Understanding Spatial Components of Educational Equity Research

• In Event: The Spatial Search to Understand and Address Educational Inequity to Inform Praxis

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
As researchers engage with the complexity of social contexts influencing education, our ability to gain insight and propose solutions to contemporary challenges is dictated, to some degree, by the critical analytic methods we employ. Spatial analysis, prevalent in many fields, has been taken up to a lesser degree in education for several reasons. First, tools of spatial analysis (e.g., geographic information systems (GIS)) are often complex to learn and become proficient. In addition, GIS is often prohibitively expensive. Finally, most educational data, while spatial in nature, does not offer straightforward spatial referencing.

As technology has advanced in the past few decades so has access to inexpensive yet effective spatial analysis tools. In working with spatial data, we have used a range of inexpensive or free tools to construct spatial data representations. These representations have allowed us examine our data in ways that often provide new and interesting insight. For this paper we address two questions: (1. How can researchers determine the nature of the spatial component of their research?; (2. How can researchers inexpensively examine the spatial components of their data to help inform analysis?

Theoretical Frameworks
We employ critical spatial perspective (Soja, 2010) in considering ways educational equity scholars may identify and analyze spatial components of their research. From this perspective, we seek to integrate the social, historical and spatial aspects impacting educational equity in an effort to understand how to improve the experiences and opportunities of youth of color who have historically been marginalized within educational structures.

Data Sources or Materials
This paper is predominantly theoretical in nature, using critical spatial theory in conjunction with recent studies in educational equity literature that have employed a spatial analysis to determine how future research can examine critical spatial components of data. Additionally, we examine free digital spatial data tools in terms of their utility to assist researchers with critical spatial analysis given existing types of data available. Finally, we draw upon our own expertise and the literature in spatial analysis to outline useful types of data displays, which may be helpful in analysis and reporting of educational equity research.

Result/Conclusions/Significance
We provide guidelines for determining the spatial nature of educational equity research using examples from literature to ground our framework. We ask researchers a series of questions to help identify, map and analyze the spatial components of research: How do your research subjects vary across space and time? What other factors have co-varied over time and space or may have instigated particular shifts, specifically with relation to differential power dynamics? Are there particular corridors of significance, physical features that afford or constrain movement, common community spatial references, or other interesting spatial phenomena that arise in discussions with participants or observations? What spatial referencing is available for you to display your data? This work is significant in that it not only examines spatial analysis theory in the context of educational equity research but it also explores ways to make these techniques more accessible to researchers, teachers and students.

Authors

• Graham Garlick

• Deb Morrison, University of Colorado - Boulder