Implications for Research and Practice

• In Event: Dismantling Racial Injustice: Contributions of the Science of Learning and Development

Abstract

This panel will integrate the big ideas from across the previous four panels and discuss the implications of these big ideas for how researchers ideally working in tandem with community efforts can make these complex ideas visible and accessible to large audiences and stakeholders. Such audiences include the broad public through media outreach, educational practitioners, civic leaders, and policy makers through relationship building. Such outreach would aim to support the public and stakeholders in resisting simplistic solutions to complex problems, and in terms of systemic racism problems that not only have longevity and persistence but also are subject to deep political and emotionally laden divisions. These principles of human learning and development apply as much to adults who assume deeply divisive points of view as to how we seek to support children and adolescents in wrestling with our social and political complexities with empathy and ethics. Specifically, this panel will discuss implications of this conception of human learning and development for the organization and aims of schooling (including teaching, assessment and teacher learning and development); for evidence and strategies for influencing policy makers with regard to education, to health and well-being, broader supports for youth development beyond schooling; and for the work of communities in sustaining the roles of community organizations and families in the wholistic development of youth. We believe that efforts to dismantle racism as beliefs and as systems require a broad ecological focus on the multiple levers of change (within individuals, within groups, within systems) that should be informed by what we understand about the beauty and complexities of human learning and development. No matter how complex it all sounds, it is real.

Authors

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University

• David M. Osher, American Institutes for Research

• Vivian L. Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania