Un-Standardizing Curriculum

In this second edition of her bestseller, Christine Sleeter and new coauthor Judith Flores Carmona show how educators can learn to teach rich, academically rigorous, multicultural curricula within a standards-based environment. The authors have meticulously updated each chapter to address current changes in education policy and practice. New vignettes of classroom practice have been added to illustrate how today’s teachers navigate the Common Core State Standards. The book’s field-tested conceptual framework elaborates on the following elements of curriculum design: ideology, enduring ideas, democratized assessment, transformative intellectual knowledge, students and their communities, intellectual challenges, and curriculum resources. Un-Standardizing Curriculum shows teachers what they can do to “un-standardize” knowledge in their own classrooms, while working toward high standards of academic achievement.

Book Features:

• Classroom vignettes to help teachers bridge theory with practice in the context of commonly faced pressures and expectations.
• Guidance for teachers who want to develop their classroom practice, including the possibilities and spaces teachers have within a standardized curriculum.
• Attention to multiple subject areas and levels of schooling, making the book applicable across a wide range of teacher education programs.
• A critique of the tensions between school reforms and progressive classroom practice.

Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Professional Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her recent books include Teaching with Vision and Creating Solidarity Across Diverse Communities. Judith Flores Carmona is assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and in the Honors College at New Mexico State University.

"Un-standardizing Curriculum is a must read for all educators and teacher educators. It can open up paths to dialogue concerning ways to ameliorate teaching and learning. The book further supports professional development aimed at empowering teachers, particularly those who are focused on equitable schooling for all students."

—Teachers College Record

"A clear framework...on how to develop culturally relevant, academically challenging, and engaging curricula." —Rethinking Schools

"Recommended as a resource for undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate students, and practicing teachers." —Multicultural Review

"Sleeter makes a strong case for what teachers can do to ‘un-standardize’ knowledge in their own classrooms, while working toward high standards of academic achievement."

—Adolescence

"A timely and important book on how to design and develop multicultural curriculum.”

—Teachers College Record

"This is an extraordinarily important book that should be required reading in every teacher education and educational leadership program. Designed to help educators deeply understand and design rigorous learning opportunities for all students, this brilliantly constructed text shepherds teachers into building and sharpening their professional judgment during a time when standards and Common Core movements are mistakenly understood as the curriculum. This book helps educational leaders build school environments that support teachers' capacity to plan and enact curriculum practices that are responsive to the range of students’ strengths. Un-standardizing Curriculum debunks and disrupts movements to standardize curriculum practices and instead provides educators with exemplary practices of educators teaching to the multicultural genius and diversity of students. This second edition is a game changer for educators interested in powerful curriculum engineering to support new century students."
—H. Richard Milner IV, Helen Faison Endowed Chair of Urban Education, University of Pittsburgh

“This text breaks new ground with a timely contribution that provides solid, potentially emancipatory grounding for a new, inclusive, research-based vision of curriculum, assessment, schools, and society. Kudos to Sleeter and Flores Carmona for their fierce critique of standardization alongside an equally substantial foregrounding of multiculturalism as an alternative that is essential to the democratic purposes of schooling in a diverse, complex society that is plagued by historic and continuing inequality. I hope that practitioners, advocates, and policymakers take this work seriously.”
—Angela Valenzuela, author, Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth

"Combining theory and practice, the authors provide up-to-date, effective approaches for teachers interested in critical multicultural curricula, and a compelling call for all educators to disrupt standardized knowledge within the context of Common Core State Standards. It is a book that teachers, teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers will continue to return to for guidance and inspiration."
—Dolores Delgado Bernal, University of Utah