Designing Culturally Responsive Literacy Centers to Include and Go Beyond Skills

This article describes an approach to designing culturally responsive literacy centers. Aligned with Gholdy Muhammad's (2020) Historically Responsive Literacy model, we reimagine literacy centers as responsive to children from historically marginalized backgrounds. We present a five-question tool that teachers can use as they plan for literacy centers that offer not only opportunities to build skills, but also to build upon children's cultural experiences, strengths, and interests. We describe our approach, offer an example of a cycle of culturally responsive literacy centers and lessons learned from our experience developing and revising these centers to maximize their effectiveness in early elementary classrooms.