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This website serves as a repository of documents produced by over 20 Pennsylvania teacher education faculty members engaged in a communitiesy of practice focused on the integration of culturally relevant and sustaining education competencies.
Between August 2022 and June 2023, and again between October 2024 and May 2025, through monthly meetings and independent exercises, participants in the “CRSE Community of Practice” explored, reflected upon, and ultimately integrated into a teacher education course or program element the Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Competencies.
Shared within this site are original and revised course syllabi and program element documents, as well as written reflections and artifacts, all of which illuminate the stories of why and how these teacher educators integrated the CRSE Ccompetencies into their work.
We hope that the materials included in this repository support the critical advancement of culturally relevant and sustaining education across the educational landscape in Pennsylvania and beyond.
In April 2023, the Pennsylvania State Board of Education included the following language in its amendments to Chapter 49 of the Pennsylvania Code (relating to Certification of Professional Personnel): “A Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) for Pennsylvania requires a genuine commitment to equity for all students. At the core of CRSE is an anti-racist undertaking that aims to eliminate the systemic and institutional barriers that inhibit the success of all Pennsylvania's students—particularly those who have been historically marginalized. A Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) encompasses skills for educators, including, but not limited to, approaches to mental wellness, trauma-informed approaches to instruction, technological and virtual engagement, and any factors that inhibit equitable access for all Pennsylvania's students."
CRSE is necessary for learners to thrive academically and personally during their educational experiences. The diligent adherence to culturally relevant and sustaining education by people and systems ensures that learners’ backgrounds, identities, lived experiences, interests, and aspirations are acknowledged and valued in the curriculum as well as in interactions with peers, educators, and policies. Similarly, culturally relevant and sustaining education and education systems are critical for the recruitment and retention of teachers of color as organizational cultures, working conditions, and relationships must also value the identities and contributions of these educators.
As published in November 2022, there were nine Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Competencies to inform the preparation and professional development of teachers and other educators in Pennsylvania. At first, these Competencies were required to have been integrated into teacher education programs by 2025 and into school districts’ in-service teacher professional development by 2024, as stipulated by Pennsylvania’s State Board of Education and Department of Education.
However, in April 2023, three Western Pennsylvania school superintendents were joined by some teachers and parents of their districts in filing lawsuits against the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), challenging the legality of the mandate that districts and institutions of higher education incorporate the CRSE Competencies into their Comprehensive Plans and Teacher Education Programs, respectively. The lawsuits erroneously claimed that the CRSE Competencies violate free speech by compelling teachers to teach a particular curriculum that conflicts with their personal beliefs and that the CRSE Competencies were developed outside of Pennsylvania’s standard regulatory review process.
In November 2024, PDE settled the lawsuits filed by three school districts in Western PA with an agreement to replace the Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education Competencies with a “Common Ground” Framework that includes competencies in “Cultural Awareness,” “Trauma-Aware, Mental Health and Wellness,” and “Technological and Virtual Engagement.” Moreover, districts are now, as a result of this settlement agreement, able to determine for themselves how they meet the regulatory requirement of culturally relevant and sustaining education in their induction and professional development programs.
The Cultural Awareness Competencies are slightly modified versions of the original CRSE Competencies. Given the timeline of this change, some of the courses featured in this repository utilize the Cultural Awareness Competencies, while others use the original CRSE Competencies.
In 2022, the William Penn Foundation awarded a grant to Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development to support the implementation of the CRSE Competencies in teacher education in Pennsylvania. The funding was utilized to establish a community of practice for teacher education faculty from institutions across Pennsylvania and to facilitate the development of materials featured on this website.
Additional funding and opportunities for expanded collaboration, including a 2023 grant to Temple University from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, now mean that the initial CRSE Community of Practice project haswill continued through 2025 as the PA Teacher Education Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Initiative. The Initiative's other work has included communities of practice for PreK-12 educators and teacher educators navigating problems of practice arising in the implementation of the CRSE Competencies, the creation of Navigating Challenging Waters: A Guide for Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Educators in PreK-12, and the edited volume Transformative Teacher Education: Disrupting Pedagogy, Practice, and Ideology to Forge Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (Emerald Publishing, 2026).
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The PA Teacher Education Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Initiative Repository is a collaboration between Temple University and the Pennsylvania Educator Diversity Consortium, for which Dr. Cole and Karen Parker Thompson serve as Co-Executive Directors.
Between August 2022 and June 2023, and again between October 2025 and May 2025, participants in the CRSE Community of Practice convened monthly to share and develop tools for integrating the CRSE Competencies into their teacher education courses or program elements. They used backwards design to reflect upon goals and to revise objectives, assessments, content, and structural elements of syllabi and other program elements. They crowdsourced articles, videos, assignments, rubrics, and other tools and resources for each CRSE Ccompetency. Participants utilized all these materials to revise their syllabi or program elements to better reflect the CRSE Competencies. Additionally, they further reinforced this alignment by incorporating land acknowledgements, identity statements, teaching philosophies, and more. Finally, the group reflected on the revision process and worked together to solve problems of practice.
(The materials included in this repository are the intellectual property of the faculty contributors and may not, at this time, have institutional approval for inclusion within program curricula.)
The CRSE Communitiesy of Practice utilized a cross-institutional collaboration model, which worked well for supporting the integration of the CRSE Ccompetencies. Participants shared that this structure for collaboration was innovative within a context that is typically very siloed and recommended the structure as a model for others within Pennsylvania’s education ecosystem.
The PA Teacher Education Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Initiative Repository is possible due to over 20 Pennsylvania teacher education faculty members’ commitments to their personal and professional growth. These faculty members spent a year working to understand, explore, and create the personal, curricular, and pedagogical shifts they believed were necessary to provide culturally relevant and sustaining education for their students and their students’ future PK-12 students. The initiative personnel from Temple University and the Pennsylvania Educator Diversity Consortium thank these faculty members on behalf of the field of teacher education as well as the broader community. We ask that those exploring the materials available in the repository extend a generosity of spirit to our faculty contributors, recognizing and appreciating the vulnerability that has been gifted to us in their willingness to make public their personal and scholarly endeavors as documented here during this moment in time.
An approach to teaching that affirms students' identities, engages them in meaningful learning, and sustains their cultural knowledge and practices. It emphasizes the importance of incorporating students' lived experiences into educational spaces to promote equity and belonging.
A set of guidelines and practices designed to help educators reflect on their teaching and create more inclusive, culturally-relevant learning environments. These competencies focus on areas such as addressing bias, fostering community relationships, and promoting high expectations for all learners.
The state agency responsible for overseeing public education in Pennsylvania. PDE worked with PEDC to develop and implement the CRSE framework and guidelines.
The PA Teacher Education Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Initiative hosted webinars facilitated by the contributors whose work is included in the repository. Recordings of the webinars can be viewed here.
If you would like to learn more about the PA Teacher Education Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education (CRSE) Initiative or be connected to one of our Repository contributors, contact Luca Poxon at crse@temple.edu.
If you would like to collaborate with other teacher education faculty and/or PK-12 educators on the integration and implementation of CRSE Competencies, please contact infoadmin@paeddiversity.org for information about PEDC’s current efforts in this area
Additional resources related to implementation of the CRSE Competencies are available on PEDC’s website: www.paeddiversity.org.
