The Imperative of Social Foundations to (Urban) Education Research and Practice

Abstract

This conceptual article aims to clarify the important relationship between the fields of social foundations of education (SFE) and urban education (UE). We argue that SFE (a) enables more precise understandings of urban in one’s preparation to practice in or conduct research with implications for urban schooling contexts and (b) strengthens one’s capacity to identify the questions and pedagogical and methodological approaches central to enacting justice-oriented education research and practice. This article calls attention to three specific SFE subdisciplines—history, philosophy, and sociology of education—as necessary complements to any education program of study, building our argument from an examination of SFE’s relationship to UE specifically. Accessing multidisciplinary perspectives to deeply understand and address vexing challenges posed by (urban) space and place is a central feature of this article.

Keywords

Black education cross-cultural studies cultural analysis educator preparation equity qualitative research race school reform social context social foundations social justice urban education

The reputation and stature of urban education (UE) as a field of study has expanded considerably in the past two decades. There are a growing number of teacher preparation and doctoral programs in the United States that offer specializations in UE, including our home institution (Michigan State University). Under the diligent leadership of Kofi Lomotey followed by H. Richard Milner, the impact factor for Urban Education has seen substantial increase in the past decade, hovering just north of 2.0 as of 2017 (Journal Citation Reports, 2019). As the status of the UE field grows, so does our need to more precisely define the urban in urban education and the concomitant methodologies or approaches utilized by educators to interrogate and oppose education injustice(s) disproportionately affecting Black and Latinx youth attending public schools in U.S. cities (Irby, 2015; Milner, 2012; Milner & Lomotey, 2013). And although there is widespread acceptance of UE research as a legitimate area of inquiry, separately there is widespread skepticism about the contemporary significance of social foundations of education (SFE) to the preparation of teachers and other school practitioners (Baez & Boyles, 2013; Hartlep et al., 2015; Philip, 2013; Tozer, 2018). Although individual faculty may espouse critical social context perspectives across a department, school, or college of education, these perspectives are no longer the province of a core SFE faculty. In other words, it is unclear that there is an imperative for stronger commitments to SFE disciplinary perspectives in educator preparation for research and practice.¹

Critical perspectives on the sociocultural and political contexts of education made possible through SFE scholarship equips researchers and practitioners to more effectively respond to competing demands over the purpose and possibilities of public education in urban school settings, especially during a time of unprecedented displacement and economic development in historically Black and Latinx communities following decades of municipal disinvestment. Considering that “cities are strategic locations for capital accumulation” (Lipman, 2013, p. 60), it is difficult to imagine, for example, the possibility of a field of urban education as we know it without the important early-20th-century contribution of foundations scholars at Teachers College, Columbia University (see Tozer et al., 2010). We want to emphasize here that UE is not and should not be considered a replacement for SFE. SFE is essential for one’s preparation as an education researcher and/or practitioner regardless of schooling context (i.e., urban, suburban, or rural). UE scholarship does, however, have much to offer SFE—a field that has been historically, although not exclusively, dominated by White scholars. As two Black scholars trained in the social and cultural foundations of education, whose scholarly work contributes to the UE literature (e.g., Venzant Chambers, 2009; Venzant Chambers et al., 2014; Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011; Warren, 2015, 2016, 2017), we insist on the symbiotic relationship between SFE and UE. Such a relationship is a salient example of SFE’s contemporary relevance to the field of education writ large.

Considering the overemphasis on “methods” courses and the declining value of SFE-related courses in teacher education (Hartlep et al., 2015), school leadership, and doctoral preparation (Tozer, 2018), we are deeply concerned with the preparation of researchers and practitioners to disavow and actively counter oppressive logics of race, class, and gender in their (future) work. These logics too often frame the organization of city schools serving a majority of the United States’s Indigenous, Black, and Latinx youth, who also tend to be characterized as “low-income” (Orfield, Kucsera, & Siegel-Hawley, 2012). By drawing attention to the growing prominence of UE as a field of study, we insist on the necessity of SFE core content knowledge to thoughtfully grapple with issues of justice and education equity. This article reflects our unreadiness with the ways SFE has become increasingly marginalized as an indispensable area of study in educator preparation as well as the ease with which contemporary UE research as a result may be(come) essentialist, indefinite, shortsighted, and unknowingly deficit over time. We offer a vision of SFE’s relationship to the field of education by focusing our discussion on its relationship to UE.

Finally, as UE scholars necessarily move toward becoming more precise about the influence of place and space on the learning outcomes of youth rendered vulnerable by multiple forms of structural inequality, SFE emerges as essential to appropriately theorizing what one means by urban in UE scholarship and practice. In the next section, we elaborate on several ways SFE enables more meticulous, well-rounded analyses of place, space, and the varying justice dilemmas traditionally explored in UE scholarship and practice. The article concludes with some theorizing about the centrality of social foundations to the doing of education research, policy, and practice.

Theorizing Space and Place in Urban Education Research and Practice

Much of the scholarship identified as urban education centers on naming the social forces shaping school outcomes for Black or Latinx youth growing up in racially segregated, densely populated, predominantly Black and/or Latinx neighborhoods where poverty is concentrated. UE research tends to reflect neighborhoods with too few institutional assets, where reformers fail to notice “opportunities in geography” (Green, 2015), and where youth are overexposed to risk (Swanson, Cunningham, & Spencer, 2003). We want to offer here that the urban in UE can and should be conceptualized much more expansively to represent variation in a city’s racial, geopolitical, and socioeconomic diversity. Everyone living in a city is not a person of color, poor, or progressive, hence the importance of naming the ways place and space matter to UE research designs and analyses. Buendía (2010) argued that UE scholars too frequently rely on flat, neat, urban-suburban binary conceptions and categories to frame/guide research inquiry and practice. He advocated for a much more comprehensive epistemological and ontological stance that, for example, acknowledges the implications of history and human agency for determining how both “urban” space (e.g., dynamic and flexible cultural practices, social relations to economic power, opportunity, and material resources) and place (e.g., concrete, fixed, situated physical location[s] and structures) are mutually constituted as human subjects move in and between them.

Regardless of urban, rural, or suburban context designation, the broader point of significance is that where a school is physically located matters as much to schooling outcomes as does how that physical location is socially engineered. Decoteau Irby (2015) asserted in his article, “Urban Is Floating Face Down in the Mainstream,” that urban education research and practice is too often a catch-all for learning to study or educate impoverished youth of color who attend schools located in cities. Milner (2012) offered a typology of urban to be used in UE research that primarily depends on population density and regional variety. Irby (2015) took a more social-foundations approach. He modeled for readers how to employ social foundations perspectives in urban-focused research by advocating use of sociology, geographical, and urban studies, for instance, to more precisely describe how space and place are indeed both inextricable and socially constructed by society (e.g., social actors, structures, and systems).

As we mentioned previously, UE’s intense focus on issues of education inequality strongly reflect the political commitments of SFE luminaries. Irby (2015) insisted “understanding the production of place and space” is essential to understanding the “production of inequality” (p. 10). In their ambition to formalize SFE as a field of study necessary to deeply examine school inequality, early SFE scholars depended on the intellectual tools and perspectives from core social science disciplines, including history, philosophy, and sociology (Tozer & Butts, 2010). It is incredibly difficult to reasonably describe the factors that determine the present-day failure of public schools to adequately educate Black students on the south side of Chicago, for example, without a deep understanding of the history of residential segregation in Chicago and elsewhere (see Danns, 2014; Massey & Denton, 1988, 1993). Likewise, broadening one’s understanding of what it takes to enact school transformation in large, gentrifying “urban” contexts requires exploring the educational philosophies and politics of venture philanthropists who are effectively reshaping the urban school-reform landscape (Horsford, Scott, & Anderson, 2018). Examining the motivations of mid- to late-20th-century Black women, parents, community activists, and other political actors in Chicago fighting to establish their own schools for Black children (Todd-Breland, 2018) is key to advancing school reform efforts in the nation’s third-largest city. Reconciling one’s understanding of schools as sites of racial socialization (Stevenson, 2014) would further enlighten educators to the real-time difficulties one must face to effectively steward school environments that inspire futurities hinging on love, thriving, and dreaming (Love, 2019; Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017).

To put it plainly, moving beyond the urban-suburban binary to think more critically about the interaction of space and place is imperative for sharpening the efficacy of UE research and practice to minimize opportunity gaps (Carter & Welner, 2013) or “inequalities in opportunity” (Carter & Reardon, 2014) faced by traditionally underserved Native, Black, and Latinx/a/o youth. Theoretical frameworks and perspectives derived from SFE scholarship facilitate richer examinations of a school’s local geography. By local geography, we mean development of an entrenched understanding of the histories of domination, cultural norms for racialized social interaction, and the (lack of) material resources available in a particular region or neighborhood context over time. Such an orientation to research and practice requires a compendium of intellectual points of view derived from various disciplinary standpoints that when combined, enables education scholars and practitioners to more effectively decode the complex ways place informs the production of space and vice versa.

Social Foundations of Education as Intervention

At the founding of the American Education Studies Association in 1968, forces were already mounting to bring new interdisciplinary lenses to bear on studying social contexts of schooling and education. These lenses are exemplified in our preceding discussion of local geography and the proliferation of foundations-oriented American Educational Research Association (AERA) special interest groups, including Critical Educators for Social Justice, Leadership for Social Justice, Post-Colonial Studies in Education, Queer Studies, and Research Focus on Black Education, among others (Tozer, 2018). Early SFE scholars aimed to utilize scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to better prepare teachers and leaders for a society that promised democracy but delivered abject inequality—in schools as well as in other social institutions in the 1930s (Butts, 1993).

The applied nature of the field has been reinforced in several editions of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (Standards), first created in 1977. These guidelines were meant to provide guidance for credentialing in professional certification and degree programs in the field of education. The Standards would demonstrate how programs of study in SFE “rely heavily on the disciplines and methodologies of the humanities, particularly history and philosophy and the social sciences, such as sociology” (Tozer et al., 2010, p. xiii). These three key foundations disciplines were implemented interdisciplinarily from the start, with anthropology of education, politics of education, aesthetics of education, and other disciplinary lenses often included.

There are now so many subdomains of scholarship that employ critical, cross-disciplinary lenses to investigate the relationships between social context and education that we cannot reference all of them to make our argument. We will, instead, focus on three of the source disciplines—philosophy, history, and sociology of education. These disciplines in particular offer the methodological tools and intellectual perspectives necessary to appropriately conceive of the barriers (and potential solutions) to teaching, leading, and learning in urban contexts. Neither of the disciplines of history, sociology, or philosophy of education is alone equipped to pursue, for example, the persistent failure of schools to educate Black children equitably. Together, however, they provide a multitheoretical lens through which researchers and practitioners can gain purchase on problems too complex for the exclusive use of a singular disciplinary analysis. Notwithstanding our focus on philosophy, history, and sociology in the following discussion, we recognize that these same points could be illustrated by using critical race theory in education, gender studies in education, postcolonial studies in education, and so on. All of these “area” studies derive from critical interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities, legal scholarship, and the social sciences.

A central focus on the philosophy, sociology, and history of education in one’s preparation for research and/or practice regardless of local schooling context is, at minimum, a reasonable expectation. Considering the significance of race and class analyses in traditional conceptions of urban education, SFE emerges as essential to cultivating orientations to research and practice that facilitate thoughtful, critical examinations of power specific to determining the implications of place and space in education practice and policymaking.

Philosophy of Education and Urban Education

Philosophy of education centers on the (de)construction of pertinent concepts, ideologies, values, and questions that frame matters of deep concern to education researchers and practitioners. This SFE subdiscipline encourages incisive critique and exploration of seemingly simple, straightforward education discourses about, for example, who should be permitted access to education in the contemporary political moment, and the best modes for delivery of said education considering the growing diversity of America’s public schooling population. Additionally, studies in philosophy and examinations of the philosophical thought left behind by scholars that include Aristotle, Socrates, Dewey, and Woodson about education form the ideological basis of contemporary education debates (Noddings, 2016). Learning how to make principled arguments, which includes deep intellectual engagements with literature and life, and their implications on the art of teaching and the science of learning are important contributions this branch of SFE makes to one’s preparation to engage in UE research and practice.

Having the tools to interrogate one’s education philosophies is essential to discerning the efficacy of school-reform initiatives—a site of much contention in UE research and practice. The work of establishing curricular canons, pedagogical approaches, policies, priorities, and school cultures that better humanize youth of color requires the skills of philosophy, which include, for example, recognizing the ways public discourse shapes political realities. In this case, SFE core content knowledge enables a keen noticing of how multiple political actors in places like Chicago use deficit-laden stock stories of Black youth, families, and communities to determine the purposes and priorities of public education in a staunch neoliberal school-reform climate (Lipman, 2013). A study in the philosophy of education sharpens practitioners’ awareness of the logics individuals in power use to privative public schooling (Watkins, 2014). Such knowledge positions teacher preparation programs, then, to help teacher candidates recognize and reject competition and market reasoning, instead helping candidates develop a deep focus on making the urban teaching and learning enterprise much more about people than about products.

Sociology of Education and Urban Education

At the heart of sociology of education is an examination of stratification and social mobility. Scholars also examine what factors or patterns drive disparities in schooling outcomes. Conceivably, the most pressing issue centers on the questions one must ask about the nature of schooling and education in U.S. society, both in cities and elsewhere. Hurn (1993) perhaps best summarized the quest for understanding that characterizes this SFE subfield:

Our best hope for reform of schooling lies in the slow and painstaking search for knowledge about these institutions rather than an immediate action to change schools now. To gain this knowledge, we must step back from the controversies and issues of the present and ask more general questions than are currently fashionable: questions about the nature of the educational process as well as how to improve it, and questions about the character of the institutions that we call schools as well as how to change them for the better. (p. 3)

The question of how to change schools for the better relies on an understanding of how changes occur over time. In this respect, social reproduction scholars have long noted that schools perpetuate inequality (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Giroux, 1983). Other sociologists of education, like Annette Lareau (2011), have focused on providing helpful peeks behind the scenes of social class, ably discerning its power despite its obscurity.

Sociologists of education have been particularly important figures in the textured study of schooling contexts. Their work brings much needed attention to the interaction of power, politics, and culture in determining threats and possibilities to public education in the United States. The important contributions of scholars with strong sociological analyses, who include Prudence Carter (2005), Annette Henry (1998), Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994), and Pedro Noguera (2003), have advanced the field of UE remarkably. They have done so by naming the myriad social forces that impede or improve the readiness of urban schools to meet the needs of its Black and Latinx students disproportionately impacted by the lack of access to resources and opportunity in cities around the United States. Their work in a long line of sociology of education scholarship invites questions that interrogate “the production of inequality . . . [recognizing] that schooling is a valued commodity . . . that is distributed unevenly” (Weis et al., 2010, p. 15). Such questions anchor orientations to UE research and practice that insist upon improving access to education opportunity for youth from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

Additionally, UE research and practice that does not draw on perspectives from the sociology of education risks not giving deep enough attention to structural analyses of race and class. Pauline Lipman’s (2013) important work, for example, compellingly points to the incredible impact of globalization, markets, and privatization for determining the failure of urban schools in gentrifying cities like Chicago to adequately educate Black and Latinx youth. This work is indispensable for noticing the not-so-easy-to-see relationship between neighborhoods, housing, and economic development on shaping the efficacy of urban schools to meet the needs of particular youth and families. Fourteen years earlier, in her book Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon (1997) concluded,

To discover why inner city schools have not improved, it is not enough to only examine present reform or educational practice. We need, in addition, to understand how inner city schools have come to be what they are. For schools—like people—are products of their past, as well as of their present. (p. xv)

Whereas the sociology of education is essential to building an orientation to research and practice in or about cities that critically considers how inequality is reproduced in school, Anyon’s work also spotlights the imperative for a deep understanding of education through the historical record.

History of Education and Urban Education

Arguably, no other field demonstrates the importance of history and the historical context than UE. A common misconception of research in this SFE subfield is that history scholars are only concerned with what has been with respect to education, urban or otherwise (Tyack, 1974). To the contrary, historians of education are deeply attentive to the fact that contemporary problems are necessarily an outgrowth of previous decisions and events. Without a thorough and comprehensive understanding of events of the past, there is no way to fully understand the problems faced while we are engaged in making history today.

Discerning the contemporary implications of state and federal government, philanthropy, and community political involvement on substantive improvements to the education of Black children, for example, is greatly enhanced by a history of Black people’s education reform activities at the turn of the 20th century. James D. Anderson’s (1988) book, The Education of Blacks in the South, provides an important counternarrative to the prevailing notion that Black people had no significant educational role prior to or immediately following slavery. Anderson’s work directly opposes dominant narratives of progress that center on the contributions of Northern philanthropists, like the Rosenwald Fund, as the original public-education innovators. Using example after example, Anderson documented how the Black community itself was instrumental in providing educational opportunities, including inaugurating a major push for mass public schooling.

Despite a tenuous employment situation after slavery, Anderson (1988) documented that the Black community established Black schools, often funded by the community, independent of external financial support despite paying taxes for public education (a process he called double taxation) and negotiating labor contracts that provided for schooling. When these terms were not met, the Black community leveraged their own labor as capital, participating in what became the Great Migration in search of better jobs and educational opportunities in the North (Wilkerson, 2012). This mass migration of Black families from the rural South to largely the urban North to seek greater educational and job opportunity is another important contextual foundation for understanding contemporary urban education. The public education system that was built in response to Black people leaving the South en masse also benefited the poor White community, who until that point had not pushed for educational opportunities for their children despite the widespread lack of access (Anderson, 1988).

Anderson (1988), a preeminent education historian, and other important works by Black scholars (Foster, 1997; Siddle Walker, 1996) helped to effectively recast the dominant narrative of Black education. Prior to their groundbreaking work, too often federal and state policy (e.g., A Nation At Risk; National Commission on Education, 1983) realms perpetuated the misnomer that the United States was falling behind other developed nations in part because of Black students and their families, a significant majority of whom lived in large cities. Consider how much more impactful urban education reform initiatives taking shape in the late 1980s through the 1990s might have been if these histories were better acknowledged in scholarship and practice. The sad irony, as Anderson documented it, is that if there was any racial community that best represented the belief in education as a mechanism of community uplift, it was Black people.

Where Do We Go From Here? Reestablishing the Significance of Social Foundations in (Urban) Education Research and Practice

The goal of this article was to clarify the important relationship of social foundations to urban education and by extension, the field of education. In doing so, we aimed to emphasize the cautions and fallacies of growing concentrations in UE research and practice without parallel attention to the value of and deep investments in SFE. In educator preparation, whether it’s teacher education, higher education, counseling, educational technology, educational psychology, or more general doctoral study, each of the aforementioned SFE subdisciplines deepen how, for instance, we (learn to) make meaning(s) of place and space in education research and practice. The foregoing discussion of the relationship of SFE to UE is ultimately intended to bolster development of an education justice orientation to research and practice that reverses the failure of America’s public schools, colleges, and universities to adequately educate Native, Black, and Latinx/a/o youth.

SFE as a field is essential to the study of education, urban or otherwise. Taken together, however, we have argued here that the philosophy, sociology, and history of education form an essential tripartite coalition of disciplinary perspectives indispensable to contemporary examinations of racial equity and economic justice. The philosophy of education ultimately requires educators to reasonably choose and enact a political stance that guides their scholarship and practice. Acknowledging the disquietudes underscoring one’s research or practice interests/agenda, and wholeheartedly embracing the subjectivities reflective of an educator’s own humanity, is central to conducting analyses of space and place that advance our understanding of the factors determining education outcomes for individuals who have long been disenfranchised by school.

Along that same line, the sociology of education cautions against short-sighted investigations of education phenomena. Education research and practice must prioritize structural analyses, which might include examinations of institutional cultures or environments, power, and the social relations that dictate the (re)production of forces that sustain White supremacy and antiblack racism. We are beyond the point that research, regardless of the physical location or social context, can focus solely on individual actions to explain wide-scale race, class, and gender disparities in education outcomes. This SFE subdiscipline encourages intersectional probes that interrogate how multiple social forces work in tandem to determine the functionality of public education in today’s globalizing world.

Finally, a firm grasp of the history of education equips (urban) education researchers and practitioners to better recognize how the past contributes to modern-day education quandaries and conundrums. Problems tackled in UE, for instance, are not without a genesis in settler colonialism, dispossession, slavery, Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education, the GI Bill, redlining, White flight, and the “war on drugs.” UE research and practice that fail to consider these and other pivotal moments in U.S. nation-making is doomed to make few if any substantive contributions to advancing the field’s knowledge base or the life possibilities of racially, ethnically, economically, and linguistically diverse students. Preparations to engage in education research and practice without rich access to history-of-education content knowledge will likely reproduce deficit perspectives of Black, Latinx/a/o, and Native communities as well as reinforce the dominant ideologies that sustain American education as a dehumanizing enterprise rife with contradiction.

Conclusion

Many education researchers and practitioners might not define themselves as social foundations scholars despite drawing heavily on scholarship that squarely fits into SFE. By drawing attention to the relationship between SFE and UE—a field growing in prestige and prominence in education—we aimed to reinvigorate interest in and conversation over the necessity of social foundations as cornerstone to the design and execution of all education research and practice across paradigms and traditions. We also encourage greater examination of place and space. Doing so ensures greater precision with respect to problem definition, question posing, and interpretation of social phenomena that advances education justice. As we’ve argued, such an aim is elusive without substantial SFE content knowledge. A sequence of SFE courses, which might include the history, philosophy, and sociology of education for example, is a necessary and reasonable complement to any program of study. This way, those being trained in education, whether as a practitioner or researcher, are better prepared to tackle complicated problems that require intellectual perspectives, epistemologies, and worldviews rooted in the humanities and social science.

Footnotes

Notes

Authors

CHEZARE A. WARREN, PhD, is an associate professor of urban education and teacher education in the College of Education at Michigan State University, 352 Erickson Hall, 620 Farm Lane, East Lansing, MI 48824; chezare@msu.edu . His research focuses on understanding the teaching and learning factors that facilitate urban-dwelling young Black men and boys’ school success.

TERAH T. VENZANT CHAMBERS, PhD, is a professor of educational administration in the College of Education at Michigan State University, 404 Erickson Hall, 620 Farm Lane, East Lansing, MI 48824; terah@msu.edu . Her research focuses on post-Brown K–12 education policy and urban education leadership.

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