'Critical' Training: Equity Scholars Advocate Use of Participatory Critical Action Research to Reduce Racial Gaps
Led by the USC Center for Urban Education and others, scholars and policy analysts from around the country have been gathering this summer to remedy one of higher education’s most intractable problems: closing the “race gap” among four-year degree earners and boosting the pipeline of minority students completing community college.
To tackle the problem in new ways, tenure-track assistant professors and seasoned administrators participated in one of five summer workshops called the ASHE Institutes on Equity and Critical Policy Analysis, whose mission was borne out of national studies showing low retention and baccalaureate attainment among students of color, especially in science and math. The institutes train faculty and analysts on how to change policies and practices that produce or sustain this inequality.
The highest realms of education need equity for minority students and faculty alike - that is, rates of participation and success in universities that are commensurate with other demographic groups, CUE leaders said. Too many students of color are now marginalized in community colleges with poor rates of transfer to four-year colleges, shrinking the pool of bachelor’s candidates and, more broadly, the presence of diverse student bodies and faculties on four-year campuses.
By participating in such institutes, the academicians were in effect creating a community of scholars dedicated to conducting their own research into the practices and policies at their schools and then taking action to correct the inequity.
Three of the seminars were held in Los Angeles, including a July 6-8 session entitled “Principles and Methods of Participatory Critical Action Research,” which was led by the USC Rossier School of Education’s Center for Urban Education (CUE).
At that three-day institute, assistant professors, policy analysts and longtime university leaders learned how to initiate action plans by using the “practitioner-as-researcher” model that was developed by CUE. Also called participatory critical action research, that model demands that improvements start at the foundation of a college: teams of instructional faculty, student development educators, administrators, institutional researchers and senior leaders take a hard look at their own institutions by doing research and then enact solutions.
The emphasis is on practitioners discovering how their own school’s climate and practices may inhibit minority students’ success, instead of viewing the problem solely based on those students’ underpreparedness.
“In this institute, we developed this method on how to work inside institutions in partnership with leaders and to do research on whether practices are dysfunctional or causing inequalities,” said CUE co-director Estela Bensimon, a professor of higher education.
Alicia Dowd, CUE’s other co-director and an associate professor of higher education, said the institutes herald a new formation of scholars committed to equality.
“They’re establishing a support network of colleagues who will engage in sustained ways to change institutional practices and bring about racial and ethnic equity. Instead of saying, ‘yes, it’s a problem,’ they would actually do something about it. It is a difficult challenge, and individuals working alone may not have the power to change things. But as a field, we can,” Dowd said.
Participants were required to develop action plans on how they would work within their own universities to achieve such change. Examples of projects developed at the institute led by CUE include:
- An examination of institutional policies related to community college transfer.
- A study to better understand and facilitate the successful transfer of historically underserved undergraduate students to graduate programs and ways to increase institutional capacity within science, technology, engineering and math disciplines to support the success of students of color.
- Inquiry into the interventions used to improve minority students’ transition to a university within career education pathways.
- An analysis of successful colleges that produce disproportionately high rates of students of color pursuing doctorates in science, technology, engineering and math.
- A study focused on creating ways for K-12 school districts to design interventions for parents, counselors, teachers and administrators that boost postsecondary minority enrollment.
- An initiative to transform the student development field through interventions in graduate programs, professional development and overall work of equity-minded racial justice educators.
“For me the biggest takeaway is the way I want to go about my work and my understanding that we can use critical action research as a tool to establish more effective public policy,” one participant said. “We think of data sets, we think of certain programs and models and trainings as public policy tools…but we don’t think about research as ourselves engaged in it as a way to inform our policy.”
Funded by the Ford Foundation, the first of the ASHE institutes was held in June in Santa Fe, N.M., and the final one was July 13-15 in Boulder, Colo.
Other leaders and sponsors are the Association for the Study of Higher Education, University of California at Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute, the University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance, Columbia University’s Teachers College, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, and the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.
By Michael Martinez