Editors of Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education

Can you give us an overview of your work in academia thus far? Or, what was the road like to creating tools to promote socially just research?

Leslie Ann Locke:  Holding several marginalized identities (female, low-income family, first-generation high school graduate), and struggling through the worlds of K-12 and higher education has shaped how I understand and interpret “schooling.” In addition, my work is qualitative and largely centers on the experiences of individuals from marginalized groups as they move through K12 and higher education and the ways leadership and policy can best serve their interests. As I have developed as a scholar, social justice and equity remain at the heart of what I do—even though the specific research questions have evolved and topics of publications have differed. Throughout, however, I design critical research questions that have the potential to improve leadership, policy, and practice by getting at a deep, rich understanding of people’s experiences, as well as educational contexts.

Kamden Strunk: I’m a quantitative methodologist, and educational psychologist focused on the intersections of racial, sexual, and gender identities, especially in higher education. Both quantitative methods and educational psychology have not, as fields of study, done a good job with issues of equity and justice. I think part of our struggle as fields is an unwillingness to deal with the historical roots of our work. Both quantitative work and educational psychology are really rooted in ideas of sorting and tracking. Some of the earliest convergence in these fields is in ability testing, which was widely used to promote segregationist and white supremacist views. To this day, most of the work in those fields either ignores issues of social identity and power or takes on deficit views with respect to marginalized communities. Because of that, and because of the work I’ve been able to be part of in working for equity and justice in education, I feel very compelled to create and propagate methodologies that are attentive to equity and social justice. I’m also very committed to seeing rigorous and thoughtful methodological work in these areas, perhaps especially in quantitative and mixed-methods studies.

Our collaboration: We began working together in Mississippi, when both of us were simultaneously hired in the College of Education and Psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi. Being in sister departments, we became quickly acquainted with each other’s work as it centered on social justice and equity.  We also connected with a small group of other critical scholars.  Soon this group began collaborating and formed the Research Initiative for Social Justice and Equity (RISE).  The members of RISE worked together in terms of collaborating around course content, teaching strategies, publishing, and programming focused on social justice, equity, and education for students, faculty, and community members.  These experiences allowed use to expand our knowledge and understanding of tools that can be used to promote socially just research and teaching, as well as opportunities to challenge and strengthen our work. We’ve written more extensively about those experiences in our prior Palgrave book, Oppression and resistance in Southern higher and adult education, but we continued collaborating after we both moved away from Mississippi. Because of those shared experiences in Mississippi and our divergent experiences before and after that time, we’ve been able to forge a productive collaboration. It’s also important that we come from different disciplines and different methodological approaches, and that leads to some really productive content and negotiation.

How did you identify the need for a textbook focusing Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education?

Both of us teach research methods courses, and this book directly comes from our teaching experiences. Leslie teaches qualitative methods, and Kamden teaches quantitative methods, but both of us teach from critical frameworks. Our observation was that our graduate students in educational research courses often had basic misunderstandings about theoretical perspectives and how they apply to educational research, and also craved applied examples of how to use different methods in real research. Further, we often had questions from students about what it looks like to establish an identity and a professional life as a scholar-activist or a critical scholar. So, from those experiences with students, we decided on the three-section structure of the book, with section one focused on theoretical and philosophical issues, section two focused on data collection and analysis, and section three on narratives of scholar-activists and critical scholars. The other key point about this book is that, while there are several qualitative methods texts that take on critical perspectives, we were not able to find materials that bridged qualitative and quantitative methods for educational research. This volume brings together writing from numerous emerging and established scholars and gives a practical overview of doing research for social justice and equity in education.

Did you find it especially important to address research methods for social justice in education? If so, why?

Yes. We’re in a moment in the U.S. where educational inequity is extreme and growing. By some estimates, K-12 schools are as segregated now as they were before Brown v. Board of Education. There is growing evidence of a school-prison nexus that funnels children of color out of schools, away from educational opportunity, and into prisons and lifetime felon labeling and disenfranchisement. In higher education, there are continued assaults on efforts to create equity and inclusion, including coordinated attacks on race-conscious admissions policies, trans-affirming policies and practices, and a steep rise in hate speech on campus. Schools also serve as cultural institutions that can serve to create social change or (and more often) to reify existing social structures, power dynamics, and inequities. At the same time, numerous political and economic forces are coalescing to de-professional educators, defund critical education, and monetize schools and students. While many of these trends are not new, and are connected to the larger neoliberal, white supremacist, and exploitative capitalist discourses and policy trends, there is an urgent need for work to move educational systems toward equity and social justice.

What are some ways that scholars can ensure that their research is more socially just?

Connecting with those who are experiencing a problem that we are trying to better understand, and collaborating with participants and/or community members to not only ensure that we indeed do understand the problem, but also that the findings authentically reflect the perceptions and experiences of those most impacted, is tantamount. Research often proceeds in ways that are extractive and exploitative, thinking of communities and people as sources of data to be gathered. Researchers can and should move to conceptualizing communities as partners in the research process with whom we can learn alongside. Further, ensuring that the research gets to those who have the most power to influence change is important.  Be that policy makers, legislators, higher education administrators, community members or leaders, principals and superintendents, teachers, or parents.  

How do you hope your research has real world impact? 

Orfield (2014) said, “Research is still too divided between scholarship of public schools and researchers on higher education. We must put these pieces of students’ lives together in our research and teaching programs” (p. 280). As we worked to create Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education, we kept this idea in mind.  We wanted to create a work that could be used in education courses with a diverse student body--those interested in a variety of research approaches and those from a variety of fields within education.  We hope that this textbook helps researchers, including emerging scholars and graduate students, work to do research that has real world impact on equity and justice in educational systems.

Reference

Orfield, G. (2014). Tenth annual Brown lecture in education research: A new civil rights agenda for American education. Educational Researcher, 43(6), 273-292.

About the authors

Kamden K. Strunk is Assistant Professor of Educational Research at Auburn University, USA, where he is also a faculty affiliate of the Critical Studies Working Group. He is a quantitative methodologist, teaching statistics for educational research at the graduate level. His research focuses on equity in education with particular emphasis on intersections of racial, sexual, and gender identities.

Leslie Ann Locke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies at the University of Iowa, USA, and Director of the Research Initiative on Social Justice and Equity (RISE).  Her research interests include leadership for social justice and equity, schooling for students from marginalized groups, equity-oriented education policy, and qualitative methodologies.