Turning Thinking into Action: The Power of Equity-based Pedagogical Frameworks to Support Practice
Abstract:
Educators who strive to develop culturally and cognitively responsive classrooms can more effectively put equity into action when they have an equity-based pedagogical framework to help them develop the potential tools, skills and dispositions at the heart of equity practices. Further, the authors argue that such work requires a community of reflective practice that helps educators learn from mistakes, explore a wider range of potential solutions, and put new thinking into action. This article celebrates what is working in schools that seek to honor the lived experiences of all students, and to develop learning ecosystems where all students thrive.
“Self-reflection is crucial and essential if we are to uncover, examine, and change biased behavior.”
Educators who believe in equity use a pedagogical framework to support action
Educational settings are among the first places where children encounter a community of people and a way of operating that differs from their familiar home settings. In school, children learn in explicit and covert ways what and how to learn, what is and is not acceptable behavior, and the benchmarks for achieving academic success. In addition to shaping children’s educational pathways, each classroom hosts a unique ecosystem of cultural beings, requiring teachers to hone a set of tools, skills, and dispositions to affirm and celebrate the diversity within the learning environment. As institutions, schools exist within a sociopolitical and philosophical context which informs teachers and teaching practices. Educators who develop an equity-based pedagogical framework understand that school and schooling provide opportunities to acknowledge the social, political, contextual, cultural, and historical factors that inform our way of seeing, being, and living.
Educators who rely on a pedagogical framework of identity, justice and equity understand the link between a student’s cultural self and their academic achievement (Hammond, 2015; Tatum, 2017; Valenzuela, 2016; YWCA Minneapolis, 2021). O'Donnell and Oyserman (2022) found that students’ academic engagement and outcomes improved when they saw their identity and cultural selves within the school context as both relevant and linked to things students can use to improve in school- focused tasks. Cultural patterns developed from infancy determine what is of value. When educators operate from an examined cultural pattern, they are less likely to attempt to fix what they perceive as “cultural deficits” in children, as they do not assume that assimilation will help the child reach cognitive, social, and emotional success. In fact, a learning environment that affirms and sustains each child’s unique cultural identity contributes to cultural continuity between home culture and school culture. Researchers Calabrese Barton and Tan (2020) suggest that educators embrace rightful presence as the inherent right of every child, honoring varied cultural ways of being and knowing–and disrupting the deficit mindset. These and other equity-based pedagogical frameworks take time to develop and can be viewed as a disposition one holds than a method one uses to teach children (Minor, 2023).
Educators who believe in equity draw inspiration from their lived experiences to better inform their actions
Sandra (Chap) grew up financially poor and culturally rich in Spanish Harlem, in a neighborhood that welcomed migrants of Puerto Rico in the 1940s and 50s. Friends, neighbors, classmates, the Catholic Church associated with the school she attended, and community members between the 1960s and 80s were primarily Puerto Rican and African American. In this enclave, Chap learned through experiences the meaning of hard work, familia, the wisdom of the elders, and that respect should always be given to adults.
Though surrounded by positive and affirming Latine people and culture, Chap was not free of the stereotypes that lived in the media, at school, or in books. She was exposed to the erroneous narratives about drunk and job-stealing Latines, as well as the myth of the Asian model minority, and stories that equated poverty with African American and Black people. These stereotypes did not resonate with the lived realities of Chap’s racially and ethnically diverse high school classmates who were all college-bound, smart young women, connected to both family and their academic lives. Some high school peers developed relationships across lines of racial or ethnic differences, but lunchtime was very much as Tatum (2017) described in her book Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? Cross-racial relationships were rare and the school curriculum was void of discussions about identity or culture. Sadly, this meant that there was no mention of, nor room for, the varied contributions from people of different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Formal schooling provided a wealth of experiences with people who defied stereotypes. A few teachers listened to youth, asked for divergent opinions on worldly topics, and created interactive and engaging lessons that supported critical thinking. These teachers developed a pedagogical approach that went beyond their academic duties, which then positively informed the students’ sense of belonging. One fourth grade teacher stood out as someone who mirrored Chap’s racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences and was herself a product of a working class family. She followed the dialects and language patterns used in the homes of many students while scaffolding English language skills. This teacher affirmed and honored the families’ racial, cultural, and linguistic patterns and educational goals. Other teachers, white lay teachers and the nuns of the parish equally looked to the funds of knowledge (Hammond, 2015; Moll & Gonzalez, 2004) that enriched experiences out of the classroom, which in turn positively influenced their own teaching, enhanced their relationships with students’ families, and allowed them to infuse the curriculum with this new knowledge about students and their lives outside of school. The school and teachers’ attempts to mirror students’ cultural lives created continuity between home and school life.
Jennifer grew up in a middle-class home with educated parents who embraced Judaism as a religion and cultural ethnicity. Jennifer knew from very young that this identity was not a choice; being of 100% Ashkenazic heritage was in her blood, something that made her different in secular schools where she was usually one of two Jewish students (the other being her younger sister). Jennifer’s father, a cellist and art history major who spent his childhood being bullied for being Jewish, experienced his identity as one who lives under constant threat, sure a Nazi was behind every corner. Jennifer’s mother, denied most Jewish practices as a girl growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, was a brilliant woman with advanced degrees in French literature and philosophy. She saw Judaism as a gift for her daughters, something she wanted them to live more fully and freely than she was allowed. But Jennifer and her sister didn’t live in Jewish neighborhoods or go to Jewish schools, so there was always a dissonance between life at home and at school, a dissonance exacerbated by attending alternative public schools that disconnected them from the kids in their neighborhood.
Jennifer and her sister blended easily most of the time, particularly if they kept their identities to themselves, because they presented as white. But several times a year, their mom would come to school to do a “show and tell” about one Jewish holiday or another, and those moments made Jennifer feel like an outsider who was included only marginally, a sort of part time visitor. Her non-Jewish peers, who came from a diversity of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, followed her mom’s visits with comments about how they “knew someone once who was Jewish,” and their fascination with religious rituals was brief at best. Even though Jennifer attended alternative schools with a focus on student-centered learning, her teachers had very little sense of how to hold space for her identity or help her understand herself.
It wasn’t until high school that Jennifer encountered a school leader and an advisor who, perhaps because they were ethnically Jewish themselves, understood some of what she needed. Even then, it wasn’t that they actively honored her identity; it was that she saw herself reflected in her teachers for the first time in her education, she felt a little less dissonance between home and school, and she felt seen for what she brought into the schoolhouse each day. They challenged Jennifer beyond her comfort zone, and they helped her understand her identity before and after she completed three projects in the Middle East. They bought Jennifer used books they thought she should read, encouraged her as a budding writer and, as Todd Shy (2021) frames it, claimed her and helped her claim herself.
Teachers hold great power–the power to lift young people and help them feel seen and honored for who they are, but also the power to disrupt students’ sense of self. It’s not a sort of magic that teachers inherit or not, this ability to extend grace and understanding to every single child, though it can feel that way to kids when only one or two adults in the building know how to do it. In our opinion, a mindset focused on rightful presence can happen in any classroom, in every classroom, and with any educator, if teachers have a community of reflective practice to support their pedagogy, authentic relationships with students and families, and equity-based lessons.
Educators who believe in equity draw on equity-based pedagogical frameworks to turn thinking into practice
An equity-based pedagogical framework is a belief system about children, education, identity, family, community, and academic success that informs the practices used in school and schooling. Educational research points to different ways to understand equity-based pedagogical frameworks in order to educate children beyond= tests and grades. The goal is to educate children for life. Calabrese Barton and Tan (2006) argue that rightful presence is a liberatory approach to naming injustices through the use of youths’ amplified voices of their own lived experiences, as child, peers, teacher, class, and school work towards social justice. Hammond’s (2015) Ready for Rigor Framework partners cultural awareness with the science behind how our brains take in cues about identity differences. The four practice areas of the framework build academically safe learning environments that are culturally responsive and sustaining.
Figure 1: Ready for Rigor Framework, Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students (Hammond, 2015)
The Landscape Model of Learning (Klein & Ciotti, 2022) offers a simple but powerful metaphor that can help educational communities build their own equity-based pedagogical framework. The concept of learning on a landscape relies on three core elements schools can build their work around: the ecosystem, which is about developing a deep understanding of all the facets of experience and identity each student brings into the classroom; the horizon, which invites educators to co-construct personalized goals with students and understand their aspirations; and the pathway, which is about using student-centered instructional practices that allow students to learn in ways that leverage their strengths and interests. By emphasizing these student-centered elements, educators can design learning experiences that increase student protagonism (agency) and create space for identity development.
Figure 2: The Elements of The landscape model of learning: Designing student-centered experiences for cognitive and cultural inclusion (Klein & Ciotti, 2022)
An equity-based pedagogical framework does serve as an opportunity to engage in anti-bias and critical social justice work. However, the authors believe it is also about educators leaning into the vulnerability of not having all the answers and allowing ourselves to grow and learn–not just from our professional development experiences, but from student voice. It means learning to look for our students’ assets, and educating them through that asset lens as consistently as possible. It means leaning into hard conversations with grace, holding space for the multiple lenses our students bring into the schoolhouse, and honoring the multiple perspectives that come from their lived experiences.
There are countless forces that can impede students' inclusion in the classroom, and by extension their academic success. Dissonance between home and school is heightened when the child’s lived realities are missing altogether, contributing to an out-of-place feeling on social, emotional, cultural, academical, and historical levels. However, a strong equity-based pedagogical framework that helps educators move from thinking to action can offer clear pathways through the challenges educators encounter and ample opportunities to reflect and learn from mistakes. Because so many of the intercultural interactions in school can breed conflict, and may create fear for teachers trying to manage those conflicts, having a clear sense of potential tools, skills, and dispositions is key. As the authors consider the most important elements of such a framework, we conclude that a community working to build equitable practices would allow teachers to do the following:
•Make mistakes and fail fast
•Bounce back in order to grow from mistakes
•Move out of the expert mentality and embrace growth and learning
•Learn from students and use student voice to guide their work
•Cultivate a mindset of grace and understanding, both with themselves and others
•Understand restorative practices and use them proactively to build inclusive cultural ecosystems
•Experience personalized professional learning that is relevant to where they are in their growth and skills
Figure 3: Elements of a Thriving Community of Reflective Practice. Image source: Sandra Chapman on Venngage.com
Further, recognizing that we will make mistakes, educators must be supported in this work by a community of reflective practice that allows them to process their experiences, identify the approaches that didn’t work, and lean into the strategies that did. An educator’s ability to fail fast, strengthen or develop a growth mindset, and rely on students and their family’s funds of knowledge (Moll & Gonzalez, 2004) is aided by establishing learning communities with other peers, from within their school and across school communities. These groups move teachers out of siloed teaching practices to shared ecosystems where better, holistic, and affirming learning opportunities are fostered (Michael, 2015). Educators need one another to turn equitable thinking into practice.
Educators who believe in equity honor all students by putting their thinking into action
What’s Working! Early Childhood: The four year olds in an early childhood, predominantly white school were familiar with the activity, Stand With Me If. They sat on chairs in a circle around the rug and waited for the student in the middle to share an ending to the sentence starter. The prompts were alway student-created and could range from Stand with me if …you like unicorns, to Stand with me if …you have a boo-boo on your knee. It was not unusual for children to name aspects of their realities, their lived experiences within their family structure (...have one dad), religion (...went to mosque) and culture (...celebrated Diwali). The teachers hoped children would use the activity to explore similarities and differences with other aspects of social identity such as race, skin color, language, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Paul, a dark skinned African American boy, was next to stand in the middle and he offered, Stand with me if you, …if your skin, …if you are brown.
While the offerings were student centered, the teachers in the room participated. One teacher, who identifies as Filipino, stepped into the circle and stood by Paul. Paul’s response to the teacher, “You’re not brown,” became a catalyst for meaning-making about skin color differences, and an exploration of self-identification and self-actualization. The teacher shared a little about her parents' identities and why she felt that being part of a group of people who say they are brown connected to her identity, even though, she pointed out, her skin was not as dark as Paul’s skin. These teachers provided an opportunity to discuss the complexity of social identity using age appropriate responses, while also creating the space for children to question adults when new information presented did not fit with their prior knowledge.
While the discussion continued, another teacher noticed a child step into the circle, hesitate, pull back, and try again. The child was encouraged to share her thoughts and the class learned that she has light skin and is biracial. The teacher reassured the child, saying “You are in charge of the words you use to describe your skin color and identity.” The class waited and the child thought, before taking a more confident step towards Paul.
What’s Working! High School: In a mixed-age high school Creative Writing course, students had ownership over most elements of their learning and were able to create a culture of inclusion, support and trust. While their teacher provided the baseline for work across the semester–two oral presentations on writers they wanted their peers to read, two workshop cycles on a piece of writing in progress, and consistent feedback on their peers’ work–students decided which authors to spotlight, which writing to bring to workshop, and even established their own dates and deadlines. Students received recognition for participation in online discussions as much as during class, to honor the introverts and different thinkers who might not feel comfortable speaking up during class. While the teacher offered occasional writing prompts to encourage new approaches, students could try the prompts or go in their own directions. Students wrote in notebooks, and though the teacher collected them a few times per semester, students could keep entries private by folding the page, so that it was their decision what was read and what was not. Students co-constructed their own agreements for the class, including elements like not interrupting each other, always trying to support the author’s intentions with their feedback, and maintaining confidentiality about what might be revealed in the writing shared.
This course was designed based on a deep sense of equity-based pedagogical work that put student agency at the core. Since sharing one’s writing for feedback can be challenging for teenagers, and because writing can reveal a great deal about students’ personal lives, creating a culture of equity and inclusion was at the heart of the teacher’s design. LGBTQ+ students could reveal or hide the gender of their love interests as they chose; introverts could participate as they wished, and all students’ identities were honored by the group and upheld by the class agreements. Students often hid elements of their lives in the folded pages of their notebooks, but they shared more over time, as a safe and inclusive culture developed. Once in a while, when someone made a mistake–asking about the gender of a love interest in a short story, making an assumption about the quality of work they might receive from a peer with cognitive differences, not realizing that a story about the death of a parent was true–the group processed the error together. They got comfortable using “ouch!” to interrupt a potentially hurtful comment, they talked together about the line between pushing each other’s thinking and being supportive, and they talked about the cultural differences that emerged in their work. And while every day wasn’t perfect, every day was a collective and personalized learning experience that caused everyone to grow.
Educators who believe in equity are lifelong learners who work toward trust and inclusion
Ensuring that educators can move their equity work from theory to practice is key to meeting students’ needs today, not years from now once teachers have had “enough” professional learning experiences. Ultimately, the shift toward practice is just that: a recognition that this work will take significant practice, that we will make mistakes along the way, and that we have a community willing to reflect and learn with us. When educators have an equity-based pedagogical framework that helps inform their choices and cultivate an inclusive mindset, they are better able to build community and trust with their learners as well, and to construct more inclusive systems with their students, as we describe in both examples of what’s working. Such trust may be as important as any framework; students who feel trusted by their teachers, and appreciated for all they bring into the schoolhouse, are more likely to activate their own agency. This allows them to make more relevant choices and advocate for their own needs, rather than needing the teacher to create inclusion for them. The more students learn to advocate for themselves, the more they can take their learning into their communities as well, and by doing so help to build more equitable systems in the world beyond the schoolhouse.
References
Calabrese Barton, A., & Tan, E. (August/September, 2020). Beyond Equity as Inclusion: A Framework of “Rightful Presence” for Guiding Justice-Oriented Studies in Teaching and Learning. Volume 49, Issue 6, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X20927363
Hammond, Z (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Klein, J. D. & Ciotti, K. (2022). The landscape model of learning: Designing student-centered learning experiences for cognitive and cultural inclusion. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.
Michael, A. (2015). Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and inquiry in education. Teachers College Press
Minor, K. (2023). Teaching fiercely: Spreading joy and justice in our schools. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass
Moll, L. C., & González, N. (2004). Engaging Life: A funds of knowledge approach to multicultural education. In J. A. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 699-715). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
O'Donnell, S. C., & Oyserman, D. (2022). Apt and actionable possible identities matter: The case of academic outcomes. Journal of Adolescence.
Shy, T. (2021). Teaching life: Life lessons for aspiring (and inspiring) teachers. New York: Avenues the World School Press.
Tatum, B. D. (2017). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?: and Other Conversations about Race. New York :Basic Books
YWCA Minneapolis, (2021). Anti-bias curriculum for the preschool classroom. Redleaf Press
Valenzuela, A. (2016). Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth. National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project & Teachers College, Columbia University
Sandra (Chap) Chapman, Ed. D. is the Founder of Chap Equity, an organization rooted in collaboration, research and dialogue. Dr. Chap is the lead on Social Identity Development for the Great First Eight curriculum development project, led by Dr. Nell K. Duke Executive Director, Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand for Children. Great First Eight is a full-day, open educational resource (OER) curriculum for children birth through eight designed to integrate all disciplines, prioritizing science and social studies to an unprecedented degree to support educators in enacting culturally relevant pedagogy. She is the co-author of Bias Starts Early. Let's Start Now: Developing an Anti-Racist, Anti-Bias Book Collection for Infants and Toddlers, Black Girl on the Playground (Teaching Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls, Corwin Press, 2021) and an article about the working relationship between the Head of School and the Direction of Diversity for the NAIS Independent School Magazine called, The Power of Conversation (Summer 2014).
Jennifer D. Klein is a product of experiential project-based education herself, and she lives and breathes the student-centered pedagogies used to educate her. A former head of school with extensive international experience and over 30 years in education--including 19 in the classroom--Jennifer facilitates dynamic, interactive workshops for teachers, leaders and students, working to amplify student voice, to provide the tools for high-quality project-based learning in all cultural and socio-economic contexts, and to shift school culture to support such practices. Jennifer is also committed to intersecting global project-based learning with culturally-responsive and anti-racist teaching practices, and her experience includes deep work with schools seeking to address equity, build healthier community, and improve identity politics on campus. Jennifer has published articles in Kappan, The Educational Forum, EdWeek, GettingSmart, and NAIS’s Independent School magazine. Jennifer’s first book, The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K-12 Classrooms Worldwide through Equitable Partnerships, was published in 2017, and her second, The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, written with co-author Kapono Ciotti, was published in 2022.