Culturally Responsive Teaching: Lesson Planning for Elementary and Middle Grades

How do I plan lessons for today’s diverse classrooms? This book helps pre-service teachers answer this question and learn to create and use such lessons in their classrooms. It is the first book to provide well-developed content-specific lesson plans that reflect cultural diversity in the United States. Rather than taking the traditional foundations-oriented, culture and history approach, this text translates that cultural and historical knowledge of specific minority groups into examples for instructional use. The text features entire field-tested units for elementary and middle grades in four content areas, language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. For example, in the language arts unit, “Stories, Stories, Stories,” students tell, write, and read stories that build on their cultural background and experiences. The math unit explores informal geometry in the patterns of Navajo rugs, African textiles, and Mexican pottery. The science unit connects weather experiences to cultural folk myths and sayings. The social studies unit examines changing requirements for voting in the USA. The text can be used as a supplement for general or elementary methods, student field experience, or multicultural education, or as a main text in practice-oriented multicultural education and multicultural curriculum courses.

Jacqueline Jordan Irvine is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Urban Education in the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has received distirnguished alumni awards from Georgia State University and Howard University. In 1996 she received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Education Research Association and an award from the Associaton for Supervision and Curriculum Development for exemplary contributions to the education of African American children. Dr. Irvine's specialization is in multicultural education and urban teacher education, particularly the education of African Americans. Her book, Black Students and School Fauilure received two national books awards--The 1991 Outstanding Writing award from The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE)and the Outstanding Academic Book of 1990 from the Association of College and University Research Librarians. Her most recent books are Growing Up African American in Catholic School and Critical Knowledge for Diverse Students. Currently she works with public school teachers in a center she founded and directs, The Center on Urban Learning/Teaching and Urban Research in Education and Schools (CULTURES).

Beverly Jeanne Armento is currently the Research Professor in Social Studies Education and Chair of the Middle/Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She holds a doctoral degree in Social Studies Education from Indiana University where she received the Lieber Memorial Teaching Associate Award. Dr. Armento has taught elementary and middle grades in New Jersey, Florida, and Maryland, and has been at Georgia State since 1975. She was selected Alumni Distinguished Professor at GSU in 1985 and Outstanding Georgia Social Studies Educator by the Georgia Council for the Social Studies Educator by the Georgia Council for Social Studies in 1990. Dr. Armento’s major areas of professional research and writing are economic education, diversity issues, and excellence in teaching and learning. Dr. Armento’s works include chapters in the Handbook of Research on Teaching, the Handbook of Research on Teaching and Learning in Social Studies, and the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. She is actively leading efforts to reform the nature of teacher education programs and the quality of teaching and learning in urban schools in the Atlanta area.