Introduction

It has been a privilege to serve on the Editorial Board of School Psychology International for several years. One of the more important achievements over this period was the development of a statement, created in collaboration between School Psychology International and the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, explicating a joint commitment to social justice, anti-racism, and equity (see Noltemeyer & Grapin, 2021). Initial conversations concerning this special issue occurred during discussions involving the statement.

Scholarly commitment to social justice, anti-racism, and equity presents ongoing challenges as well as opportunities. It should not be surprising that, in this respect, ontological, epistemological, cultural, and political challenges exist simultaneously. We need only reflect on our home discipline, psychology, to witness this confluence, as powerful preferences and habits promote research aligned with dominant interests. Following suit, psychologists recurrently default to practices supporting ethnocentrism (i.e. prefacing one's own culture as a frame to view other cultures) and anthropocentrism (i.e. valuing human beings above other things such as animals, climate, and the land). Disciplinary dedication to positivist onto epistemologies and the cultural politics of individualism today remain firmly entrenched in the conduct of school and educational psychologists.

However, many professionals who have practiced in schools and/or researched in the area accept that matters pertaining to social justice, equity, and diversity are difficult to devolve into quantifiable knowledge and distilled relationalities. In contemporary communities, acknowledging, valuing, and engaging with difference is crucial for responding in socially just ways. Subsequently, the goal of this special issue was to bring what might otherwise seem like incongruent knowledges together in support of schools and their communities. On reading, it should become apparent that incongruency here does not invoke questions of value but more so points to how these ideas exist within the status quo. The contributions to this special issue are meant to simultaneously present challenges and opportunities and, on this measure, they unequivocally succeed.

The first paper of the issue by Benninger et al. begins with the recognition that multiple ways of knowing are too often marginalized when trying to be heard in modern institutions. Such recognition particularly applies to school/educational psychologists who regularly serve as gatekeepers within educational settings. Knowledge is, they argue, continuously affected by issues concerning relational power, culture, gender, and age, and for psychologists working in schools, this circumstance is in need of direct attention. Theoretically, the movement toward critical forms of psychology can offer valuable resources, and the authors highlight youth participatory action research as one methodological manifestation. The paper tracks a case study to show how their approach goes beyond mere application to imbuing an attitude or orientation to the conduct of research. In this manner, research is enabled to be more than a transactional relationship. In working with youth as co-researchers, school/educational psychologists can set up potentials for transformational engagement through respectful allyship.

The discussion tendered by Talapatra et al. asks how research can work with individuals and communities to engage first-person accounts or what is commonly referred to in qualitative research as voice. Further, they want researchers to question their own purposes for engaging marginalized populations. The specific population highlighted in the paper is people with disabilities with explicit attention drawn to people with intellectual disability. Borrowing from DisCrit and Critical Race Theory, as well as more contemporary Disability Studies, the authors look to enable an emancipatory form of inquiry with the capacity to center disabled students’ voices in school/educational psychology scholarship. The paper argues emancipatory inquiry could not only valuably change the way school/educational psychologists conduct research but also that such a shift could also affect the profession's delivery of services more aligned to social justice principles.

Sefotho and Moeketski offer a unique Southern African contribution to the special issue. They discuss the Indigenous philosophy of Botho/Ubuntu as an alternate paradigm to varieties of epistemic injustice that dominate school/educational psychology. Driving their contribution is a commitment to decolonizing ways of knowing and being in contemporary societies. According to the authors, Botho/Ubuntu promotes communal understandings of personhood and care-oriented relationships across generations in the community. In contrast to prevailing scientific paradigms, the authors adopt critical African psychology to de-hegemonize and humanize work taking place in educational settings. Thus, for psychologists working in schools, the goal is to pursue cognitive justice (i.e. an orientation where different forms of knowledge can coexist and challenge dominant onto epistemologies).

In the paper written by D’Costa et al., school/educational psychologists are warned about the implicit and oppressive ideologies potentially perpetuated in quantitative research. They concentrate on three areas of concern: (i) discipline disproportionality, (ii) school accountability metrics, and (iii) special education disproportionality. Far from being neutral indicators or measures applied in educational practice, the authors make the case that quantitative research contributes to the oppression of already marginalized populations. One example of this, developed through the use of QuantCrit analyses, is the suggestion that special education disproportionality should be considered a function of racism (e.g. the adultification of Black youth) and not, as elsewhere erroneously argued, an outcome inherent to race. The discussion concludes with a call to psychologists working in educational settings to adopt a social justice orientation to address institutional oppression in contemporary communities.

Aguilar et al. describe and apply collaborative autoethnography to record the experiences of marginalized graduate students and faculty in US-based school psychology programs. The process invites multiple voices to contribute to creating a counterspace for historically excluded and underrepresented people to be heard. In such space, stories can be told to express frustration, challenge erroneous and oppressive attributions, and promote community building. The authors adopt an intersectional approach to analyse the discussions convened for the paper. A number of themes were then drawn from discussion transcripts, from which programmatic, faculty, and student implications were derived. The paper makes an important contribution to the special issue with particular interest going to the ethics involved in utilizing innovative methodology within traditional modes of oversight.

The final paper of this special issue comes from an international collaboration involving scholars from Australia and the US. Corcoran and Vassallo argue that the continued separation of school and educational psychology, across aspects of research, training, and professional practice particularly in the US, limits prospective knowledge development. An example is used where sub-discipline siloing has seen the creation and ongoing development of isolated critical applications in school and educational psychology. To encourage alignment between these critically informed approaches, the authors put forward the idea of psychosocial justice – an ethically centred approach to psychological theory∼practice which shifts social justice orientations to explicitly oppose reductionist susceptibilities. Several pragmatic suggestions are made to address how school and educational psychology might be able to collaborate more effectively. For example, the inclusion of researchers on intradisciplinary teams would encourage dialogue between sub-disciplines.

As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, the prospect of this special issue was initially made possible via collaborative work involving the journal's Editorial Board. From conceptualization to actualization, the special issue would not have been possible were it not for the tireless support of Sally Grapin (editor-in-chief) and Amity Noltemeyer (consulting editor). I also would like to sincerely thank the reviewers who contributed their time to ensuring the high scholarly quality of the special issue. Finally, my thanks extend to the authors who so generously contributed their work to this special issue. The prospect of collaborative knowledge-making is alive and well – I hope you, the reader, concur.