Districts nationwide have launched efforts to fundamentally change their central offices to support improved teaching and learning for all students and are turning to research for help. The research provides promising guides but is challenging to use. What happens when central offices try? We explored that question in six districts using sociocultural learning theory to analyze 124 interviews, 499.25 observation hours, and approximately 300 documents. We found that central office administrators varied in their appropriation of five research-based ideas between and somewhat within districts. Prior knowledge and assistance from intermediary organizations proved necessary but not sufficient to support appropriation absent internal leaders who taught others how to use the research. These findings elaborate research use as a learning process that may require particular, intensive internal leadership.
Since the mainstream racial awakening to pervasive and entrenched structural racism, many organizations have made commitments and adopted practices to increase workplace diversity, inclusion, and equity and embed these commitments in their organizational missions. A question often arises about how these concepts apply to research. This paper discusses how organizations can build on their specific commitments to diversity, inclusion, and equity by applying these principles in the research enterprise. RTI International’s framework for conducting equity-centered transformative research highlights how incorporating principles of diversity, inclusion, and equity requires a departure from mainstream practice because of historical and intentional exclusion of these principles. Drawing on methodologies of culturally responsive evaluation, research, and pedagogy; feminist, Indigenous, and critical methodologies; community-based participatory research; and theories of social transformation, liberation, and racial justice, this organizing framework illustrates what this departure requires and how research can serve liberation and social justice by transforming the researcher, the research content, and the day-to-day practice of conducting research. Centering the work of seminal scholars and practitioners of color in the field, this paper provides a holistic framework that incorporates various research approaches and paradigms intended to shift power to minoritized and marginalized communities to achieve social transformation through research.
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