Chapter 6: Community Responsive Model in Literacy Education

Most ethnically conscious education programs begin by looking at the existing knowledge of culture in an ethnic group and then build educational practices to accommodate differences. This chapter describes an approach that is directly responsive to a community of learners and teachers. While the majority of literacy research has been conducted in traditional contexts where individuals interact with text in isolation, Actual Community Empowerment (ACE) Reading strategies are developed within social contexts (e.g., Pacific Island group learning environments supported by adult or peer tutors) and do address the unique perceptual and learning modalities of diverse cultures (e.g., visual representations and oral histories used in Pacific cultures).