Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment: The Global Relevance of Critical and Inclusive Pedagogies in Higher Education eds. by Frank Tuitt, Chayla Haynes, and Saran Stewart (review)

2016 has turned out to be a year in which any illusions about American being in a "post-racial" moment have been shattered. From the 4–4 decision that effectively affirmed the Fifth Circuit's ruling blocking President Obama's Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the use of race among other factors in admissions in Fisher v. University of Texas, to the shocking results of the 2016 presidential election, in which the winning candidate employed racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia to victory exploiting White resentment and voter suppression of people of color, to American Capitalism threatening to destroy First Nation soil before Obama's executive intervention to re-route the Dakota Access Pipeline—2016, like every year before it since the European conquest of the North American continent, has demonstrated that racial inequity is alive and well in all aspects of American life—public policy, immigration policy, energy policy, and education.

Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment: The Global Relevance of Critical Inclusive Pedagogies in Higher Education is therefore a welcome and opportune scholarly endeavor to advance critiques of one of America's most established entities: colleges and universities. The purpose of the book is to identify and define critical inclusive pedagogies (CIPs) and explain how they are at work today in higher education institutions, in hopes of those institutions becoming truly multicultural in every sense of the word: professionally, intellectually, academically, socially, emotionally, and otherwise. Foreword author Lori D. Patton makes clear this need early in Tuitt, Haynes, and Stewart's edited volume when she states:

However, when it comes to the enactment of critical and inclusive pedagogies; race, equity, and higher education fail to reflect the racist, inequitable structures embedded in most higher education classrooms. Regardless of educational context or social location, the conversations about race that occur in the classroom are limited, if existent at all.

(p. viii)

Evoking critical legal scholar Derrick Bell's call for immediate, enduring action toward racial equity, Patton notes that unexamined and non-reflective educational practice implicates higher education practitioners in oppression and positions Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment as a work "bridg[ing] the gap from thought to action, providing the necessary context for education around the work to either embrace or recommit to centering race in postsecondary classrooms and engaging in necessary conversations to ensure that students do not leave our institutions the way they came" (p. xi).

Co-editor Haynes introduces the volume by noting the inequity in educational access and outcomes, specifically underlining critical and inclusive pedagogies as a strategy to challenge systemic racial inequality—which benefits all students, and particularly racially minoritized students. Critical and inclusive pedagogies, rooted in the works of Friere, Giroux, hooks, McLaren, and others, "encourage that teaching practice create an oppositional ontology of history to expose the relationship between knowledge and the lived experience" (p. 2). To this end, the editors have arrayed this pedagogical toolkit into three sections: How We Think About Our Work (critical and inclusive approaches to instruction and course design), How We Engage in Our Work (how CIP practices allow educators to serve as teacher and student to reflect the history and composition of the world), and Measuring the Impact of Our Work (how CIP enable knowledge to transform classrooms, institutions, and communities in which the institutions reside).

As we navigated Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment, we gained appreciation for the editors' skill in creating an accessible and engaging volume with applicability for a range of educational audiences. Part I, How We Think About Our Work, employs scholarly reflection of authors in three unique contexts, starting with Stewart's account of navigating a Caribbean university employing CIP to advance...