Everyday Diversity: Developing Cultural Competency and Information Awareness

Designed to serve as both a textbook and a course guide, Everyday Diversity: Developing Cultural Competency and Information Awareness helps students interrogate their own positionality so that they can better understand others and how they experience the world. The book also teaches students how to carefully consider information sources, particularly those pertaining to controversial issues including culture, diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice.

The book begins with four core assessments that build upon each other: cultural autobiography, academic analysis, field notes and report, and final synthesis. The readings, questions, and activities that follow the core assessment chapter provide students with additional guidance and research that will help them complete the course assignments successfully. Specific topics addressed within the readings include best practices for taking ethnographic field notes, the importance of diversity in professional settings, how culture affects communication, and white privilege.

Experiential in nature and aimed to help students develop both personally and professionally, Everyday Diversity is well suited for human diversity, critical literacy, introduction to research, education, health sciences, qualitative research, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology courses.

Angela Cartwright, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of curriculum and learning in the West College of Education at Midwestern State University, where she teaches courses in social studies, content methods, and human diversity. She earned her master’s degree in drama, literacy, language arts, and reading, and her doctorate degree in multicultural and equity studies in education, from Ohio State University.

Emily Reeves, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of curriculum and learning, as well as education and reading, in the West College of Education at Midwestern State University, where she teaches courses in reading and writing strategies, applied research, content reading, developmental reading, human diversity, and teaching reading and language arts. She earned her master’s in education administration from Lubbock Christian University and her doctorate degree from Texas Tech University.