Educational researchers, leadership, and policymakers have had the privileged voices and place from which to theorize and address educational inequities. But for some exceptions, nondominant families have been relegated to participation in school-centric “parent involvement” activities. Drawing from a participatory design-based research study using standpoint and critical race theory, our findings suggest key convergences between the lived experiences and insights of nondominant parents and recent educational equity scholarship, while revealing untapped expertise, knowledge, and capacity for addressing inequity. We argue that holding a “place” for the complex understandings of nondominant families can open expansive possibilities for transforming educational systems toward racial equity.
The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerbated existing racial injustices in schools and society. Although many have argued for a principled refusal to return to an inequitable “normal” (Roy, 2020), dominant models of educational improvement prioritize technical-rational approaches that often result in administrative racism in school systems, with little attention to the complexities of race, power, and privilege in addressing long-standing racial injustices. The need to address settler colonialism, anti-Black, and other intersectional racisms are far from new, but we argue that the confluence of these pandemics demands new roles for research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in education that aspire to transform systems beyond their current construction. In this article, we draw on the intersections between racial equity and RPP scholarship to propose key pivots for RPPs in working to foster educational justice in school systems. We use our racial equity-focused RPP to illustrate efforts to (a) center justice in multidimensional change; (b) develop equity-centered data systems; and (c) enlist racially minoritized youth, family, and community expertise. As partners in an ongoing racial equity-focused RPP, we challenge ourselves and our colleagues to take up the work of remaking schooling to become answerable to the learning and knowledge of youth, families, and communities impacted by racial and educational injustices.
Researchers and educational leaders have long debated the appropriate roles and forms of family engagement in education. Although, in recent years, scholars have sought to understand how racially and linguistically diverse communities should participate in their children’s education, the field has struggled to recognize and engage families’ expertise and disrupt the dynamics of inequity that shape disengagement. In this article, we highlight recent understandings regarding the development of disciplinary identities and cultural practices in learning to offer new approaches to the field of family engagement for conceptualizing the untapped potential of nondominant family knowledge and cultural practices in learning settings. By highlighting examples from mathematics learning that center families as legitimate sources of knowledge, we suggest avenues for engaging diverse family leadership in co-designing equitable learning environments that foster students’ empowering disciplinary identities and learning.
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