Critical Policy Analysis as Community-Engaged Research: How Education Scholars Are Enacting Democracy in Multiple Contexts

• In Event: 34.079 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 34.079-9 - Diversifying Methodologies

Abstract

Scholars who use critical policy analysis (CPA) understand it to be a theory and method to uncover whether policies perpetuate imbalances in power. However, CPA scholars typically examine policies from a distance. CPA holds potential to be a more democratic research method that bridges theory to practice. Then, CPA becomes active advocacy, rather than passive scholarship, where scholars are working alongside communities to actually do critical policy work on the ground. We present a subset of data from a larger study that asked educational policy scholars why and how CPA informs their work, and what they consider to be key objectives of this approach. We focus on how these scholars considered community-engaged scholarship to be an important element of CPA.

Authors

• Anjale DeVawn Welton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Katherine Cumings Mansfield, Virginia Commonwealth University