A Co-Curricular Model for Supporting the Next Generation of Equity-Focused Educational Psychologists

• In Event: Division C Vice Presidential Session: Calling in Educational Psychology Researchers, Continued: Supporting Culturally Responsive and Critical Research Journeys

Abstract

Objective. This paper provides direction for how educational psychology students can emerge from their graduate programs positioned to disrupt barriers to social progress in society—specifically by using a cocurricular approach: RiSE UP (Research in partnership with Socially and Economically Underrepresented Populations).

Conceptualizing the Notion of Change Agent in Educational Psychology. Historically, scholarly critiques of the relationship between psychological science and society have focused on systems-level interrogations of disciplinary customs, frameworks, and methods (Arnett, 2008; Fowers & Richardson, 1996; Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, & Misra, 1996; Graham, 1992). Although essential for providing guidance on how psychology could, ought, and needs to shift, these critiques offer little guidance right now to psychology students who are already agents of change. These students need guidance on how to strategically navigate the discipline’s often problematic, antiquated, and inequitable power structures (Prilleltensky, 1997).

We situate the notion of a “change agent” within the historical landscape of social movements in the United States. Concepts of serving the community, serving humanity, and serving one another are then introduced to draw parallels between values that underlie the actions of past social leaders and those underlying the customs and practices observed today in prospective educational psychology students with communally oriented values. This context sets the stage for the proposition that an equity-focused educational psychologist is not a brand of scholar our discipline needs to “make” but a brand of scholar our discipline needs to attract and invest in.
Toward an Equity-Focused Training Infrastructure. The RiSE UP model represents a compilation of design principles from psychological science and related disciplines, with the goal of helping change agents create a personalized roadmap for conducting community engaged scholarship.

Design Principle 1: Change agents are encouraged to exercise collective agency in actively constructing culturally affirming training spaces to supplement the mainstream learning opportunities provided in a psychology program’s course of study or curriculum.

Design Principle 2: Change agents can also use culturally informed standards of success to develop a clear vision of what counts as impact for them.

Design Principle 3: By incorporating narratives, conversations, observations, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts gleaned from the voices and experiences of everyday people, change agents can identify untranslated stories from the public that inform their conceptual perspectives.

Design Principle 4: Change agents should push one another to carefully define the communities they wish to serve.

Design Principle 5: It is important to know about historical figures who, through such artistic expressions as poems, photographs, and public service announcements, found ways to derive a sense of joy—resisting the premise that revolution can come only in the forms of sadness, frustration, seriousness, and destruction.

Significance. Applying these design principles, change agents can develop sensemaking tools that position them to: (1) access (or remain in touch with) their why, (2) assert the rightful presence of cultural perspectives in psychology research and services, and (3) rise bove oppressive professional training experiences and begin to reimagine what should constitute a reputable psychology program and redetermine for whom it is designed.

Authors

• DeLeon Gray, North Carolina State University

• Joanna N. Ali, North Carolina State University