Insights on (In)Equity Initiatives in the Context of Discourse, Organizations, and Identity
Anna Bethune, Heather McCambly, Aireale J. Rodgers, Krystal Villanosa
2020
International Conference of the Learning Sciences
In today's educational settings, equity initiatives are simultaneously ubiquitous and highly contested. Struggles to achieve meaningful social change through these initiatives are often studied as public policy or leadership crises, yet could and should be addressed anew as a matter of learning that is mediated by practitioners' socio-political identities in organizational contexts. This symposium takes up this challenge, exploring how organizational settings mediate practitioner learning and
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... tivity to determine the relationship between macro-level equity discourses and micro-level socio-political identity. We build on theoretical and empirical work across organizational learning, educational equity, and identity. Across these papers we explore the relationship between identity and equity work in four distinct organizational contexts: 1) a faculty learning community within a research university, 2) science museums, 3) two education grantmaking organizations, and 4) an out-of-school time STEM education provider. Presently, many educational institutions--elementary and secondary schools; universities and colleges; museums, zoos and aquaria; after-school and out-of-school-time organizations--have been charged with increasing the diversity of, and creating equitable conditions for, both their workforce and their learners. This social and political directive is in response to the growing ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of learners in the United States and the racially homogenous nature of education practitioners and leaders, most of whom are white (Berry, 2015; Gay, 2013; Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Experiences Studies, 2018). This agenda is also motivated by the increasing attention paid to redressing the socio-economic disadvantage inherited by communities of color as a result of historical injustices and structural racism (e.g., slavery, Jim Crow, school resegregation). In an effort to respond to these pressures, educational institutions have leaned primarily on three key strategies: 1) recruitment and retention of minoritized learners, workers or both (i.e., "diversity"); 2) instating "inclusive" organizational policies (i.e., "inclusion" or "inclusivity"); and 3) designing interventions for minoritized learners so that they provide access to domain-or setting-specific resources (i.e., "access") (Ahmed, 2012; Nightingale & Mahal, 2012). Yet these strategies have not resulted in a diversified workforce, nor have they led to equitable partnerships and interactions with minoritized learners or workers (Wentling, 2004; Kania & Kramer, 2011) . Notably, not all initiatives aimed at increasing diversity or equity do the same, or even similar, work. This can be partially attributed to differences in education practitioners' social locations in their organizations-meaning that the roles and positions they occupy, the departments in which they are situated, and the ways in which they interpret and enact their social identities in response to the situations in which they find themselves (Weick, 1995) all profoundly impact how practitioners' engage with diversity and equity work. This is also due in part to the multiple languages and meanings of "diversity" and "equity", which are constantly shifting, frequently conflated, and often contested. This ambiguity is consequential as we know that the definitions of diversity and equity that individuals and organizations adopt can have material impacts on ensuing educational designs as they are pulled from macro-level discourse down to the micro-level of practice (Hand, Penuel, & Gutiérrez, 2013; McCambly & Colyvas, Under Review). Paradoxically, we also know that an organization's adoption of particular equity discourses does not always result in meaningful changes in practitioners' pedagogy or processes of organizational learning (Spillane, 2000; Fiss & Zajac, 2006) . Prior work offers some rationales for why organizational policies and discourses are often decoupled from practice including differences in: 1) how frames (i.e., global, socio-cultural, political discourses and narratives related to diversity and equity) are manifested and mobilized within organizations (e.g., Benford & Snow, 2000; Coburn, 2006) ; and 2) how individuals adopt, enact, or intentionally negate particular definitions for diversity and equity work in patterned ways correlated with their individual racial, class, and gender identities (Rattan & Ambady, 2013; Warikoo & Novais, 2015). Still, we know relatively little about the cognitive and cultural processes that happen in the context of specific organizations which act as structured mediators between macro-and micro-levels of activity (Ray, © ISLS
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