Chapter 6: Teaching Tolerance’s Perspectives for A Diverse America: A Resource for Elementary Educators Who Want to Teach about Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality While Meeting National Standards

In 2014, Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, launched Perspectives for A Diverse America (PDA). Aligned to the Common Core Standards for Language Arts and Literacy, the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, and Teaching Tolerance’s groundbreaking Social Justice Standards—PDA is a web-based anthology of texts, strategies, and tasks that can be used by K–12 social studies educators who are looking for an integrated approach to teaching about race, class, gender, and sexuality while seamlessly meeting national standards Shuster, 2013–14).

One year after its inception, a number of elementary school teachers in the State of Hawai’i took the curriculum to the test and piloted it in their classrooms. In this chapter, we will tell two of their stories. This will include: a general overview of the PDA curriculum, a brief description of the formal evaluation that was used to collect data about teacher experiences with the curriculum, and the presentation of two case studies that illustrate how the teachers used PDA to integrate the teaching of race, class, and gender into their mainstream standards-based curriculums. The chapter will end with a summary of the overall impacts of the curriculum and advice for other elementary school teachers who want to use PDA to “provide students with the critical competence for reflective thought applied to the analysis of social problems” (Stanley, 2010, p. 20).