Community Activism and Advocacy

• In Event: Maximizing the Policy Relevance of Research for School Improvement

Abstract

This presentation explains community advocacy with the case of Communicating School Redesign, which is the implementation of Act 77, a Vermont state policy. This case is an example of how policy can be enacted with public values. Researchers, community groups, and intermediary organizations collaboratively created structures to empower the inclusion of local voices, and active, shared participation, in the shaping of flexible pathways for high school completion. Up for Learning, an intermediary organization providing technical support, promoted the development of youth-adult partnerships across the state to lead school reform efforts for this state policy. The authors share examples of how youth-adult partnerships within different school contexts facilitated community organization efforts to understand how to implement this policy through wide, inclusive dialogue and several other locally-based communication techniques and structures.

Grassroots activism or advocacy in education can be a powerful way to both shape public opinion and put pressure on educational institutions to ensure that their enactment of policy is aligned with public values. This type of organizing is typically defined as members of a community within a particular field—be it residential, institutional, or virtual—taking sustained action around collectively-defined issues of concern (Christens & Speer, 2015). The focus of these collective efforts is frequently on change, and its strategies may take a variety of forms, including protest or civil disobedience, lobbying, or mobilized engagement in public forums such as school board meetings, traditional or social media, or community hearings (Alinsky, 1970; Ishimaru, Rajendran, Nolan & Bang, 2018; Mapp & Warren, 2011; Welton & Freelon, 2018).

Christens and Speer (2015) argue that community organizing is bound together by several elements that include: (a) assessment/relationship development; (b) participatory research; (c) action or mobilization; and (d) evaluation and/or reflection. In this chapter, we present the work of UP for Learning—an organization dedicated to providing technical assistance to support the expansion of youth-adult partnership—as a case of how community organizing led by youth used educational research to stimulate community dialogue on the purpose of schooling and to influence the implementation of state policy. The theory of action of this grassroots strategy centers on student-facilitated dialogues between community members and peers about the goals of school, grounded in research on personalized learning.

As the facilitators of these dialogues, students are engaged with research on education and communication strategies to introduce the community to new possibilities for structuring learning while engaging existing mindsets and beliefs about education, personalized learning, and student capacity for driving their own educational decisions. The case highlights the value of student organizers as strategic partners for research dissemination while emphasizing the varied potential sites of engagement for researchers in an organizing effort.

Authors

• Catharine Biddle, University of Maine

• Dana L. Mitra, Pennsylvania State University