Diversity Pedagogy: Examining the Role of Culture in the Teaching-Learning Process

Written by a powerful new voice in the field of multicultural education, Rosa Hernandez Sheets draws from her extensive teaching experience in urban schools to examine the learning issues of diverse student populations from pre-school to high school.

The first in its field to demonstrate and explicate the interconnectedness of culture and cognition to the teaching-learning process, Diversity Pedagogy: Examining The Role Of Culture In The Teaching-Learning Process promotes successful services for more students, especially those from underserved communities. This text introduces a new theory–diversity pedagogy–constructs explicit applications to practice by providing examples of real-life classroom situations throughout, ultimately uniting schooling, culture, and psychology.

“A monumental piece of work! Exciting, insightful, authentic, and comprehensive. Rosa Hernández Sheets has written a ground-breaking, thought-provoking text unmatched by others in the area of multicultural education, educational psychology, and child development. This text should be required reading in every institution of higher education that prepares teachers to teach in multicultural, multilingual, socially diverse settings. Hernández Sheets has successfully intersected and integrated issues of diversity with pedagogy, culture, and human development. This teacher-friendly, straightforward, highly readable, and brilliant work is a must for those of us involved in teacher preparation”
―Laureen Chew, Professor and Department Chair, College of Education, San Francisco State University

“In this book teachers have many opportunities to “see” theory personified as practice, and to witness how ideas move from conceptual abstraction to instructional action. This is a compelling accomplishment that should be empowering to multicultural education novices, as well as affirming to the more experienced advocates.”
―Geneva Gay, Professor, University of Washington

“This is a marvelous book! Very soundly conceptualized and clearly written, this lively and engaging text is peopled with a wide variety of students and classrooms. Rosa Hernández Sheets skillfully helps teachers see their power to facilitate healthy development, sense of self, and academic achievement of the culturally and linguistically diverse students in today's schools. Readers will find this book well-grounded in research, and at the same time delightfully readable and engaging.”
―Christine Sleeter, California State University, Monterey Bay

“Rosa Hernández Sheets has provided in Diversity Pedagogy not only the first but also the best currently existing textbook that defines “diversity pedagogy” and clarifies the relationships among culture, cognition, teaching, and learning. Within these relationships that form a complex classroom ecology, significant variables of diversity―ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, ability differences, and family structures―are addressed.”
―G. Pritchy Smith, University of North Florida

“Sheets' view of culture is expressed less in terms of traits (customs, habits, tradition) and more in terms of sets of control mechanisms that help to explain why children behave as they do in a school or classroom-based context. In a word, her approach is additive, honoring the norms, morals, and cultural values that children bring with them to school. . . . Indeed, she suggests that without such attention to student differences, the very achievement that all teachers of culturally diverse classrooms seek is not possible.”
―Angela Valenzuela, University of Texas, Austin