ABSTRACT
The Introduction defines the transformative teacher as an inclusion educator of any culture, subject, and level, who collaborates to connect core content to humanization and world healing. Transformative teachers engage subjects with joyful justice experiences. The Introduction describes a holistic empowerment approach to transformative teaching – Environmental Liberation Education – to replace mainstream exclusions and environmental destruction with equity and sustainability action-reflection. This approach integrates cultures, mindfulness, and nature into academics, indoors and outdoors, on site and off. The approach supports diverse student success and teacher best practices with critical consciousness circles during routines. It proposes Three Transformative Tools for Environmental Liberation Education: Diversity Circles for structure, Multicultural Mindfulness for process, and Approach-in-Dimension for design and assessment. It explains how these tools help transformative teachers develop culture competence to reduce institutional bias with structural competence during hourly and daily decisions. The tools assist transformative teachers to link academics to the environment through culture to learn how to respond to change and make change. The Introduction also summarizes the book’s research methods, topic areas, data collection, coding, and analysis. It offers a Culture Survey for readers to self-assess a diversity baseline. It explains how to journal for chapter comprehension. It describes Multicultural Mindfulness Activities in each chapter for readers to apply transformative theory to classrooms, labs, and meeting rooms. It presents one Multicultural Mindfulness Activity: Diversity Circle Now.
