“It was about making connections”: Supporting early childhood educators as family literacy picturebook curators

This study examines how 24 early childhood educators in the United States enacted their roles as family literacy picturebook curators through the Family Book Bag Project, a professional development initiative designed to strengthen reciprocal literacy partnerships between home and school. Grounded in Vygotsky’s social theory of learning, funds of knowledge, and the Critical Literature Response Framework (CLRF), the study combined thematic analysis of 59 selected picturebooks with qualitative analysis of teacher narratives. Findings revealed that teachers prioritized family and community representation as their primary theme and food and nutrition as their top secondary theme, drawing on families’ everyday knowledge and traditions as the foundation for literature curation. Teachers’ narratives revealed three patterns of curation, pedagogy-driven, family and community-driven, and student-centered, each enacting the CLRF’s core practices of intentional selection, collaborative participation, and critical reflection. Together, these findings show early childhood educators making purposeful curatorial choices that position family funds of knowledge, home languages, and community practices as central to school literacy rather than supplementary to it.