Situating Connective and Productive Disciplinary Engagement (CPDE) Within Other Equity-Oriented Scholarship: A Systematic Review (Poster 1)

• In Event: Connective and Productive Disciplinary Engagement: Key Concepts, Applications, Developments, and New Directions

Abstract

Objective:
As this session demonstrates, CPDE extends Engle and Conant’s (2002) framework for PDE in important ways to confront issues of equity. Agarwal and Sengupta-Irving (2019), however, were not the first to do so. Drawing on a systematic review, our paper situates CPDE—and the work it inspired—within a broader literature on the ways that PDE and expansive framing (Engle et al., 2012) can serve social justice aims. Our review helps to pinpoint the specific affordances CPDE offers and the synergies it holds with other equity-oriented scholarship.

Methods:
We used Google Scholar to identify 2714 publications (as of June 2022) referencing Engle’s frameworks for PDE and expansive framing. Two team members independently coded each publication as unpublished/irrelevant/inaccessible (450), not in English (287), passing reference (800), supporting reference (803), not peer-reviewed (177), or include (197), with an interrater agreement of 78% (Cohen’s kappa = .72). Publications marked for inclusion engaged substantively with PDE, expansive framing, or both. In a second round, two reviewers assessed whether the publication pursued an equity focus; in total, 32 publications met that criterion and formed the basis of our review.

Findings:
We identified four strands of equity-oriented scholarship (Table 1). Strand 1 (n = 12) used the PDE principles to aid and empower students from historically marginalized communities (e.g., Hand et al., 2012), but did not explore whether all students benefited equally from these learning opportunities, nor did they question what counts as “disciplinary.” Strand 2 (n = 7) built on Engle et al. (2014) to examine which students were contributing to disciplinary discussions and why (e.g., Langer-Osuna, 2016). These studies identified factors that either undermine or support equitable access to PDE, offering a corrective to work that tracks engagement only at the group level.
Studies in Strand 3 (n = 5) sought to widen PDE to include cultural and community knowledge (e.g., Thompson, 2014). Agarwal and Sengupta-Irving’s (2019) work on CPDE (and the work it inspired) fell into this category. Finally, Strand 4 (n = 8) drew on Engle’s other central contribution—expansive framing—to define diverse contexts to which students might transfer and apply their learning (e.g., Doucette et al., 2022). As CPDE did, these studies expanded the nature of disciplinary knowledge but were more explicit in defining transfer contexts that derived from students’ lived experience with oppression, conflict, and activism.

Orientation and Conclusions:
Embracing the situative and critical traditions that drove Engle and Conant (2002), Agarwal and Sengupta-Irving (2019), and others, our review sidestepped traditional expectations that it focus on effect sizes from ostensibly “rigorous” controlled studies, at the expense of important theoretical, interpretive, and practical advances. That orientation led to new insights about the complex ways that equity-focused learning might transfer to both non-dominant and dominant contexts—including the standardized tests that prevent many minoritized learners from accessing valued opportunities for education and employment. Engle et al.’s (2012) notion of expansive framing offers a way to design specifically for transfer and, for that reason, could inform ongoing scholarship on CPDE.

Authors

• Eric B. Freedman, University of Iowa

• Daniel T. Hickey, Indiana University

• Grant T. Chartrand, Indiana University

• Tripp Harris, University of South Carolina

• Bianca Schamberger, University of Iowa

• Morgan Qianxu Luo, Indiana University