Equity Expansive Critical Collaborative Inquiry: Artifacts, Processes, Participants, and Innovations

• In Event: Resurgence of Backlash to Redressing Pernicious and Persistent Inequities: Navigating Race, Class, and Systemic Equity-Driven Improvement

Abstract

The Midwest & Plains Equity Center’s associate director will detail the center’s critical collaborative inquiry process (Great Lakes Equity Center 2018; Skelton et al., 2021). More specifically, she will describe processes and tools developed to collect, analyze, and frame data in ways that illuminate complex understandings and evoke innovative approaches to addressing education inequities. This requires and supports local use and multiple sources of data on how children and families are served and with what outcomes to inform future system and school improvement, including professional development and strategic planning (Skelton et al., 2021).

The critical collaborative inquiry process includes four repeating steps that include and condense the steps of expansive learning cycles that Thorius introduced in the first paper of the session: (1) Identifying indicators of inequities (2) Analyzing context: People, policies, and practices; (3) Creating strategies and taking action; and (4) Monitoring actions and evaluating impact.

Next, Kyser will present the center’s most robust tools for engaging in critical collaborative inquiry cycles: the Equity Context Analysis Process (ECAP). The ECAP is facilitated by center staff with education agency partners in three phases (i.e., planning and preparation, data collection, and rubric analysis co-interpretation and setting equity priorities). Specifically, the ECAP:
1. Includes comprehensive tools for data collection and analysis;
2. Engages multiple stakeholders in the coordination, collection, and interpretation of these data;
3. Centers the assessment of equitable practices;
4. Is designed to identity opportunities for growth related to advancing educational equity systems-wide;
5. Is organized around domains that have been linked explicitly to those policies, practices, belief systems, and relationships that contribute to disproportionality, as well domains for systemic change derived in part from the Systemic Change Framework (Kozleski & Thorius, 2014).

Author

• Tiffany S. Kyser, Indiana University - Indianapolis