The Role of Positionality in Promoting Racial Equity Through a Formative Intervention Study (Poster 12)

• In Event: University-Community Engagement as a Strategy for Dismantling Racial Injustice and Co-Constructing Educational Possibilities

Abstract

This poster examines a formative intervention aimed to foster a compassionate kindergarten in an urban neighborhood in Finland. University and community partners, including a Somalian-born staff member (co-author), established a collaborative research-practice-partnership to address the needs of the Somali speaking families who are minoritized in Finland but formed the largest ethnic group in the kindergarten under study. The staff member’s job in the kindergarten was to broker between the staff and the Somali-speaking parents. The university partners were predominantly white. The aim of this methodological study is to advance understanding of positionality in research-practice-partnerships that seek to promote and examine racial equity in educational settings.

The research began with a theoretical model of a compassionate kindergarten based on a culture of compassion perspective (Author1 et al., 2018). This perspective allows for examining the foundations that the practices of an educational organization create for compassionate and caring actions among the kindergarten community. A central tenet of this perspective is the commitment to promoting equity through compassion, which is understood as a social phenomenon that “shapes and is shaped by conditions of inequality and coercion extending to the notion of social justice and solidarity” (Fotaki, 2015, p. 200).

The data come from a series of Change Laboratory sessions (Engeström, 2008) conducted with the staff of a Finnish kindergarten. Change laboratory is a formative intervention, characterized by a collective effort to question and analyze the existing practices, reenvision what the activities are about, and to create new tools and practices to realize the enhanced vision. This study focuses on pilot projects designed and implemented as part of the Change Laboratory sessions to foster a racial equity and culture of compassion in the kindergarten. The data include field notes and recordings of intervention sessions and interviews, which were analyzed with reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022).

The findings illuminate the crucial role of positionality for relationship building with the minoritized families. Firstly, the Somalian-born researcher/staff member helped to mediate the perspectives of the Somali parents in the intervention. Her interviews with them were shared in the Change Laboratory to urge the staff to question their practices and address everyday racism in the kindergarten. By contrast, the positionality of the white researchers became problematic regarding their attempts to gain the trust of the Somali families. Secondly, the contribution of the Somalian-born researcher/staff member was instrumental in overcoming misunderstanding, and cultural and language boundaries in the communication between the kindergarten staff and some racialized families when addressing the children’s needs. Our analysis underlines the importance of negotiating different perspectives on the children’s needs and appropriate educational support with all interested parties.

In all, this study advances a nuanced understanding of positionality and relationship building in formative interventions. The findings can be useful for avoiding misguided attempts to address the needs of minoritized families and for developing more inclusive and collaborative ways of collaboratively designing for racial equity in educational settings.

Authors

• Antti J. Rajala, University of Eastern Finland

• Nimco Noor, City of Helsinki