Sociology IN Education: Expanding the Boundaries of our Sociological Imagination to Address Inequity

• In Event: Imaginative Sociology: Disrupting Epistemic Apartheid to Transform Education and Society

Abstract

C. Wright Mills (1959) introduced the notion of a sociological imagination to direct the practice of sociological inquiry away from both abstract theorizing and the impulse to simply generate data on social life with no connection to the social context that helped produce what sociologists saw in front of them. Mills described the sociological imagination as the ability to understand how the interactions between individual biographies and history shape society. This imagination not only held promise to improve the discipline of sociology, but to improve our lives as individuals and as a society. It promised a way to understand the world politically and seek to change it. While Mills did not write explicitly about how the sociological imagination can be used for an analysis of racial inequality in education, scholars both before (e.g. Du Bois, 1899) and after him (e.g. Crowley, 2019) understood that addressing racial inequality in education was impossible without an understanding of the structural nature of white supremacy and its historic creation.

This paper details how the extension of the sociological imagination into an applied research setting can yield new ways of designing systemic solutions to inequality in education. While sociologists of education have long observed racial, ethnic, and linguistic inequality in education, their inquiries have less often led them to address inequity within the instructional core- the interaction between students, teachers, and instructional materials (Elmore, 2004). As a sociologist at a national education nonprofit that focuses on improving instructional experiences for Black and/or multilingual students, I use my experience developing an instructional practice framework as a case study to explore the value that the sociological imagination can have in applied settings where we rarely find sociologists due to normed - and somewhat outdated - ways of conceptualizing career paths and the boundaries of sociological inquiry. The centering of how individuals and structures interact to shape classroom experiences with attention to cross-disciplinary connections and real world context in the development of the framework has been a key reason for its rapid and widespread takeup over the past year.

The e2 Instructional Practice FrameworkTM was developed to redefine high quality instruction and address three realities: 1) our public education system does not yet realize the potential of all students, 2) system leaders face challenges in creating sustainable, meaningful changes in instruction and 3) those two realities are intrinsically intertwined. This suite of tools grounded in the framework bring together often disconnected strands of research across disciplines on instructional practice and practitioner knowledge to support leaders in building a shared vision, understanding the current state of teaching and learning in their schools relative to that vision, and taking action to further deliver on the promise of equitable instruction for students. It fundamentally disrupts the idea that educational leaders and teachers are passive actors in an inequitable system and, returning to the sociological imagination, asks them to engage with how their individual actions might address the structural inequality they see within their classrooms and schools.

Author

• Diana Cordova-Cobo, Student Achievement Partners