Across, Among, and Together: What Will Meaningful Stakeholder Collaboration Take?

• In Event: Thinking and Feeling With Justice: Destabilizing Voice and Practice in Transition

Abstract

How do researchers engage in “deliberate collaboration with organizational stakeholders” (p. 1; Walker, Croft, & Purdy, 2019)? This paper addresses this question in the context of attempting to research, and thus offer solutions to, a decades-old, societal and educational problem: There is a persistent lack of opportunities for people identified as “disabled” to learn, work, and be in community after leaving high school. Organizational stakeholders (e.g., secondary teachers, transition specialists, and school counselors, college counselors and advisors, vocational rehabilitation counselors, and service providers from a variety of community-based organizations) often act in response to federal and state policies and use or contribute to practices that are developed without a depth of input from people and communities for whom these are intended (Kozleski et al., 2008). Therefore, the first aim of this paper is to argue an expansion of the definition of stakeholder as addressed in the AERA call for proposals, in support of expanding who is included and demonstrating that the “power and possibilities” (p.1, Walker et al., 2019) for public good are greater when the public (i.e., young adults identified with disabilities and their families) is included alongside researchers and members of organizations. The second aim of the paper is to contextualize the practices of researchers and stakeholders. The AERA call, while alluding to historical problems of racial inequity, could be viewed as evasive (Annamma, Jackson, & Morrison, 2017) of the complexities of racism, ableism, heterosexism, and other ideologies of exclusion that embed collaboration and dialogue about educational problems. Despite an extensive, peer-reviewed knowledge base detailing the importance of identity, culture, and history in understanding the problems of transition as a results-oriented process (i.e., high school graduation, paid employment, enrollment in postsecondary education), scholarship in support of developing specific transition educational practices has largely focused on the individual with a disability as a unit of analysis, disability as deficit, and a decontextualized field of practice, paying too little attention to this extant work. Transition researchers, often to the exclusion of stakeholder collaborations, have focused their work on establishing a set of evidence-based practices that predict postsecondary success (Mazzotti, et al., 2015; Test et al, 2009a, 2009b). The third aim of the paper is to offer a postsecondary transition-focused theoretical framework for collaboration among stakeholders that redistributes power among stakeholders and changes the cultures of practice to be more equity-focused. This framework will draw on an interdisciplinary critical theories, making connections with the special education transition knowledge base, to outline implications of increased, equitable collaboration among researchers, organizational, and community stakeholders in both research and practice.

Author

• Audrey A. Trainor, New York University