Community-Engaged Research Through the Lens of School Closures: Opportunities, Challenges, Contributions, and Lingering Questions

• In Event: 63.034 - Research for Justice: Challenging Discriminatory Policing, School Closures, and Youth Unemployment

Abstract

This co-authored paper by a group of activists and scholar-activists in Baltimore, New York City and Philadelphia develops reflections from their local contestations of school closures. They first crafted their community-engaged scholarship (CES) framework at a gathering of activists, scholars, teachers and parents that also included representation from Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington DC, and Boston who had gathered to examine the current state of research on school closures, develop a research agenda linked to community organizing, and build a regional scale network to collaborate on shared projects.

Such research collaborations began forming in the 1960s (Stoecker, 2001) and continue under many names:, action research, community-based/driven research, community-engaged scholarship, participatory action research, among others. CES aims to “produc(e) knowledge that can be used by community partners to contribute to positive social change and the well-being of individuals, families, and communities” (Small and Uttal, 2005, p. 938), and it emphasizes social justice embedded in democratic ideals. Without discounting the variances in CES, this paper engages with underlying similarities in opportunities and challenges and shows, when done well, CES benefits a range of stakeholders and enriches research, teaching, and community-based institutions and neighborhoods (Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Peterson, 2009). Key assumptions about the efficacy of research for addressing social problem, about attending to issues of trust and power in collecting and analyzing data, about the need for flexible research designs, and about the need to co-equally value knowledge from community partners as that produced in the academy (Small & Uttal, 2005) shaped the ethical and political commitments and gave stronger epistemic warrant to research conclusions.

This paper highlights three distinctive forms of CES: participatory action research (PAR), where university and community partners collaboratively engaged in almost all aspects of the process; engaged learner research, where the researcher documented a community organizing campaign with the support of the organizers; and a grassroots listening project implemented without university partners. It also addresses questions around power differentials, race and racism, and ownership and voice.

CES is a necessary correction in the field of policy research, traditionally the terrain of technocratic experts with little or no input from aggrieved communities. Despite scant research to support the policy and widespread opposition(Conner & Cosner, 2015; de la Torre & Gwynne, 2009; Kirshner, Gaertner, & Pozzoboni, 2010; Lipman & Person, 2007; Pappas, 2012, 2015; Shiller, Jordan, & New Lens, 2015), public school closures have displaced massive numbers of low-income black and Latino students. In 2013, Chicago closed 49 public schools whose collective student body was 87% black, 11% Latino and 94% low income; Philadelphia closed 23 schools affecting a student body that was 81% black, 11% Latino, and 93% low income; and, New York City closed 22 schools whose student body was 53% black, 41% Latino, and 81% low income (Schott Foundation, 2013). The three cases show that community and youth voice can create pushback and build a knowledge and advocacy base, and thus offers promising new directions.

Authors

• Jerusha Osberg Conner, Villanova University

• Barbara Ferman, Temple University

• Liza Pappas, The New York City Independent Budget Office

• Zakiyah Ansari, Alliance for Quality Education

• Jessica Shiller, Towson University