Who This Book Is For

Chapter 6 encourages readers to consider how culturally competent teaching affects family engagement. As teachers embrace diverse cultures, the need to form authentic and respectful bonds with students’ families becomes obvious. Readers explore the value of family engagement and learn strategies for collaborating with parents and caregivers to enhance the classroom community.

Finally, in part 3, chapter 7 introduces the concept of intersectionality and encourages readers to adopt intersectional pedagogy. Readers learn how to account for intersectionality in their curriculum, instruction, and assessment to interrupt discrimination and eliminate barriers for students who hold historically marginalized identities.

Chapter 8 provides the knowledge and tools teachers need to create inclusive and equitable assessments. Readers learn how to modify formative and summative assessments to ensure diversification, collaboration, and independence. They also learn how to modify classroom assignments to become assessments.

Chapter 9 outlines three tasks teachers should commit to as a way of extending their work beyond the scope of this book. Through reflecting on classroom practices, engaging in professional development, and modifying classroom activities, teachers ensure they will continue to create an equitable learning environment where all students thrive.

Finally, the appendix discusses how to communicate culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining strategies to administrators during teacher evaluations. It includes a tool for demonstrating how your practices align with your campus’s evaluation criteria.

The wonderful, powerful reality of transformative education is that it’s suitable for diverse teachers, students, and families. This book is relevant for educators at all levels and of every subject. It is my hope that teachers at every level will read this book, write in it, and use it to collaborate with their students and peers. I want teachers to use this book as one of their many resources to argue for cultural education. I want school administrators to use this book to promote equitable education in their schools. I want students to come together to seek diverse representation and their voices to be heard because the adults around them value their perspectives more than before. By reading this book and implementing the strategies, I want teachers to gain approaches to ensure they remain standards based and provide high-quality instruction; information to argue for the integration of culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies within the curriculum; and tools for implementation.