Making Sense of Racial Equity: Staff Perspectives in Creative Learning Organizations

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Troubled Organizational Waters: Racial Equity/Inequity, Politics, and Change

Abstract

This study investigates how staff in creative learning organizations (CLOs) make sense of and enact racial equity through their identities and frames. CLOs—particularly those led by and for communities of color—serve as critical yet understudied spaces of resistance and imagination. This comparative case study analyzes how identities shape staff understandings of equity and their capacity for racialized changework. Findings show that staff ground their work and equity commitments in personal and social aspects of identity such as race or gender. By centering micro-level dynamics of identity and framing, this paper highlights how individual sensemaking can either constrain or enable organizational transformation. It contributes to research on racialized organizations and educational change in informal learning contexts.

Author

• Ashlyn Salvage, University of Pittsburgh