Chapter 8: Al Otro Lado Del Puente: Fostering Literacy Partnerships Between Academia and Latino/a Communitise

In this chapter, we describe our experiences working with Latino/a families and prospective teachers in the development and implementation of a small-scale community engagement project sponsored by a universitybased grant. The main goal of this project is to highlight the importance of preparing prospective teachers to serve as agents in Latino/a children’s literacy development. First, we discuss our involvement in this project as foregrounded by our experiences growing up in a Latino/a community in the Caribbean and our current research foci as doctoral students. Second, we present a model for promoting literacy development based on the remarkable work carried out by a Puerto Rican social agent. Then, we explain the conception of social justice that undergirds this project, which focuses on two tenets: family involvement and culturally sensitive curricula. Finally, we offer brief accounts of the events carried out in two venues to elucidate the implementation of our proposed literacy development model and our conception of social justice.