This text offers “real world” case studies involving educational staff, students, and families from diverse backgrounds in a variety of dynamic school settings.

Bridging Multiple Worlds emphasizes long-term, comprehensive solutions that promote school, home, and community partnership to meet challenges in educational settings. The text provides foundational information about diversity in the US, multicultural education, and family-school-community partnership in Part I; moves on to explore the use of cases in teacher education and how to analyze cases using a “decision making scaffold” in Part II; and delves deeply into specific cases and the issues surrounding them on a wide range of diversity topics in the seven chapters in Part III.  The authors’ backgrounds in Special Education enable them to incorporate issues involving children with exceptional needs and their families into nearly half of the cases, making this text a good companion to special education courses in addition to a comprehensive resource for all courses about diverse learners.  Instructors and students will find the authentic situations stimulating and well-contextualized with pertinent research and background information preceding each case. Specific discussion questions following each case foster reflective analysis from a social justice perspective.  These questions, used in conjunction with the Decision Making Scaffold, allow for broad and open class discussions of difficult issues and challenge participants to find common ground from which a meaningful and comprehensive plan of action can be developed.  The framework of the book allows future teachers, counselors, related service providers, and administrators to appreciate and understand the complexity of diversity issues in the cases and in the schools/communities where they will work.