Implementing Racial Equity: Collectivity, Praxis, and Struggle

• In Event: Research as Repair: Advancing Educational Justice Through the Critical Study of Policy Implementation

Abstract

In my praxis, I have opened myself up to learning, growing, and building with others to advance racial justice in higher education. To leverage my policy implementation research for institutional change, recognizing the misalignment at times between my theories of action and the actual practice that occurs in community college. Over the last few years, I have shifted my approach as a researcher and committed myself to working in solidarity with colleagues, struggling alongside equity advocates as implementation unfolds, and moving from scholarly inquiry to instigation. And from this awareness and acknowledgment; taking action to do better, be better, and actively serve as a lever for building just and equitable institutions.
This paper builds on a three-year Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) supporting 17 community colleges in implementing race-conscious student equity plans. These plans are state-mandated requiring individual colleges to identify equity gaps for specific student groups, establish goals to mitigate gaps, and share out action strategies to achieve those goals. RPPs, as described by Villavicencio et al., are “are collaborative approaches that bring practitioners and researchers together to tackle specific problems of practice in ways that are relevant and beneficial to those in the community” (p. 254). These collaborations between practitioners and researchers are critical to shifting policy efforts intents into lived practice that serves students experience racial inequities. (Farrell et al., 2022; Tanksely & Estrada, 2022; Villavicencio et al., 2023). As our RPP commenced, by coincidence or fate, I began to read the writings of Mariame Kaba (2021; 2023). As I turned the pages, every paragraph was a reminder of what was missing from my approach; where my implementation research, practice, and writing felt ineffective or isolated from the realities on campus. Kaba’s words reshaped my thoughts on research and influencing institutional change, when I read, “When something can’t be fixed, then the question is what can we build instead?” She responded, “The answer is collectives. Only building power among those most marginalized in society holds the possibility of radical transformation.” Meshing these ideas and my own praxis meant that I needed to rethink how I conducted implementation research, the relationships I held with institutional actors, and the utility of the results stemming from my work.
This paper details the process of building our Equity Collective RPP as well as connecting the tools available for equity advocates to prompt racialized organizational change. Categorized into readiness, implementation, and sustainment, we describe the ways that we have worked within the Collective to advance racial equity efforts over the last few years (Kezar, 2014). Our focus has been on building solidarity, mapping the organizational terrain, advocating for institutional commitments that mitigate racialized equity labor, and carrying out racial equity work as collective action, not individual responsibility. As we highlight the work of the Equity Collective-RPP, this writing is an attempt to be publicly useful and to clearly share what we’ve done, what we’ve learned, and what others can take away from our implementation as a form of collectivity, praxis, and struggle.

Authors

• Eric R. Felix, San Diego State University

• Leslie Gomez, San Diego State University