![]() ![]() This vision affirms the socially and culturally situated experiences of young children within their families, whānau, Footnote 1 and communities. The bicultural early childhood curriculum of Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Whāriki: He Whāriki Mātauranga mō ngā Mokopuna o Aotearoa Early Childhood Curriculum (Ministry of Education Citation2017), espouses a vision of children as ‘competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society’ (p. ![]() Affirmation of the complexities of children’s language/s and literacies and the work of early childhood teachers are discussed in the implications for early childhood teacher education and professional development, centre leadership, and policy. The data presented highlight family linguistic and cultural resources, the efforts of families to sustain home languages, and the critical role of early childhood teachers to engage in reciprocal partnerships with families. Exemplars of family pedagogies framed through a funds of knowledge theoretical lens, provide counternarratives to deficit discourses regarding children’s language competencies, and challenge the encroaching reductionist notion of the ‘language gap’ and narrow views of early literacy promoted in the preparation of children for English-medium schooling. In this paper, we draw on data from three empirical studies to position families as experts in the lives of their children, valuing the linguistically and culturally diverse literacies children carry from their whānau, homes, and communities in bicultural and superdiverse Aotearoa New Zealand. ![]() Growing tension within the early childhood education sector of Aotearoa New Zealand around the roles teachers and families might play in preparing children for success in school suggests that notions of readiness are gaining traction. ![]()
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