Supporting Students with Justice-Oriented Root Cause Analysis Frameworks (Poster 7)

• In Event: Scaffolding for Local Change-Making: Innovative EdD Supports Across Contexts

Abstract

Frequently, EdD students do not sufficiently explore or accurately attribute causality in their research. In particular, they tend to struggle to articulate the relationships among the many causal influences at play. For example, a student might identify a school’s lack of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) as a cause of low literacy performance, but not articulate the reasons behind the school’s choice not to include CRP (values associated with Whiteness/White supremacy and the exclusion of racialized groups from the production and dissemination of knowledge (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023). Additionally, while students/school leaders might assign causality to specific forms of injustice, they do not often interrogate their own role in assigning causality and by extension uphold unjust practices.

In this presentation, presenters, guided by improvement science methodologies, synthesize a variety of pedagogical processes and curriculum supporting EdD student analysis of causality in their capstone processes and papers. In particular, presenters explore causality frameworks–such as social-ecological models WHO social determinants framework, Ecology of Educational Equity (Bronfenbrenner, 2013), WHO social determinants framework (Solar & Irwin, 2010), the 5 Why’s (Ohno, 2006), and the Social-Ecological Model of Racism & Anti-Racism (Brown & O’Connor, 2021)–that expand student understanding of influential causes. Research presented will show how these frameworks can be used to help students/school leaders construct their own theories (and frameworks) of causality.

Overall, participants will take away examples of causality frameworks that help students/leaders sufficiently explore and accurately attribute the array of causes associated with their problems of practice, especially those rooted in injustice. Participants will also learn how to center justice in the causal analysis process by a) determining the causal influences of entrenched systems of power and oppression; and b) disrupting deficit-based thinking/ideology. Finally, participants will extend emerging ideas for leadership curriculum and future scholarship around critical causality.

Authors

• Jess Weiler, Western Carolina University

• Emily E. Virtue, Western Carolina University

• Brandi N. Hinnant-Crawford, Clemson University