Critical Foundations: Building a shared understanding and collective practice for justice-oriented education reform

• In Event: Transformation from Within and Outside of Schools: Residency-based preparation for education professionals supporting systemic change

Abstract

Intersecting systems, structures, policies, and practices within and outside schools have woven together throughout history to produce disparate educational experiences and outcomes. We see evidence of this through the school-prison nexus, where disciplinary practices within schools produce racialized disparities, heightening minoritized communities’ engagement with policing and the carceral system (Muñiz, 2021). Evidence of the multidirectional interaction surfaces in policies that limit identity-affirming curricula for all students through CRT bans, book bans, and divisive concepts laws (Welton et al., 2023). We assert that actors within and outside of schools can dismantle these oppressive forces and create a justice-oriented landscape to produce equitable educational experiences and outcomes for all youth. In this paper, I examine the conceptual framework that undergirds the graduate program, highlighting the interdisciplinary learning facilitated when aspiring educators are prepared alongside aspiring policy actors.

Vital to preparing aspiring education policy actors, advocates, and teachers is developing a critical understanding of the history of inequity in US schools and its contemporary legacy. By interrogating the policies, systems, and structures of oppression that fabricate the educational inequity and injustice present in today’s society, we can deconstruct them and reimagine a more just and equitable future. In the graduate program, we engage students in an iterative cycle of critical reflection to develop their critical consciousness (Freire, 1972). Embedded in the introductory course that all students take together, the cycle of knowledge, reflection, interrogation, application, and action supports students as they define the justice-oriented actions they seek to enact in education. In this paper I analyze the key elements of the course structure and students’ assignments to examine how students develop an understanding of racism and inequity in education and employ critical analysis skills to evaluate real-world education policies and practices along the continuum of moving education away from or towards justice.

In the foundational course, students explore theoretical frameworks that seek to explain racism and inequity in education. Students also reflect on their intersectional identity, experiences of relative marginalization and relative privilege in educational settings, and how their identity and experiences co-construct their worldview, views of others, and conceptualization of educational justice. Throughout the course, students interrogate policies and practices that create inequity in schools through the theoretical frameworks that anchor the course. For example, in one class session, students examine the history of racialized tracking in public schools through theories that center color evasiveness (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Collins, 2009) and position white supremacy as the underlying force of oppression (Leonardo, 2009). Students also apply theoretical frameworks in the analysis of current policies and practices, activating their justice imagination to identify actions to move schools towards educational justice. These cross-concentration generative learning processes challenge the erasure of teacher voice in policy making (Watkins, 2022) and the school-community disconnect that can accompany educational advocacy movements.

Author

• Sabrina L. Wesley-Nero, Georgetown University