Finding Our "Scholar Cap": Harnessing Diversity and Working Toward Equity Through Inquiry

• In Event: 26.035 - Participatory Action Research for Institutional Change: Reconsidering Diversity Training, Access, and Retention of Historically Marginalized Populations

Abstract

Purpose
Critical Civic Inquiry Summer Institute (CCISI) brought together high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to research barriers and resources to higher education. Drawing on participatory action research (PAR) and theories of learning, CCISI aims to develop critical consciousness around educational inequities, challenge traditional ideas of who has and produces knowledge, and reframe higher education as a step toward individual and collective change rather than an endpoint in and of itself.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how CCISI can be used as a model for institutions to move beyond symbolic diversity through the positioning of students as blooming scholars (Tienda, 2013). We demonstrate how the CCISI learning environment supported shifts in students’ perspectives and actions toward issues of social justice and allowed them to re-envision themselves as scholars.

Theoretical Framework
Sociocritical literacies (Gutiérrez, 2008) bring together everyday knowledge and academic texts to foster complex understandings of social organizations that influence everyday practices. The use of inquiry to develop sociocritical literacies has generated positive outcomes around college-going practices. CCISI drew on this research to conceptualize a college pipeline in which expansion of our identities as learners and researchers was privileged. By being able to locate oneself as an actor within complex education systems, and to see oneself as a knowledge producer, students are prepared to navigate and challenge educational inequities (Gutiérrez, 2008).

Methods
CCISI participants expanded understanding of education inequities through discussion of ten academic texts, three videos, and one guest lecture. We mapped out visual representations of our educational journeys, wrote auto-ethnographies, and created protocols to interview and survey our peers, families, and teachers. We coded our data and triangulated to form claims. As part of our “action,” the group decided to create a year-round continuation to support ongoing actions proposed by the group.

Data sources
Our data sources included:
• cognitive ethnographic fieldnotes and video from 10 sessions
• audio of 20 planning/debriefing sessions
• written reflections
• 19 educational journey maps
• 9 auto-ethnographies
• 17 interviews
• 111 survey responses

Results
We documented the way in which all participants worked side-by-side to engage with rigorous academic content, discuss issues around equity, and design and implement research methods and analysis (Erickson, 2006; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). We argue these processes fostered shifts in students’ perspectives and actions as indexed by students’ incorporation of critical concepts in both formal and informal dialogue. Through counternarratives and multiple points of data, students were able to reframe their relationship to education and educational inequities.

Significance
This paper aims to produce a model for institutions to move beyond symbolic diversity. College access programs, through unexamined assumptions and/or university policies may unintentionally re-inscribe deficit-oriented curriculum, through remedial programming, which focuses on what students are lacking (Gildersleeve, 2010). The CCISI offers a model, which helps students re-imagine ways to engage in the university and scholarship, which we argue is central to students’ success. We seek to demonstrate empirically grounded tools and ways of organizing that can support programs needing and wanting to move away from gap oriented decision-making.

Authors

• Rebecca G Kaplan, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Carlos Porfirio Hipolito-Delgado, University of Colorado - Denver