Abstract
There is a growing trend in American education to use centrallycontrolled comprehensive school reform, academic standards, scriptedcurricula, and high-stakes achievement testing to attempt to create educa-tional equality and provide a better education for low-income students.However, while a more standardized school curriculum is being adopted,the school children studying the curriculum are often ethnically andlinguistically diverse. This diversity can be seen as a disadvantage and adifficult complication for those who wish to see a uniform curriculumadopted. However, bilingual and bicultural home and community envi-ronments can also be viewed as a resource (Ruiz, 1984) to help studentslearn new academic content and be able to express their ideas in a largervariety of languages, genres, and semiotic modes. Even in situationswhere the classroom curricula and activities are specified in great detail,some teachers are able to act as bottom-up language and literacy plan-ners (Ricento & Hornberger, 1986) by modifying and adapting thecurricula and suggested activities to better enable their students tobecome bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural. Thus, the purpose of thischapter is to use ethnographic data to provide examples of how twoelementary school bilingual education teachers who teach a mandatedcurriculum utilize the various linguistic, cultural, and textual resourcesthat are available in their bilingual classrooms to help ensure that theirclassroom instruction is comprehensible, draws upon the community’slocal funds of knowledge, and enables students to successfully becomebilingual and biliterate.