Research Confronts Equity and Social Justice–Building the Emerging Field of Collaborative,Community Engaged Education Research: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Keywords

social activism urban action research activist scholarship communitiy partnerships

In an era of growing inequality and persistent racial disparities in education, as well as the increasing dominance of neoliberal policy agendas, education researchers face growing calls for their scholarship to directly confront equity and social justice in education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006). The 2012 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), for example, had as its theme “To Know is Not Enough” (Ball, 2012) and charged education researchers to increase the relevance of scholarship to improving educational practice and equity and justice in education. Meanwhile, in the published version of his 2013 AERA Presidential Address, William Tierney (2013) argues that producing high quality research, while essential, is insufficient to addressing poverty and educational inequality and calls for scholars to engage directly with those they study.

Researchers who conduct collaborative, community engaged scholarship (CCES) offer a powerful answer to this call by partnering with community and education activists to create knowledge in direct support of equity-oriented change agendas. In CCES, scholars and a variety of community change agents work together to identify research questions, design appropriate research, collect and analyze data, produce research reports, and design educational interventions and policy initiatives based upon research findings. This kind of research addresses educational failure and inequities as profound issues of racial and social justice for children, families, and communities (Warren, 2014). It challenges the hierarchy of expertise and the hegemony of academic knowledge (Smith, 1999), appreciating the value of multiple forms of knowledge. It recognizes that communities have a need for and indeed a “right” to research (Appadurai, 2006), and realizes the necessity of combining collaborative knowledge production with organizing efforts to build power for change (Oakes & Rogers, 2005; Renee, Oakes, Rogers, & Blasi, 2007; Torre & Fine, 2011).

This special issue includes a set of articles designed to advance the theory and practice of CCES in education research and related fields. CCES has emerged across a range of disciplines and research domains, relying upon different methodologies and ethical frameworks, including participatory action research (Brydon-Miller, 2001), youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008), action research (Greenwood & Levin, 1998; Stringer, 2009), community-based research (Strand, Cutforth, Stoecker, & Marullo, 2003), and other forms of engaged scholarship (Saltmarsh & Hartley, 2011) like community-based participatory research (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2011). In this sense, we use CCES as an umbrella term across this variety of approaches. What unites this field, and distinguishes it from other attempts to link research to practice (Coburn & Stein, 2010), is its explicit attention to researchers working in partnership with community, parent, youth, and educator groups pursuing change agendas focused on increasing equity and justice in education (Oakes & Rogers, 2005; Warren, Oh, & Tieken, 2016). We do not limit our focus to research in educational settings; we include education-related research collaborations in community settings as well (Tate, 2012; Warren, 2005).

Despite these centrally important similarities, we call this an emerging field because scholars practicing CCES typically operate separately in their diverse disciplines and methods, with little sharing of best practices in theory and method. Field building requires a collective process of clarifying theoretical premises, addressing ethical challenges, and working toward a shared set of methodological practices. There will always be a variety of ways to conduct CCES, as there are in any field, but a more united field requires the engagement of scholars in a collective discourse bound by a set of shared understandings and a stronger sense of common identity across the disciplines and practices (Hyland, 2013).

To help overcome the silos and cross-fertilize ideas in this field, this special issue brings together scholars who theorize and practice this approach to research in many diverse ways to address a set of issues confronting the emerging field. The articles emerged from a conference process organized by the Urban Research Based Action Network (URBAN) in 2015 and supported financially by a conference grant from the AERA. URBAN formed in 2012 as an intentionally cross-discipline, cross-issue learning community designed to advance the field of CCES in a variety of ways, helping scholars to build connections across silos, learn from each other, and share resources and lessons, building the capacity of scholars to conduct CCES, supporting early career scholars, advocating for institutional changes within higher education, and building collaborations with education and community activists that democratize knowledge and promote equity-oriented change.

At this conference participants identified and addressed five key issues or challenges facing CCES across disciplines that hinder the advancement of the emerging field. These issues include the following:

Community engaged scholars face the criticism from mainstream academia that their “advocacy” research is biased and fails the standard of social science rigor;

Translating justice-oriented CCES to the policy arena requires challenging the hierarchy of academic expertise while negotiating the tensions that arise between university-based activist researchers and their community-based counterparts working in political environments;

Ethical standards developed for mainstream research are inadequate, or even counter-productive, to CCES that tries to build collaborative partnerships with participants;

Institutional reward structures in academia fail to support CCES and work against expansion of the field; and

Early career scholars, and graduate students in particular, face challenges in pursuing CCES, which limits the entrance of the growth of new scholars and the growth of new scholarship in the field.

Participants at the conference formed working groups to address these issues.¹ The groups were formed to be intentionally diverse, representing a variety of disciplines and types of CCES practiced, as well as theoretical, methodological, and ethical perspectives. The groups presented drafts of papers and working ideas at the conference and engaged in lively conversation in multiple forms with the larger body, further clarifying ideas and marking out areas of agreement as well as different perspectives and emphases in the emerging field. Working groups revised their work and developed the articles that appear in this issue.

The organizers of the URBAN conference formed the editorial team for this special issue, with Warren serving as lead editor. Each of the five articles in this special issue addresses one of these challenges. The authors draw upon extant literature, their own theorizing, practice and experience across disciplines and research contexts, and the comments from colleagues in the conference process to produce these articles. Collectively the articles offer a robust argument for the powerful contributions of CCES as it seeks to combine the aims of knowledge production with social justice activism and to respond to the demands of academic and community institutions in the larger context of systemic inequities and injustices in our educational and social system. In many cases, however, the authors do not seek a singular answer or simple solutions to the questions that are raised; rather, diverse perspectives and enduring tensions can be seen to bring dynamism and vitality to this field-building enterprise.

Although CCES has a long history in education research and in other fields, it may be entering a new moment. The newly created URBAN network, for example, joins a growing number of networks established over the past 15 years and committed to advancing CCES in a variety of forms, including Imagining America, Democracy Collaborative, Campus-Community Partnerships for Health, and the international Talloires Network. In other words, scholars are looking to connect across disciplines to identify commonalities and differences, share best practices, and clarify theoretical premises, ethical challenges, and methodological practices. The authors of the articles in this special issue are intensely engaged in this intellectual and activist process and offer these articles as contributions to building this emerging field.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received funding from AERA to hold the conference, as explicitly stated in the article. The author did not get specific funding for this particular article.

Notes

Author Biography

Mark R. Warren is a professor of public policy and public affairs at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and one of the co-founders of the Urban Research Based Action Network. Mark studies and works with community and youth organizing groups seeking to promote racial equity and justice in education, community development and democratic life. He is the author of A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform and the forthcoming Lift Us Up! Don’t Push Us Out! Voices from the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement.

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