Culturally Responsive Teaching Resources for Educators

August 19, 2021

It’s the beginning of the school year! Here are some book recommendations for educators by the Perpich librarian in collaboration with the Perpich arts education specialists. This curated list is intended to offer compiled research and a variety of perspectives to support your personal growth and foster learning for all of your students. All items on this list are available at the Perpich library. Click on titles for more information.

1. Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (2nd edition) by Paul C. Gorski & Seema G. Pothini
Offers pre- and in-service educators an opportunity to analyze and reflect upon a variety of realistic case studies related to educational equity and social justice. The accessible cases allow educators to practice the process of considering a range of contextual factors, checking their own biases, and making immediate and longer-term decisions about how to create and sustain equitable learning environments for all students.

2. Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning: Classroom Practices for Student Success, Grades K-12 (2nd edition) by Sharroky Hollie
Provides educators with a pedagogical framework for infusing the most appropriate, engaging, and responsive teaching practices into today’s diverse classrooms. This updated resource provides concrete, practical activities and easy-to-implement strategies that address culture and language in five key areas: classroom management, academic literacy, academic vocabulary, academic language, and learning environment.

3. Culturally Responsive School Leadership by Muhammad Khalifa
Focuses on how school leaders can effectively serve minoritized students—those who have been historically marginalized in school and society. The book demonstrates how leaders can engage students, parents, teachers, and communities in ways that positively impact learning by honoring indigenous heritages and local cultural practices.

4. Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice (3rd edition) by Geneva Gay
Geneva Gay has made many important revisions to keep her foundational, award-winning text relevant for today’s diverse student population, including: new research on culturally responsive teaching, a focus on a broader range of racial and ethnic groups, and consideration of additional issues related to early childhood education. Combining insights from multicultural education theory with real-life classroom stories, this book demonstrates that all students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through students’ own cultural experiences.

5. Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond
In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain compatible culturally responsive instruction. It includes: information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships, ten “key moves” to build students’ learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners, and prompts for action and valuable self reflection.

6. Equity by Design: Delivering on the Power and Promise of UDL by Mirko Chardin & Katie Novak
This book is intended to serve as a blueprint for teachers to alter the all-too-predictable outcomes for our historically under-served students. A first of its kind resource, the book makes the critical link between social justice and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) so that we can equip students (and teachers, too) with the will, skill, and collective capacity to enact positive change.

7. Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps, and Teaching in Today’s Classrooms (2nd edition) by H. Richard Milner IV
In the thoroughly revised second edition of this book, H. Richard Milner IV addresses the knowledge and insights required on the part of teachers and school leaders to serve students of color. Milner focuses on a crucial issue in teacher training and professional education: the need to prepare teachers for the racially diverse student populations in their classrooms. The book, anchored in real world experiences, centers on case studies that exemplify the challenges, pitfalls, and opportunities facing teachers in diverse classrooms. The case studies—of teachers in urban and suburban settings—are presented amid current discussions about race and teaching.

8. We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools (3rd edition) by Gary R. Howard
In the third edition of this now classic work, Howard reviews the progress we have made in the interim, as well as the lack of progress. Making a case for the “fierce urgency of now,” this new edition deepens the discussion of race and social justice in education with new and updated material. Aligned with our nation’s ever more diverse student population, it speaks to what good teachers know, what they do, and how they embrace culturally responsive teaching. This essential text is widely used in teacher preparation courses and for in-service professional development.

9. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love
Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

10. What Is It About Me You Can′t Teach?: Culturally Responsive Instruction in Deeper Learning Classrooms (3rd edition) by Eleanor René́e Rodriguez, James Bellanca, & Deborah Rosalia Esparza
Now in its third edition, this powerful book features timely new content from innovative schools and teachers, focusing on reaching struggling students. The authors illuminate how to raise student achievement by upholding high expectations, while teaching with cultural responsiveness. Discover how to: lead all students to deeper learning, grounded in critical thinking, creative problem solving, communication, collaboration―and the “5th C,” cultural awareness; support the latest standards for college and career readiness and English Language Proficiency/Development; incorporate technology into teaching and learning in innovative ways, adaptable to varying resource levels; and implement K-12 lesson plans that support individualized, project-based learning.

All items are available at the Perpich Library.