Expanding Utopian Methodology: Possibilities and Challenges of Cultivating Anti-Racist and Equitable Higher Education

• In Event: Leveraging Cultural Historical Activity Theory in Higher Education to Re-Mediate the University

Abstract

Introduction
The current political and legal violence toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in K-12 and higher education necessitate an utopian methodology to relay, resist, reimagine and redesign anti-racist, inclusive, and equitable spaces for all, especially diverse students with and without disabilities from marginalized communities at higher education. This paper examines the possibilities and challenges of employing a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) theory-informed utopian methodology by analyzing two case studies, an action research in Teaching for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (TIDE) Student Association at a public university, Texas and an implementation of Learning Lab, inclusive systemic design process in a rural high school serving American Indian students in Wisconsin for the cultivation of anti-racist, inclusive, and equitable education with the following questions.

1. How and to what extent were the utopian methodological principles operated and enacted in TIDE and Learning Lab?
2. What are the possibilities and challenges in the process of enacting utopian methodologies in K-12 and higher education systems?

Theoretical Framework
Grounded in a Marxist historical materialist philosophy, CHAT is a praxis-oriented theoretical framework which posits that the collective and collaborative analysis of historical and situated contradictions and developing situated solutions led and owned by local stakeholders can facilitate collective agency and systemic transformation in complex activity systems. Formative intervention methodology has evolved in CHAT to facilitate ecologically valid and transformative systemic transformations. Formative interventions follow a cycle of expansive learning actions (forming teams, questioning, analyzing, modeling, examining the new model, planning for implementation, reflecting on the design process, actual implementation, and consolidating/sustaining the new model). In the present case studies, we utilized formative intervention with a utopian methodology (Levitas, 2013). Levitas proposed reconstitution of society with three modes of the utopian method: archaeological, ontological, and architectural.

Methods and Data Sources
In both case studies, we employed constant comparison with inductive and deductive coding for the analysis of the data (e.g., meeting memos, mediating artifacts, interview transcripts, etc.). Case study one examines two years of collaborative action research with first generation undergraduate students of color in TIDE Student Association at a historically and predominantly White university. Case study two investigates a four-year long university-school-community partnership on the construction of systemic transformational systems and practices by disrupting the historical racialization of disability and constructing equitable systems for educational equity.

Findings
Findings indicate that successes are the onto-epistemological ideological becoming of the participant students in case study one and construction of solutions and implementation committees for the enactment of equitable systems in case study two. However, multilayered challenges occurred at the macro-meso-micro levels, such as anti-DEI policies, color-evasive, raciolinguistic, neoliberal, and meritocracy ideologies, lack of institutional supports, lack of interest and resources, and biases and taboo topics.

Scholarly Significance
The presentation of these two case studies will provide significant implications about how to Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal by demonstrating how to (re)design and enact CHAT-inspired utopian methodology for the cultivation of anti-racist and equitable policies, systems, pedagogies, and practices in higher education.

Authors

• Heeok Jeong, Stephen F. Austin State University

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison