Designing and Enacting Solidarity-Driven Forms of Partnership and Decision Making

• In Event: Beyond the Engagement Paradigm: Family and Community Leadership in Co-Designing Educational Justice

Abstract

All family-school partnerships, but especially those that seek to center marginalized individuals, families, and communities, are steeped with the legacies of accumulated power, historical inequities, and unjust relationships (e.g., Author & Vossoughi, 2016; Vakil et al., 2016). Further, while education leaders are often tasked with addressing inequities and disparities faced by students and families of color, the field and programs that prepare leaders offer a dearth of models and practices for fostering transformative collaborations. Our aim in this paper is to offer leadership practices focused on partnering and decision-making with families and communities towards redesigning education systems for educational justice. Specifically, we introduce solidarity-driven codesign as a transformative practice that blends disciplinary and methodological orientations in order to address historicized relations of families with schools, asymmetrical power, and assimilative processes of schooling. In this paper, we contextualize this practice in our own partnership process as we (leaders of a national project) shifted from partnerships with 10 Collaborative communities nationally in phase one of the project to deeper work with four of these sites in phase two.

We anticipated that a conventional subaward selection process could foster competition towards singular, predefined aims even as we sought to foster collaboration towards multiple approaches and forms of changemaking. Such a model would reflect leadership practices that continue to locate decision-making power within hierarchical structures. In line with our commitments, we “leaned in” to this tension by developing a process that would recognize these power dynamics and disrupt traditional decision-making.

We used knowledge and interaction analysis (e.g., diSessa, Levin, & Brown, 2015) across our data set of community design circles that were conducted by project 10 Collaboratives to highlight stories and experiences that point to expansive forms of leadership. Community design circles are empowering in-depth, reciprocal working groups with diverse stakeholders that aim to identify issues and collectively design solutions for systemic transformation. These design circles were audio/video recorded and transcribed producing 36 transcripts. We also conducted interviews with facilitators before and after design circles to better understand multiple forms of community wellbeing and education justice and how they were manifesting in local context through codesign. This preliminary analysis was used as a framework for developing community-defined practices for partnership and decision-making. Through conversations with each of our Collaboratives, we iteratively refined and leveraged this framework to collectively identify four phase 2 sites.

In this paper, we offer these five strategies and solidarity-driven codesign as practices for enacting equitable forms of leadership. We provide vignettes from the data, including stories, data visuals, and images to ground these practices in the “lived experiences of educators, students, and parents across multiple contexts.” These strategies include,

1. Involving families and communities as co-designers of their own futures,
2. Engaging multiple identities and perspectives in interactions and relationships,
3. Sustaining reflexive and iterative learning processes over time,
4. Engaging current and ongoing tension points, and
5. Imagining and enact change.

We see implications for increasing equity-oriented practices in education leadership preparation programs, school-community collaborations, and research-practice partnerships.

Authors

• Charlene Montano Nolan, Western Washington University

• Aditi Rajendran, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Ann M. Ishimaru, University of Washington

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences