 21st.’

One copy of each book version of binding (a left bind and right bind) was created for the final edits of the books for the family, as shown in Figure 6 along with the children receiving their final copies.

Ali and Bahareh construed consequence in terms of benefits for their children’s reading and book engagement:

‘… by looking at their expressions, you can understand that they are surprised to see their own photos in the book … Now they look at the book like a photo album and communicate with the pictures … Certainly, the reaction they show when they see their own face in the book, in our opinion, instils a sense of identity in them.’

Ali and Bahareh further reflected on consequences for their children and themselves in the following way:

‘It can be a special way to bond with our children and give them a unique and personal gift. Creating a book for our children allows us to share stories, lessons and memories that can be cherished for a lifetime. It can also be a way to strengthen their love of reading and learning. Ultimately, creating a book for children is a meaningful and heartfelt endeavour that shows our dedication and care as parents.’

These words bespeak deeper meanings about gifting the family’s cultural and linguistic heritage to their children. As Bahareh explained,

‘I love my kids learn my language, you know … They know where they belong… they not forget their culture, you know … and how they speak … I think for me it’s very important to learn their own language because they’re always not live in Australia, they go overseas and their relatives there, they need to understand, you know. Kind of first we came in Australia, we don’t know how to speak, you know, it was very hard for us. The same when they go back their home, it’s hard for them to communicate…To their grandma, grandpa or maybe their aunty, uncle.’

This desire was balanced with their wish to enable their children’s access to Australia’s dominant culture and language, which they were more confident they would achieve through school, as Ali commented:

‘When we came to Australia, our eldest son was only able to speak Farsi. Considering that we were sure he would master English sufficiently in school, our strategy for mastering Persian was to send him to a Persian language school, that’s all. We bought and provided the required resources for his advancement on the recommendation of the school and organised our time in such a way that we have free time during the school day.’

The family shared their desire to continue with the project to ‘enhance communication and collaboration with experts’. Their stance was that ‘a top priority in multilingualism is to support children’s language development in multiple languages’. At the time of writing, the family was working towards recording the book’s audio that they initiated to this end.

9. Yuliya and Anna—Case Study 3

Yuliya (pseudonym), Anna’s (pseudonym) mother, expressed a keen interest in being involved in the literacy project and attended a meeting at the TAFE SA creche with the researchers, educators, and other interested families. During the meeting, she asked multiple questions and signed the consent form to confirm her and her children’s involvement in the project. She also exchanged contact details with one of the researchers to facilitate further communication. At the close of the meeting, the researcher engaged in a conversation with Yuliya and her children, switching to Russian, their first language, which pleasantly surprised the family and aided deep listening that enabled Yuliya and the researcher to understand nuances of each other’s meaning while bonding and building trust between them.

This initial interaction was followed by a face-to-face meeting with Yuliya, Anna, and the researcher at the TAFE SA library for a pre-book-making interview, expanding the relational context and apposite setting in which to engage in dialogue. This dialogue included Yuliya asking questions about the project and sharing her own vision and aspirations for Anna and her involvement in co-creating books with us. By this meeting, her son had already started school. It became clear that Yuliya valued the cultures and languages experienced in Russia and Australia, and she sought opportunity for her children to be immersed in their Russian culture—hence, they attended Russian ethnic school:

‘I wanted them to be in this culture. So that they could be surrounded with more language. Only my Russian is not enough. When they communicate with peers, listen to educators, grandma or sister this is additional opportunity to hear more Russian.’

Inclusion was a strong emphasis when communicating with Yuliya. It was crucial to take into consideration the specific constraints she faced as a mother of young children and a student in the Adult English Migrant Program through TAFE SA. Yuliya highlighted the busy times of the term, when assignments and projects required her to spend more time on studies, and these factors were carefully considered throughout the interactions. Furthermore, communication strategies were tailored to her preferences, allowing for flexibility in choosing face-to-face meetings or virtual platforms such as WhatsApp, MS Teams, or text messaging.

Although the researcher could speak Russian, Yuliya expressed a preference for engaging in dialogue in English. However, she frequently sought clarification in Russian to ensure a clear understanding and to find translation for certain words she wanted to use. For instance, Yuliya asked for the English translation of the Russian words ‘пpeдки’ (ancestors) or ’yмнoжeниe’ (multiplication) and sought clarification on the meaning of ‘sustain’ in Russian. This bilingual exchange facilitated linguistic appropriateness by accommodating Yuliya’s language preferences while enhancing comprehension and clarity. Moreover, shared cultural understanding ensured the inclusive nature of the approach with both Yuliya and Anna. For example, when discussing the Russian ethnic school that Anna attended, Yuliya emphasized the importance of exposing her to cultural celebrations:

‘What is interesting about school as well ethnic school is we celebrate for example New Year in New Year tradition...with attributes, characters like with Ded Moroz (Russian Father Christmas).’

Multimodal engagement though digital technologies extended in-place apposite settings to virtual spaces that offered additional communicative affordances for co-creating the book. These virtual spaces ensured timely responses through the use of email, the exchange and immediate viewing of the images via MS Teams or WhatsApp, as well as fostered discussions and ensured clarity through text messaging. Yuliya also responded to post-book-making inquiries through written answers submitted via MS Teams. Additionally, the virtual platform facilitated the rapid verification of translated annotations featured in the book. On the other hand, in-person encounters provided unique opportunities, particularly observing interactions between Yuliya and her daughter. For instance, during discussions about various literacy and numeracy activities that Anna engaged with at home, Yuliya interacted with Anna, prompting her to bring four pegs as a way to assess or demonstrate her mathematical understanding—as seen in Figure 7.

When initiating dialogue with Yuliya about co-creating a book, the researcher talked about the meaning of their name and invited Yuliya to perform likewise. We used this icebreaker in all our initial encounters with the families to initiate dialogue in a way that showed respect for and recognition of their cultural heritage, connecting with the cultural and linguistic appropriateness of authentic dialogic encounters. We learned that Anna’s (a different real name) name had German origins, with her father’s ancestors being from Germany. Discussing the meaning of the names supported the dialogic process but also underscored the research team’s commitment to understanding and valuing the cultural backgrounds of the participants.

In this initial encounter, Yuliya asked about the nature of the images that should be included in the book. Yuliya noted that she already had relevant images corresponding to the topics discussed, which could be incorporated into the book. Following this, Yuliya had autonomous agency to include images Anna and she had chosen. In the first draft, however, the written text, while composed in Anna’s first-person perspective, was too lengthy to reflect the child’s authentic voice. When discussing this first draft with Yuliya, we explored the importance of prioritising the child’s voice. In subsequent drafts, the written text was composed in Anna’s own words, capturing her agency and voice, as seen in Figure 8.

To co-create the book, we worked multimodally together. Yuliya used an application on her tablet and shared the draft with the researcher. This draft was then refined by incorporating annotations in the form of speech bubbles, personalising the content and highlighting Anna’s voiced authorship. As the researcher collaborating with this family was fluent in Russian, she was able to revise or add translations of the text in Russian. Prior to printing, the translations were reviewed by Yuliya to ensure accuracy and avoid any potential errors. During this process, Yuliya suggested changes to a few words to enhance contextual specificity. As a result, the encounters, both face-to-face and online, enabled meaningful engagement with Yuliya to ensure shared understandings of the book-making process and goals. Engaging virtually, however, was particularly important for back-and-forth checking for clarity and translation of the book’s written text as well as going through the images to group them according to themes.

Dialogue with Yuliya prompted her to discuss the rich literacy activities she had already implemented with Anna. For example, the researcher had an in-depth conversation about the types of activities in which Anna was engaged. When Yuliya mentioned, ‘I try to explain to her, like see, 10 times two is 20. Now she can to do addition or subtraction. I don’t think she completely understands the concept,’ the researcher responded by commenting on children’s understanding of counting and number sense. Yuliya then decided to check Anna’s comprehension of numbers by asking her to bring various numbers of pegs and count them. The researcher observed the entire interaction without intervening.

The audio recording of the dialogic encounters, photographing Yuliya and Anna’s interactions during these encounters, and the book itself, all provided for trustworthy documentation. Furthermore, ongoing communication with Yuliya via MS Teams and text messaging, including the exchange of images and book drafts, ensured additional trustworthiness in the documentation process.

In an encounter after the book production was complete, Yuliya highlighted the consequences of being involved in this project and the affordances her husband and she saw of having made the book for Anna and the family. For example, Yuliya said: ’I am going to use it for the family book’. She also noted how the book would be a meaningful way to preserve memories of Anna’s childhood years in a tangible form. Yuliya said:

‘Participating the project is a great opportunity to save precious moments of personal development and daily discovering of Anna. To take a snap some beautiful moments she takes over her early years’ adventure.’

10. Recurring Themes Across the Three Case Studies

Across the three case studies, recurring themes about the affordances and complexities of co-creating books in authentic dialogic encounters emerge. These themes further highlight this study’s broader implications for implementing a CSP-framed family literacies approach in diverse early childhood settings.

In all three cases, engaging with families in ADEs afforded means to understand families’ desire and practices to sustain their languages and cultures. Such a desire compelled families’ participation in the project and continues to be clearly evident throughout the project to date. This desire extended to families’ wishes for their children to see themselves in what they read—the books they co-create in this project provide a means for this. Clearly, CSP can only truly be viable if those within the cultures being sustained are actively involved as equal partners and have the opportunity and desire to shape and inform key goals, processes, and outcomes, as provided through authentic dialogic encounters.

Across the three cases, ADEs brought to light the complex and evolving nature of cultural identity for refugee and migrant families. These complexities strike at the heart of how families construct themselves on and between their different shores and homelands. These complexities are evidenced, for example, in the embeddedness of the co-created books’ content in children’s and their families’ worlds as lived, both in their everyday lives and on culturally traditional (e.g., festive) occasions. Complexities of identity were also apparent in the families’ desires for their children to learn English and to feel that they belong in their Australian communities, while also supporting their children’s multilingualism and sense of their cultural and language heritages. Families acknowledged children’s right to decide for themselves about their linguistic and cultural engagement with these heritages while harbouring hope that their children would engage with them. This hope was buoyed across the three cases by the affordances of the co-created books for capturing memories in lasting ways and providing enduring legacies.

Families, each in their own way, exercised agency that is supported and encouraged in the ADEs. The guide the researchers devised, previously shown in Figure 1, proved highly effective as a scaffold to explicating book-making processes and mutually determining roles and responsibilities. In supporting families’ agency, we have needed to be mindful of families’ various circumstances and commitments, such as raising a family, settling in a new homeland, studying English at the local college, travelling to visit family overseas, and working.

Equally critical is understanding how families wished to support their agency. The most knowledgeable informants of what these resources are and how to locate them are the families themselves. Indeed, families’ digital strengths and resources have proven to be a strong asset in this project that has enabled an approach that is flexible and responsive to families’ needs, as the case studies evidence. By acknowledging families’ various technological strengths and resources, including the technologies they use to remain connected with their families overseas, the researchers found themselves needing to be dexterous with their own use of technologies.

Supporting children’s agency proved more complex and required careful negotiation with the families in the three cases. Children’s voices are expressed in a myriad of ways, including how children interact in and with their world, the choices they make, and what gives them pleasure and enjoyment. These are what families paid heed to when ensuring that the books included their children’s voices in meaningful ways. Families’ photographs stored in their digital devices also provided key scaffolds for building books together and supporting the children’s agency and voices.

Families all expressed their appreciation of the value of the co-created books for sustaining their children’s cultures and languages and allowing children to see themselves in what they read. The books have been prized for supporting relationships with extended families at a distance and when visiting in person. At the same time, the books have provided opportunities to support families’ efforts to foster their children’s multilingualism—with parents expressing their appreciation of and desire for opportunities for their children to learn English and to feel that they belong in their Australian communities. These books, therefore, are a significant step in advancing an explicitly culturally sustaining approach to family literacies that can contribute to enabling children to flourish and grow their heritages and evolving identities in their newfound homeland.

11. Discussion

This study contributes significantly to the field of CSP (Alim et al. 2020; Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017) by advancing the co-creation of books in authentic dialogic encounters with children and their families as a means for implementing CSP in culturally and linguistically diverse early childhood settings. The principles of authentic dialogic encounters, as originally conceived by Freire (1970) and adapted for use with children (Harris and Manatakis 2013) and their families (Harris et al. 2020, 2021), have been found in this project to provide a generative framework for operationalising family literacies approaches as culturally sustaining pedagogy—as discussed below with reference to each principle of authentic dialogic encounters in turn.

The relational contexts in which the researchers dialogically engaged with families to co-create the books have been central to implementing culturally sustaining practices. These contexts have been highly variable and mobile across face-to-face and various kinds of virtual spaces across the three case study families presented here, and indeed in all of the families in this project to date. Invariably, however, these relational contexts have been characterised by equitable relationships with, and strengths-based views of, families and their children, and an ethics of caring and commitment characterised by dispositions such as respect, reciprocity, trust, and support—as befits a family literacies approach framed by CSP principles.

Essential to authentic dialogic encounters is deep visible listening through which the researchers in this study learned about what matters to the families with respect to their cultures and languages as they have been traditionally experienced and are evolving in their contemporary lives. CSP’s aspirations could not possibly be hoped to be realised without such listening. Deep, visible listening is essential to hearing parents’ priorities and concerns, which have been well documented in the literature as our previous review attests. Actively listening to the children and their families and books continues to afford opportunities to learn about what they wished as outcomes, what their cultural practices are, how their cultural worlds are evolving, the children’s trajectories, and what it is in their cultural and language practices that they wish to sustain. This listening continues to be deeply generative; we have come to learn and actively support families’ desired and extant practices for sustaining their children’s heritage cultures and languages whilst respecting their children’s choices.

Harnessing the power of storying through authentic dialogic encounters has optimised families’ and their children’s meaningful engagement, which supports culturally sustaining practices. Through storying, books’ content has been embedded in the children’s everyday lives and special (e.g., festive) occasions. Through co-creating and sharing these books, mobile spaces have been created with children and their families, in which their languages and cultures have mingled and been recognized and validated, as should happen in family literacies approaches (Pahl and Kelly 2005) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Alim et al. 2020).

In acknowledging and respecting families’ desires and efforts with their children, the researchers’ support of families’ and their children’s agency, along with the embeddedness of the books in the children’s and their families’ worlds, have been integral to ensuring cultural and linguistic appropriateness in our CSP approach. Through families’ lead and agency, co-creating the books has centred children’s and their families’ worlds and sees them lead what they wish to represent in the books and how—thereby enacting CSP in terms of connecting with families’ cultural and linguistic practices and identities and how they are evolving in children’s lives, as seen in the three case studies.

Further to families’ agency, the researchers continue to respect and support families’ decisions about the extent of their involvement and their enthusiasm for and initiative with making these books. The researchers also remain mindful of how parents resourced their agency through digital technologies and translation resources that they were accustomed to using in their lives.

Another key complexity related to agency concerns supporting families to support, without over-riding, their young children’s agency and voices. Children’s agency is essential to their engagement in authentic dialogic encounters (Harris and Manatakis 2013) and to the effectiveness of family literacies programs (Cun 2022; Dicataldo and Roch 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Lee et al. 2018; Wagner 2023). In this project, optimal engagement with children’s agency and voices occurred in ways that were embedded in a child’s world. In this, a myriad of ways in which children’s voices are expressed must be acknowledged, including how children interact in and with their world, the choices they make, and what sparks their interest or gives them pleasure and enjoyment. Parents were closely observant of these aspects of their child’s life and found that photographs provided a key mediator in their interactions with their child that supported and encouraged their child’s participation in building a book together in their home/community languages and English. Herein lies the power of deploying multimodal means of communication and expression to support meaningful participation within and across languages in a culturally sustaining family literacies approach.

In working to ensure the linguistic appropriateness of the work, a key complexity concerns working with and producing different language scripts on screen and in print. Essential to navigating this complexity is calling on families’ expertise in their languages whilst acknowledging their expressed concerns about their proficiency in English that they are learning as an additional language. As indicated in this paper’s previous literature review, language loss constitutes a complex concern for families in their newfound homes, where English is the dominant language that they are learning as an additional language. Congruent with research findings elsewhere, the parents taking part in our project wish their children to learn and maintain their home/community languages and cultural heritages (Anderson et al. 2015; Baralt et al. 2022; Barnes et al. 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Singh et al. 2015) whilst learning English as their new nation’s dominant language (Barnes et al. 2022; Harris et al. 2020, 2021; Ng’asike 2019). Co-creating books with families and their children in their home/community languages and English supports this aspiration in ways that are meaningfully embedded in their lives.

Inclusion to ensure that all participants’ voices are heard, with time and structures that allow for and sustain dialogue, has been essential to this project’s CSP work. Inclusion draws our attention to considerations of families’ access, comfort, convenience, and flexibility and how best we might communicate with one another. Such considerations required us to be flexible and responsive to families’ circumstances—for example, changing our thinking about sharing circles and translators, as previously indicated.

Inclusion is inextricably tied to apposite settings that are not only relevant to the focus at hand but are also convenient for families and can be mobile as needs be, as previously discussed in our review (e.g., Iruka et al. 2018; Dávila and Abril-Gonzalez 2022; Justice et al. 2020). These considerations transformed our initial notions of physically conducting the encounters in the child’s crèche or childcare centre into fluid and quite mobile spaces that traverse a child’s home, community, and childcare site and with families overseas, in which stories evolve and are shared in place and through virtual means.

Authentic dialogic encounters demand trustworthy documentation, which in turn supports the promise of CSP to understand and promote children’s cultures and languages. The insights that are collectively and dialogically constructed must be soundly documented, for we cannot sustain what we do not authentically understand or represent. The books co-created in this project both require and provide means for trustworthy documentation as they have been voiced by the families through their words and images and involved meticulous processes of translation and scripting supported by translation resources, as seen in the three case studies.

In this project’s context, consequences of authentic dialogic encounters concern sustaining cultural and linguistic practices, as is CSP’s aspiration (Alim et al. 2020; Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017). These consequences may be thought of in terms of pluralist outcomes, which comprise a key tenet of CSP (Alim et al. 2020; Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014, 2017). For the families, these outcomes have pertained to acknowledging and incorporating their traditional and contemporary cultural and linguistic practices while supporting their sense of belonging in their newfound community; supporting families’ capacity to sustain family relations both in Australia and overseas; and preserving memories and giving tangible form to families’ cultural heritages and lifeways.

For the children, these outcomes include projecting their cultural, linguistic, social, and personal identities, as evidenced in the book examples shared throughout this paper; providing opportunities for sharing their stories in their families and community; optimising children’s agency and voices; and encouraging who children are and are becoming, as literate people and as participants in their world.

For the researchers and the field at large, these outcomes have included generating new knowledge about how CSP may be implemented through shared book making that is embedded in authentic dialogic encounters, as illuminated throughout this paper and brought together in this discussion.

12. Conclusions

Mindful of the cultural disruptions families face when moving to live in another country, and in the interests of equity, access, and human rights, this study has been grounded in the conviction that CSP provides a critical frame for developing a multilingual family literacies approach in early childhood settings. Such an approach validates and proactively works to sustain families’ cultural and linguistic practices, even as these practices continue to evolve in contemporary worlds. Therein lies the significant contribution of this paper: evidencing how CSP can be operationalised as a multilingual family literacies approach with migrant and refugee families in early childhood settings.

Through co-creating books in dialogic encounters with families, this study has advanced CSP’s four tenets:

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Pluralist outcomes have connected with families’ diverse cultural and language practices while providing access to the dominant culture;

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Nuanced, dynamic understandings of families’ cultural and language practices have been generated, with the co-created books being firmly embedded in children’s and their families’ worlds where traditional cultural practices merge with contemporary practices;

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How children and families experience and evolve their cultures and languages in their contemporary, newfound worlds has been acknowledged and made visible in terms of families’ traditional and contemporary cultural practices;

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Reflecting on the efficacy of practices for a greater cultural good has been encouraged in terms of children’s trajectories and families’ cultural lifeways.

As this study continues to progress, the researchers and participants as co-investigators are exploring and advancing ways to further promote intra- and inter-cultural understandings and relations that can contribute to sustaining children’s trajectories and families’ lifeways, including making these books available to others within the childcare centre and the broader community. Part of this further inquiry includes continuing to engage in dialogue with educators about how the books are received by the authoring children, children with the same languages, and other children; and how the books have impacted on educators’ practices with children. Such dialogue will inform how we can collectively grow a community of culturally sustaining practices where knowledge is shared, and mutual learning happens with one another, for advancing a greater cultural good.