Critical Multicultural Education
Sleeter, C. E., 2024. New York: Teachers College Press.
This volume collects Christine Sleeter’s core work focusing on critical multicultural education, situating culture and identity within an analysis of power and racism. Multicultural education arose in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and, in its inception, shared with that movement a focus on eradicating both interpersonal and systemic racism. The problem this book takes up is that, over time, many people have come to understand and enact multicultural education in ways that evade grappling directly with racism. This volume includes ten of Sleeter’s articles that explicitly locate multicultural education within critical understandings of race, racism, and colonialism, offering both theoretical and practical discussions of what that means.
As conservatives across the country launch all-out attacks against any form of diversity in schools, Christine Sleeter’s
Critical Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice is an important intervention on the side of racial justice in education.
Wayne Au, editor,
Rethinking Schools, and professor, UW Bothell School of Educational Studies
Christine Sleeter has been a brilliant and courageous thought leader in critical multicultural education (CME) for over two decades, breaking with white solidarity long before it was acceptable in mainstream discourse. I consider her a foundational mentor whose work has had a profound influence on how I understand and articulate the dynamics of systemic racism and the role of white people in achieving racial justice. This beautiful and intersectional volume traces the trajectory of CME from its inception to the present time, delineating the resistance it has faced and speaking back to current forms of backlash with clarity and nuance.
Critical Multicultural Education needs to be required reading in every school of education.”
Robin DiAngelo, author of
Is Everyone Really Equal?,
White Fragility, and
Nice Racism
Critical Race Theory and its Critics
López, F. & Sleeter, C. 2023. New York: Teachers College Press.
Who and what are behind the attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT)? Why are attacks on the teaching of racism happening now and what can be done about them? In this book, López and Sleeter answer these questions in an effort to intentionally and strategically provide readers with sustainable tools for teaching toward an equitable future. This comprehensive book includes an overview of today’s controversy surrounding CRT; a historical account of efforts to thwart fair and unbiased education opportunities; research on why these efforts have been successful; and ways for teachers, school leaders, and researchers to address this pushback in their own work. Contrary to claims by critics of CRT, research supports that addressing racism in the classroom is an integral part of a broader effort in ensuring that all children thrive. Written in an accessible style for a broad audience, Critical Race Theory and Its Critics offers evidence-based recommendations on messaging (including social media), organizing, and sharing research.
Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools
Sleeter, C. E. & Zavala, M. 2026. Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy and Research, 2nd Ed. New York: Teachers College Press.
This timely and compelling book conceptualizes Et hnic Studies not only as a vehicle to transform and revitalize the school curriculum but also as a way to reinvent teaching. The authors show how the traditional curriculum’s Eurocentric view of the world affects diverse student populations. The text highlights several contemporary exemplars of curricula—from classroom level to district or state-wide—illustrating core concepts in Ethnic Studies across a variety of disciplines and grade levels. Interviews with students who experienced Ethnic Studies in high school shed light on what students find most significant about Ethnic Sudies. A final chapter considers how research on P–12 ethnic studies can be conceptualized and conducted in ways that further both advocacy and program sustainability.
Chapter Three, "What the Research Says about Ethnic Studies," was reprinted by the National Education Association, where you can
download it.
Christine Sleeter and Miguel Zavala pull no punches in their approach to ethnic studies in education. Despite the negative critiques of ethnic studies rooted in White supremacy and the politics of fear, their contribution to critical thought and praxis is necessary and commendable. Like many of our comrades in this struggle, I rejoice in the fact that they remain undeterred and unafraid.
David Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago
Crafted in an engaging and accessible manner, Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools answers important questions regarding the overwhelming effectiveness of K–12 Ethnic Studies, while inspiring us to put our dreams of humanizing and rigorous academic experiences for our youth into action. I want everyone we work with to read this book!
Curtis Acosta, University of Arizona
Rethinking Ethnic Studies.
Cuauhtin, R. T., Zavala, M., Sleeter, C. & Au, W. 2019.
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.
As part of a growing nationwide movement to bring Ethnic Studies into K–12 classrooms, Rethinking Ethnic Studies brings together many of the leading teachers, activists, and scholars in this movement to offer examples of Ethnic Studies frameworks, classroom practices, and organizing at the school, district and statewide levels.
Built around core themes of indigeneity, colonization, anti-racism, and activism, Rethinking Ethnic Studies offers vital resources for educators committed to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in our schools.
Ethnic Studies as a field is about a half century old. Some may think it has outlasted its usefulness. However, in these times with a resurgence of hate crimes and vicious rhetoric, we need clear and cogent understandings about race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, ability, religion and all kinds of human differences. This volume lifts our discourse and our discernment. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and each other.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison and President, National Academy of Education
In this moment of rising visibility and normalization of systemic, intersectional, and organized racism, we must more deeply understand the legacies of white supremacy, colonization, and imperialism that have long shaped U.S. schools and society, and the equally long legacies of anti-oppressive struggle. With brilliant insight, stirring passion, and evidence for hope, Cuauhtin, Zavala, Sleeter, Au, and dozens of colleagues share here a compelling framework, analyses, and examples of precisely that. Rethinking Ethnic Studies does nothing less than build our collective capacity for rethinking education more broadly.
Kevin Kumashiro, author of Bad Teacher!
Rethinking Ethnic Studies provides an excellent resource for teachers, students, and activists who wish to critically understand and engage the fundamental issues and questions that frame the field. The volume brings together theory and practice in ways that are both engaging, as well as extremely practical for classroom use. Overall, this is precisely the book that Ethnic Studies educators and advocates have been waiting for—a powerful pedagogical contribution that embodies a genuine tribute to an abiding historical commitment to cultural democracy within education and the larger society.
Antonia Darder, Leavey Endowed Chair of Ethics & Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University
Rethinking Ethnic Studies is one of the most comprehensive, insightful, critical, and important books on Ethnic Studies in education. It charts a bold new path forward for the current Ethnic Studies resurgence that both builds off of and develops the scholar/activist history of the discipline.
Nolan L. Cabrera, University of Arizona
Un-standardizing Curriculum
Sleeter, C. E. & Flores Carmona, J. 2017. Un-standardizing Curriculum: Multicultural Teaching in the Standards-Based Classroom, 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press.
How can teachers learn to teach rich, academically rigorous multicultural curricula under current standardization constraints? This book grew out of my work with teachers in a graduate course on multicultural curriculum design. This second edition, which has been an excellent-seller, offers a much-needed framework to help teachers take on this challenge.
We offer a framework, illustrated with the work of classroom teachers as they grappled with creating and teaching strong multicultural curricula in multicultural contexts, while attending to “big ideas” and standards in the curriculum.
Diversifying the Teacher Workforce
Sleeter, C. E., Neal, L. I., & Kumashiro, K. K. Eds. (2014). Diversifying the Teacher Workforce: Preparing and Retaining Highly Effective Teachers. New York: Routledge.
This new book grows from work we have been doing with the National Association for Multicultural Education, focusing on diversifying the teacher workforce and narrowing the demographic gap between who teaches and who populates U.S. classrooms.
While the demographic gap is often invoked to provide a needed rationale for preparing all teachers, and especially White teachers, to work with students of color, it is far less often invoked in an effort to examine why the teaching force remains predominantly White in the first place. This edited collection brings together leading scholars to look closely at this problem.
They examine why the teaching force is predominantly White from historical as well as contemporary perspectives, showcase and report available data on a variety of ways this problem is being tackled at the pre-service and teacher credentialing levels, and examine how a diverse and high-quality teaching force can be retained and thrive. This book is an essential resource for any educator interested in exploring race within the context of today’s urban schools.
Power, Teaching, and Teacher Education
Sleeter, C. E. 2013. Power, Teaching, and Teacher Education: Confronting Injustice with Critical Research and Action. New York: Peter Lang.
In this collection of essays (versions of which have been previously published, mainly as journal articles), I place the work of teachers and teacher educators within a struggle over what it means to educate a highly diverse public. Visions for public education, as shaped by progressivism and the Civil Rights movements, have emphasized preparation of all children and youth for participation in a diverse democracy.
This vision is being challenged by neoliberalism, which frames education as a commodity to be acquired for individual advancement within a competitive marketplace, and as an arena for profit-making. In this book, I connect incisive conceptual analyses, research reviews, and descriptive portraits of teachers and teacher educators as they «teach back to power.»
I argue that the work of pushing back against neoliberalism, especially as it overlaps with racism, patriarchy, and radical religious fundamentalism, is a political project, but one that research can help to support.
Nominated for the 2015
AERA Outstanding Book Award
Creating Solidarity across Diverse Communities
Sleeter, C. E. & Soriano, E., Eds. 2012. Creating Solidarity across Diverse Communities: International Perspectives. New York: Teachers College Press.
What does it mean to build or act in solidarity, especially in multicultural contexts? This book takes on that question. In this book, experts from around the globe grapple with what solidarity in multicultural societies might mean and how it might be built. With a variety of analytical perspectives and findings, the authors present original research conducted in the United States, New Zealand, Spain, France, Chile, Mexico, and India.
Educators will recognize relationships between issues discussed in the book and their own places of work, helping them to better understand issues of diversity and take steps toward building solidarity in their own schools and communities. This book demonstrates the commonality of purpose across the globe to connect schools and teachers with the communities they serve, and suggests avenues for bringing diverse understandings together to bridge antagonism and fear.
School Education, Pluralism and Marginality
Sleeter, C. E., Upadhyaya, S. B., Mishra, A. & Kumar, S., Eds. 2012. School Education, Pluralism and Marginality: Comparative Perspectives. Andhra Pradesh, India: Orient Black Swan.
This book, international in orientation but with a specific focus on India, grew out of a fabulous conference of the same name, held in New Delhi in 2007. We argue that education is an ‘enabling factor’, which facilitates not only economic betterment but also human freedom. However, for the marginalized — Dalits and tribals in India in particular — basic education remains a challenge not only due to lack of access, but also because the pedagogy of mainstream education alienates the marginalized.
We make the case that school education must be conceptualized around the material, social, and life experiences of marginalized groups, and that pluralism and social inclusion should be the core principles of the pedagogic conceptual framework, practices and processes of school education across the world. Divided into four sections, we bring together international perspectives on education from the USA, UK, Europe, South Africa, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, among others, with a focus on India.
Professional Development for Culturally Responsive and Relationship-based Pedagogy
Sleeter, C. E., Ed. 2011. Professional Development for Culturally Responsive and Relationship-based Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang.
The work presented here is a large-scale evaluation of a theory-driven school reform project in New Zealand, which focuses on improving the educational achievement of Māori students in public secondary schools. The project’s conceptual underpinnings are based on Kaupapa Māori research, culturally responsive teaching, student voice, and relationship-based pedagogy. Data were produced by a research team who conducted a three-year external evaluation of the project in 22 of the 33 schools implementing its professional development initiative.
The book shows the extent to which a well-conceptualized and culturally grounded program in culturally responsive pedagogy, supported by a well-conceptualized professional development program, can shift teacher practices and understandings. These shifts lead to a reduction in the achievement disparities of minoritized students, as well as support for the students as culturally located human beings. While the professional development project in this book addresses Māori students’ educational achievement, the study’s findings and messages are applicable to minoritized peoples in countries around the world.
Teaching with Vision
Sleeter, C. E. & Cornbleth, C., Eds. 2011. Teaching with Vision: Culturally Responsive Teaching in Standards-Based Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
In this book, we showcase the professional experience and wisdom of classroom teachers who have been navigating standards- and test-driven teaching environments in California and New York, without losing their vision of what teaching can be.
Representing diverse backgrounds, schools, grade levels, subject areas, and specialties, these teachers tell their own stories about their practice, their challenges, and how they learned to maintain a social and pedagogical vision for their work.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2011
Through these teaching stories, Sleeter and Cornbleth demonstrate the kind of rich intellectual life and curiosity that we need to create the schools our children deserve….This work is culturally sensitive, critically astute, and absolutely essential for teachers and teacher educators today.
From the Foreword by Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools & Linda Christensen, Lewis and Clark College
Doing Multicultural Education for Achievement and Equity
Grant, C. A, & Sleeter, C. E. 2011. Doing Multicultural Education for Achievement and Equity, 2nd. ed. New York: Routledge; translated into Korean.
We created this book as a hands-on, reader-friendly multicultural education textbook that actively engages education students in critical reflection and self-examination as they prepare to teach in increasingly diverse classrooms.
The book, which draws on activities we have used in our classes, is designed to help pre-service teachers develop the tools they will need to learn about their students and their students’ communities and contexts, about themselves, and about the social relations in which schools are embedded.It challenges readers to take a truly active and ongoing role in promoting equity within education and helps to guide them in becoming highly qualified and fantastic teachers.
Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis
May, S. & Sleeter, C. E., Eds. 2010. Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis. New York: Routledge.
Critical multiculturalism has emerged over the last decade as a direct challenge to liberal or benevolent forms of multicultural education. By integrating and advancing various critical theoretical threads such as anti-racist education, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy, critical multiculturalism has offered a fuller analysis of oppression and institutionalization of unequal power relations in education.
This book directly and illustratively addresses what a transformed critical multicultural approach to education might mean for teacher education and classroom practice. Providing both contextual background and curriculum specific subject coverage ranging from language arts and mathematics to science and technology, each chapter shows how critical multiculturalism relates to praxis.
Making Choices for Multicultural Education
Sleeter, C.E. & Grant, C.A. 2009. Making Choices for Multicultural Education, 6th ed. New York: Wiley; translated into Korean.
Focusing on what multicultural education actually looks like in the classroom, this book encourages all to examine the latest theoretical perspectives on multicultural education, as well as personal beliefs about classroom diversity.
Carl Grant and I show how schools reflect broad patterns of institutional discrimination, and then offer five different approaches to addressing such problems in the classroom. Companion to Turning on Learning.
Turning on Learning: Five Approaches for Multicultural Teaching Plans
Grant, C.A. & Sleeter, C.E. 2009. Turning on Learning: Five Approaches for Multicultural Teaching Plans, 5th ed. New York: Wiley
With a wealth of lesson plans for grade levels K-12 covering a variety of subject areas, this book illustrates how to apply the principles of multicultural education in the classroom. Lesson plans are in a “before and after” format, showing how lessons can be transformed.
This is designed as a practical, lesson-based companion to Making Choices for Multicultural Education.
Facing Accountability in Education: Democracy and Equity at Risk
Sleeter, C. E., Ed. 2007. Facing Accountability in Education: Democracy and Equity at Risk. New York: Teachers College Press.
Chapters in this edited book raise serious questions about the current accountability movement, whom it actually benefits, and how genuine progress can be make toward improving access to quality education and strengthening democratic education for everyone.
Although the accountability movement purports to benefit all students and particularly those who have been left behind historically, on balance it appears to benefit primarily those who are White and native English-speaking; and it appears to be linked to a movement to privatize public services in the interests of large corporations.
Chapter authors include Christine Sleeter, Jamy Stillman, Linda Skrla, James Scheurich, Kathryn Bell McKenzie, Barbara McCombs, Cherry McGee Banks, Robert Linn, Linda Darling-Hammond, Jori Hall, Laurence Parker, David Gillborn, Lois Weiner, Sally Tomlinson, and James A. Banks.
Culture, Difference and Power
Sleeter, C. E. 2001. Culture, Difference and Power. New York: Teachers College Press.
In this creative multimodal e-book on a CD-ROM, I blended text, pictures, music, and interactive activities to engage students in multiple ways, and to help them see connections among core concepts and practice.
This was a strong seller until Mac shifted its operating system to OS 10, which it can run it only with some difficulty. It still does work on PC computers.
The format of Sleeter’s e-book presents an intriguing alternative to books that deal with cultural issues and societal values. . . .I am certain that Culture, Difference, and Power will compel users to question their conceptions about the society they live in, and that is not at all a bad start.
Review by Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas, Language Learning and Technology.
Multicultural Education as Social Activism
Sleeter, C. E. 1996. Multicultural Education as Social Activism. New York: SUNY Press.
Connecting multicultural education with political issues of power and struggle, I explore what multicultural education means to white people, given the unequal racial power relations in the U.S. and worldwide. I examine connections between race, gender, and social class, particularly as these connections play out for white women.
While taking a feminist perspective, I am also wary of the power white middle class women exercise in defining what counts as gender issues. Throughout the book, I argue that multicultural education was born in political struggle and can never meaningfully be disconnected from politics. Ultimately the quest for schooling for social justice is a political quest rather than a technical issue.
Multicultural Education and Critical Pedagogy: The Politics of Difference
Sleeter, C.E. & McLaren, P., Eds. 1995. Multicultural Education and Critical Pedagogy: The Politics of Difference. New York: SUNY Press.
In Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, Peter McLaren and I bring together a lively collection of works written by scholars from diverse backgrounds.
The book grew out of our discussions about connections between critical pedagogy and multicultural education, that are often not seen when multicultural education is understood in an apolitical and sanitized manner, and when critical pedagogy does not directly address racism and patriarchy.
After the School Bell Rings
Grant, C. A. & Sleeter, C. E. 1996. After the School Bell Rings, 2nd ed. Falmer Press.
This book reports an ethnographic study of a desegregated working class junior high school in the Midwest. We sought to understand how the school was structured, how it worked, and the sense teachers, students, and administrators made of schooling, in the context of unequal social relationships of race, social class, gender, and disability. Chapters examine the students’ world, teacher culture, classroom life, and the school’s organizational and institutional context.
This second edition reports a study of the students after that had moved on to high school, to find out what happened to the dreams for their futures that they had expressed while in junior high. The book offers a sobering portrait of how unequal relationships end up being reproduced in the context of everyday life in schools, but we also suggest that this reproduction process is not inevitable, and can be challenged.
Developing Multicultural Teacher Education Curricula
Larkin, J. & Sleeter, C. E., Eds. 1995. Developing Multicultural Teacher Education Curricula. New York: SUNY Press
This edited book begins by discussing issues involved in preparing a predominantly White preservice teacher education population for multicultural teaching, and issues faculty need to consider when redesigning their coursework from a multicultural perspective.
The remaining chapters examine and illustrate how specific courses in the teacher education curriculum, from foundations to methods courses, can be redesigned multiculturally. Authors include many practical “nuts and bolts”suggestions along with discussions of problems that might be encountered in their implementation.
Keepers of the American Dream: Multicultural Education and Staff Development
Sleeter, C. E. 1992. Keepers of the American Dream: Multicultural Education and Staff Development. Falmer Press.
In this study of a staff development program, I followed a group of teachers over a two year period, to find out the extent to which the staff development impacted on their work in the classroom. The staff development program focused on multicultural teaching, and took place in a teacher center over a period of two years.
Acting as evaluator of the project, I and a research assistant attended all staff development sessions, and observed and interviewed the teachers periodically in their classrooms. The book explores potentials and limitations of staff development for transforming classroom practice in the context of structures of teacher work and the sense teachers make of their experiences in a racialized, gendered, and classed live context.
Empowerment through Multicultural Education
Sleeter, C.E., Ed. 1991. Empowerment through Multicultural Education. New York: SUNY Press.
This book reframes questions about student diversity by probing the extent to which society serves the interests of all, and by examining the empowerment of members of oppressed groups to direct social change. It examines the empowerment of children who are members of oppressed racial groups, lower class, and female, based on the ideas of multicultural education.
A series of ethnographic studies illustrates how such young people view their world, their power to affect it in their own interests, and their response to what is usually a growing sense of powerlessness as they mature. The authors also conceptualize contributions of multicultural education to empowering young people, and report investigations of multicultural education projects educators have used for student empowerment. Issues in teacher education are also discussed.
