T he purpose of this volume is to contribute to education research by presenting comprehensive and nuanced understandings of intersectional perspectives. Researchers working within an intersectional framework try to account for the dynamic and complex ways that race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, ability, and age shape individual identities and social life. We argue it is essential to overcome simplistic, static, one-dimensional, and additive approaches to education research by expanding the use of analytical categories and engaging the multiplicities of people's circumstances within and across teaching and learning settings. This volume is our attempt to open a space for analysis, dialogue, and reflection among scholars about intersectionality, and the possibilities of reimagining the research tools used to address the complex demographic, social, economic, and cultural transformations shaping education. Ideally, this conversation will reach audiences outside of the academy. Drawing from a long tradition of Black feminist theorizing and activism, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) is credited with proposing the term intersectionality as an academic concept. Intersectionality was also nurtured by the theorizing of women of color regarding race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of inequality that occurred as early as the 1960s (
Today it is rare to find a college of education (COE) that does not request faculty to include metrics in annual reports of their scholarly productivity (e.g., number of articles published in high-impact factor journals, H-factors, altmetrics, citations, funded grants). At the same time, faculty and COEs alike often struggle to understand if and how the educational research they produce is useful and used among wider stakeholders (Southerland, Gadsden, & Herrington, 2014). The gap between research production and potential use is likewise reflected in university promotion and tenure practices, which increasingly rely on indirect measures of research quality (Cooper, 2015a). For example, the journal impact factor (JIF) is a metric that reveals little about the quality or relevance of any article, yet it remains one of the most influential indicators for research accountability and to distribute incentive (Piwowar, 2013). Many scholars recognize the limitations of indirect metrics and seek to broaden definitions of scholarly impact (e.g.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ([IDEA] 2004; IDEA Amendments 1997) is a civil rights–based law designed to protect the rights of students with disabilities in U.S. schools. However, decades after the initial passage of IDEA, racial inequity in special education classifications, placements, and suspensions are evident. In this article, we focus on understanding how racial discipline disparities in special education outcomes relate to IDEA remedies designed to address problem behaviors. We qualitatively examine how educators interpret and respond to citations for racial discipline disproportionality via IDEA at both the district and the school level in a suburban locale. We find that educators interpret the inequity in ways that neutralize the racialized implications of the citation, which in turn affects how they respond to the citation. These interpretations contribute to symbolic and race-evasive IDEA compliance responses. The resulting bureaucratic and organizational structures associated with IDEA implementation become a mechanism through which the visibility of race and racialization processes are erased and muted through acts of policy compliance. Thus, the logic of compliance surrounding IDEA administration serves as a reproductive social force that sustains practices that do not disrupt locally occurring racialized inequities.
This study examines emerging efforts by three colleges of education to contribute to research use through public systems of knowledge exchange among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and other education stakeholders. Often labeled knowledge mobilization (KM), such organization-and individual-level agendas seek to enhance, expand, and sustain engagement with educational research. Colleges of education with public KM agendas signal formal, local efforts at a time when KM remains weakly integrated within education. This study seeks to highlight the interdependent opportunities and challenges that accompany individual and organizational capacities for such change associated with KM. Findings from analysis of faculty survey responses (n = 66) suggest that progressive engagement with KM among colleges of education challenges their faculty to navigate the competing demands of knowledge production and mobilization.
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