Focusing on the goals of student-centered learning while also attending to standards-driven mandates, this practical, how-to volume provides educators with a way to integrate multicultural themes into the K-12 social studies curriculum. The author demonstrates how teachers can draw on the histories of their local school communities to help students connect to broader topics in U.S. history and explore crucial themes of diversity.

Features include: describes ways to engage students in exploring issues of race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and language by studying the stories of their hometowns; highlights portraits of individual communities, demonstrating how to view historical events through a multicultural lens; provides model lesson plans and projects aligned with the National Standards for History and the NCSS Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education; and shows teachers how to easily adapt the approaches modeled in the book to studies of their own school communities.