Just outside a major urban center on the east coast of the United States an activist group struggled to create a system-wide multicultural education program. Through a seven-year qualitative study, Pepi Leistyna documents and interprets -- via a critical pedagogical lens -- this group's work with professional development, curriculum and instruction, faculty and staff, and community outreach. Through engaging examples, stories, and participant voices, Leistyna offers a comprehensive, accessible ethnography with implications for others who might attempt similar sorts of systemic change.

Pepi Leistyna is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception and coeditor (with Arlie Woodrum and Stephen A. Sherblom) of Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy.