Community-Based Research: Youth, Families, and Community Leaders Transforming Critical Nodes of Educational Access (Poster 2)

• In Event: Mapping the Landscape of Improvement Research: Representing Diverse Approaches Using a Common Grammar

Abstract

Purpose

This poster uses our study of community-led efforts to transform critical nodes of educational access to represent community-based research as a formal approach to improvement research in education.

Perspective

Community-Based Research in Education (CBRE) has roots in and intellectual resonances with practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), action research/YPAR (Cahill, 2007; Caraballo et al., 2017), research-practice partnerships (Coburn & Penuel, 2016), participatory-design (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), Freirean critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), and indigenous epistemologies (Smith, 2021). It engages youth and families through communities of inquiry, taking seriously the epistemic privilege (Moya, 2002) and multiple ways of knowing and being of those impacted by educational inequities, especially along intersectional axes of race, class, gender/sexuality, (dis)ability, language, and immigration status. Mapping the improvement space involves inviting families to interrogate their educational conditions and develop research questions derived from their lived experiences. The community of inquiry will often prefigure alternative educational arrangements more conducive to their own flourishing. Iterating and measuring thus involves testing specific interventions not by the metrics of those in power, but rather by the desires and criteria of the community members themselves, enhancing their individual and collective self-determination. Finally, spreading and sustaining improvement focuses on cultivating local intellectual commons, ever-expanding networks of care and support, and participation in larger social movements directed toward educational justice.

Modes of Inquiry

We look across nested inquiries within our long-term partnership – a multilingual and multiethnic research collective composed of families, youth, leaders and university-based researchers – to illustrate how CBRE can improve educational access and reimagine relationships between schools and communities.

Data Sources

Data sources include: fieldnotes of community events, transcripts from inquiry meetings, artifacts (photos, school documents, workshop slides, collective writings).


Findings:

Building the foundational conditions: We have co-constructed our research agenda through recursive practices for consensus-building and group norms that presume equality as a grounding premise, ensure research benefits the community, and that findings are made public in transparent, creative, and action-oriented ways (Authors, 2015)

Mapping the improvement space: Our collective used photovoice, testimonios, and collective analysis of documents to surface barriers in the education system alongside community strengths. Specific priorities are distilled through culturally and linguistically inclusive meetings.

Identifying a theory of (and ideas for) improvement: CBRE’s theory of improvement is that those most directly impacted by an inequity need to be at the forefront of both identifying problems and fostering change.

Iterating and measuring: The collective has engaged in numerous cycles of improvement, for example through workshops demystifying college access regardless of immigration status or by identifying pathways for parent-led school partnerships. Community priorities include but go beyond discrete skills (e.g. the college essay) to interrogating issues of power in higher education and providing opportunities for students to navigate post-secondary life on their own terms.

Spreading and sustaining improvement: Engaging in creative forms of intellectual activism, such as a participatory documentary, workshops for other families, mentoring new generations through innovative programming, and partnering with activist organizations.

Significance

CBRE offers one powerful example of democratizing knowledge production.

Authors

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University