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As a means to challenge and diminish the hold of mainstream curriculum's claim of being a colorblind, politically neutral text, we will address two particular features that partially, though significantly, constitute the hidden curriculum in the United States—race and class—historically studied as separate social issues. Race and class have been embedded within the institutional curriculum from the beginning in the US; though rarely acknowledged as intertwined issues. We illustrate how the theoretical and interpretive structure of French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu can productively subsume the insights of critical race theory into its framework in a way that provides a more robust understanding of how race and class continue to be socially reproduced in schools. To perform this task we examine, through Bourdieu's constructs of habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence and misrecognition, the ways in which race, in general, and whiteness, specifically, influences pedagogical and curricular existence within the institutional superstructure of school.

This study describes how a primary school teacher and her students explored multiple means of communication through the use of a project on storytelling and drumming to personalize and translate cultural differences into universal human experiences they could understand. It documents how the teacher and two researchers collaborated with planning and implementing the drumming project so that it integrated social studies with multiple modes of literacy. It discusses how the teacher and researchers examined cultural universals within this project to provide students with a frame of reference to engage in an authentic understanding of diverse cultures within their classrooms. Finally, the study examined the students’ work within the actual drumming project.

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This chapter focuses on two persistent challenges in teacher education and the teaching profession, specifically the development and retention of quality teachers. It examines the challenges that school districts and education preparation providers (EPPs) face in recruiting and preparing diverse candidates for hard-to-fill content areas and schools. This work began when a college of education and a school district collaboratively worked to design a new grow your own (GYO) model where recent high school graduates and paraprofessionals are paid to work with the district's best teachers, while earning an accelerated bachelor's degree, with all tuition, fees, and textbooks provided. This racially diverse cohort was dually licensed to teach in elementary (K-5) and special education and placed in the lowest socioeconomic schools in the districts with the commitment to teach in the district for at least three years.