By implementing carefully selected children's literature into the current reading curriculum, teachers can help students develop into civic-minded citizens who are willing and able to take meaningful action. Much has been written about the need to link learning and culture in our literacy classrooms (Banks, 1995; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014; Nieto, 2000). Connecting academic standards with students' home lives supports engagement while also contextualizing new learning within the lived experiences and prior knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2005) that students bring into the classroom. Rooted in culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), this work aims to achieve academic excellence while also developing and/or maintaining cultural competence. Academic excellence refers to helping students to construct strong academic identities for themselves as they are both challenged by and supported into new learning. Cultural competence speaks to the process by which this new learning takes place--namely, classroom practices that grow out of students' rich cultural knowledge and ways of being. While an increasing number of classroom teachers have embraced these first two aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy, the third aspect, "critical consciousness," is often overlooked or avoided. Building on Freire's (2017) notion of "conscientization," Ladson-Billings defines critical consciousness as the ability to "critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities." Literacy instruction that is rooted in helping students to develop critical consciousness, as demonstrated in the vignette above, helps students to think more critically about oppressive social beliefs and practices (Hass, 2020). This critical awareness is key if education is to play a role in building a more just democracy for all.