Race-Conscious Systemic Design to Address Overrepresentation of Students of Color With and Without Disabilities in School Discipline

• In Event: Toward Equity-Oriented Special Education Through Empowering Minoritized Communities

Abstract

Objective
Overrepresentation of students of color with and without disabilities in school discipline is a miner’s canary that reveals a pernicious system of exclusion (Waitoller et al., 2010). As a situated issue, addressing racial disproportionality in school discipline requires developing localized solutions in response to local racial politics and the school community’s needs and goals (Bal, 2018). To develop locally meaningful solutions, Learning Lab, a community-driven systemic design intervention, was implemented at an urban Middle School. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Learning Lab amplified school stakeholders’ voices and sociopolitical imaginations to design a new support system for addressing the overrepresentation of students of color with and without disabilities in school discipline.

Theoretical Framework
Learning Lab is a community-driven problem-solving process to “address educational inequities, resulting from the historical legacies of settler colonialism, racism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness and promote social transformation (Ko et al., 2022, p. 6). Learning Lab aims to leverage local stakeholders’ lived experiences, voices, and future imaginations to envision an equity-oriented school system (Bal 2011, 2018). In Learning Lab, school stakeholders critically interrogate systemic challenges and design new solutions for the systemic transformation.

Methods and Data
This study used a critical design-based research methodology to facilitate and document a transformative systemic design process led by school stakeholders. Two school administrators, four general and special education teachers, two parents of color, and one support staff of color participated in the systemic design. Learning Lab sessions began in November 2021 and ended in May 2022. Data resources are video recorded eight Lab sessions and artifacts (e.g., school discipline policy). In the first round of coding, I took an inductive approach with multiple coding strategies (e.g., in vivo coding and process coding (Saldaña, 2016). A pre-formulated analytic framework informed by expansive learning theory (Engeström, 2016) was employed to thematically categorize coded data.

Findings
Learning Lab started by developing a historicized, intersectional, and spatial lens, indispensable to understanding “the structural and historical underpinnings of the problem” (Cavendish et al., 2014, p. 34). Discipline data disaggregated by race, gender, and disability status, news articles, and geographic information system (GIS) maps (e.g., school zoning, residential patterns by race and household income) were utilized as mediating artifacts to develop a situated understanding of how the local racial history and color-neutral use of data are indexed in existing policies and practices. With a situated, nuanced lens, members engaged in systemic analysis to identify systemic breakdowns. Deficit-oriented ideologies, lack of preventive and restorative strategies, disconnected relationships with families, and lack of special education legal literacy were identified as systemic challenges. Race-conscious, equity-focused guiding questions were used to facilitate Lab members’ systemic design activities. Members collaboratively designed new solutions to amplify the community’s inputs and cultural practices, dispel distrust, and cultivate a culturally affirming, inclusive classroom ecology.

Significance
Learning Lab can be a transformative policy-making tool to empower school stakeholders’ multiple voices and build authentic, intersectional alliances beyond superficial participation in the local policy-forming process.

Author

• Dosun Ko, Santa Clara University
  Presenting Author