Many teachers and educational researchers have claimed to adopt tenets of culturally relevant education (CRE). However, recent work describes how standardized curricula and testing have marginalized CRE in educational reform discourses. In this synthesis of research, we sought examples of research connecting CRE to positive student outcomes across content areas. It is our hope that this synthesis will be a reference useful to educational researchers, parents, teachers, and education leaders wanting to reframe public debates in education away from neoliberal individualism, whether in a specific content classroom or in a broader educational community.

The purpose of this study was to disrupt whiteness through the use of critical race counternarratives during a critical literacy workshop with middle-school preservice teachers. Over two years, 57 preservice teachers participated in and reflected on their experiences reading master narratives and viewing counternarrative texts in a critical literacy workshop. Students responded in a variety of ways that ranged from displacing responsibility for their ignorance about the counternarrative texts onto educational structures, to troubling their roles in reproducing oppressive school environments and considering action steps for future teaching. Our research has important implications for preservice teachers, teacher educators, and those interested in implementing preservice teacher educator curriculum using a critical race theory lens.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how preservice teachers (PSTs) respond and reflect in a University course that centres Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) in the United States. Using artefacts from 100 PSTs class assignments we found two main themes. PST display a surface level consciousness which contributed to some contradictions in their responses and a discourse of whiteness was difficult for the PST in this study to decentre. Additionally, through this course, some of the students began to raise their consciousness critically in promising ways. Our findings illuminate the importance of PSTs having more than one course to wrestle with contradictions, their own deficit thinking, and to foster the new understandings. Additionally, this study displays the importance of having teacher educators in teacher education who develop their own critical consciousness in order to teach courses that decentre whiteness.

Culturally relevant education represents a wide collection of pedagogies of opposition to social injustice and holds a commitment to collective empowerment and social justice. By using culturally relevant education as a framework, we make the case to include religious diversity as a part of culturally relevant education intentionally. We believe that by opening the dialogue to include religious diversity, we are working together as educators to promote social justice in schools that benefits all children regardless of their religious backgrounds. We synthesize successful examples of culturally relevant education in connection to religion. Further, we argue for teacher educators to incorporate discussion of religious diversity as part of multicultural and social justice teacher education.

Many teachers and educational researchers have claimed to adopt tenets of Culturally Relevant Education (CRE), but recent work describes how standardized curricula and testing have marginalized CRE in educational reform discourses. In this review, we synthesized literature moving beyond CRE in terms of race and ethnicity into the areas of gender and sexuality equity. Findings and implications offer a reference useful to educational researchers, parents, teacher educators, teachers, and education leaders wanting to reframe public debates in education away from neoliberal individualism.