It's striking to me that authors with such an ambitious proposal (culturally responsive teaching across the curriculum with massive character development in teachers) would land on such a familiar and safe intervention (PDs and interventions in teaching practices). We're talking about structural oppression - why are interventions focused on teachers instead of structures?

Thank goodness we are acknowledging the vast amount of work the kind of teaching described here would require. Thinking about implementing this in a district that served, say, two main linguistic communities would be daunting. My district serves 7-10 wholly unique cultural and linguistic communities in a city that encourages the development of semi-isolated cultural enclaves under the banner of multiculturalism. I can't imagine implementing this without significant structural changes at the district level, and maybe even at the city level? Again, I am struck by questions about the environmental prerequisites for culturally responsive teaching.

Love me some inquiry projects. Although, as someone deep in PBL-land, it is definitely not a panacea. Student ability to access PBL because of other cognitive, linguistic, economic, and skills factors varies dramatically.

This seems like a crucial point for the remainder of this article. The authors are trying to articulate this vision for a culturally responsive teacher, but the idea is that, culturally responsive teachers both require other culturally responsive teachers and also have to engage in culturally responsive teaching - it's the chicken-egg stuff you get in Aristotle. I want to think more about what sort of teaching environment would be required to allow teachers to become culturally responsive. What does the administrative environment need to be like? Class size? Union? Salary? What are the material/professional conditions necessary for the emergence of SRT?

I think this is a helpful way of reaching an important theoretical point here. It seems like Kumashiro is asking the question: How do teachers get students to be different? And the answer is like, "It's hard, because even when you teach them new stuff, set up their environment perfectly for change to happen, make them feel safe, and expose them to a nice new anti-racist identity to switch into, the transformation doesn't always happen." I worry that we've sort of lost the thread of anti-racism though, and we're just hanging out in the deep end. Also, here, maybe, is another pointer towards Kumashiro's comfort with themes from religiosity waiting in the wings, and raises the question whether this anti-rationalist conclusion is itself a symptom of Kumashiro's own academic conceptual framework.

This reminds me of the use of the term 'krisis' in the ancient Greek Hippocratic traditions that gets picked up in the 19th and 20th centuries by psychoanalysis and the existentialists. Kumashiro explicitly cites psychoanalysis in the previous paragraph - the skepticism about rationality as a useful or usable tool in seeking a remedy. Instead, there's a sort of "leap of faith" move - here called "moves a student to a different intellectual/emotional/political space" - which I think has more than a little in common with the experience of religious conversion. Kumashiro seems friendly towards this sort of perspective at this point in the paper. I wonder whether Kumashiro has a religious or spiritual background.

Talk about "braving up"! This moment highlights, for me, the vast attention to priming, cultivating, and educating (maybe even curating?) an audience that this sort of intervention would require. If the intervention is being done in the privacy of a student's mind, or perhaps in a small group of students who share a series of educational experiences, then I can imagine a group of people having sufficient shared context to understand the use of what would otherwise appear to be a repetition of a harmful stereotype but is actually a disruption.