Analyzing Community Cultural Wealth in With the Fire on High to Foster Asset-based Perspectives

Preservice teachers must learn to support their culturally and linguistically diverse students who have a wide range of life experiences. Such learning begins with approaching students from an asset-based perspective rather than a deficit-based one. Additionally, the curation of curricular texts featuring underrepresented identities and center joy and positive representations of identity can powerfully disrupt the hegemony of limited and deficient default texts. In this chapter, we invite preservice teachers to read young adult literature using community cultural wealth (CCW) as a framework to analyze the novel With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo. By exploring oneself and the text using CCW, preservice teachers can better understand the ways in which their students’ communities and cultures make valuable contributions to their lives, especially those who are often underrepresented or stereotyped. We also invite preservice teachers to use CCW as a tool to analyze and select classroom texts that are positive and diverse. This chapter includes activities and sample graphic organizers that can be used with preservice teachers and secondary students.