Culturally relevant pedagogy aims to build on students' individual and cultural experiences and to allow diverse populations opportunities to access a generalized curriculum. The purpose of this action research study was to create a culturally relevant teaching framework to integrate curriculum texts and evaluate for effectiveness. The participatory action research model encourages participant collaboration to develop and to assess an authentic area of need. The research design was qualitative and used a mixed-methods approach to collect interview, focus group, and survey data from participants in two cycles. Participants were recruited through purposeful and snowball sampling from educators and school community members in Massachusetts public schools. Data from seven collaborative meetings and participant feedback was coded using descriptive methods to identify findings from the framework creation, revisions and reconfigurations in Cycle 2. Findings from the research suggest that teachers perceive policy, alignment, and support as significantly impacting their ability to integrate culturally relevant pedagogy with fidelity because of inconsistent autonomy. Teachers expressed that policy and poor alignment with leadership can perpetuate barriers in delivering engaging content. Implications based on this research suggest a further look at administrators' perspective as well as more open dialogue and opportunities for communication between teachers and administrators. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]