Inclusive Future Making Through Critical Implementation Praxis to Address Racial Disproportionality in School Discipline

Abstract

Background:

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an obdurate injustice, particularly for Indigenous youth who experience systemic exclusion and punitive treatment in educational spaces. Although interventions such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) have helped reduce exclusionary practices, they have not adequately addressed racial disparities. Emerging scholarship calls for race-conscious, locally grounded approaches that move beyond universal, technical solutions to foster systemic transformation. In response, the Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), a participatory co-design intervention, was launched with a rural high school to develop a culturally responsive and inclusive behavioral support system that addresses school discipline disparities affecting American Indian students.

Research Question:

This study examines how a rural school community, serving students across 12 townships and an American Indian reservation, engaged in critical implementation praxis, iterative cycles of collective reflection and action, to enact a new behavioral support system co-designed through the ILL. Specifically, it investigates how school community members, including students, families, educators, and Tribal partners, collaboratively refined the system through reflective dialogues and design experiments that responded to the school’s sociocultural and political realities. The study explores how the school community addressed systemic contradictions that emerged during implementation, disrupting and reimagining punitive disciplinary structures.

Research Design:

This study employs Critical Design Ethnography to analyze the participatory co-design process led by the school community. Data generation focused on the implementation phase of the ILL and included video/audio recordings, field notes, session artifacts, and weekly memos. An abductive analytic approach was used to identify patterns of reflective dialogue and collective action across 11 implementation team sessions, involving educators, students, Tribal partners, and university researchers.

Conclusions:

Findings indicate that critical implementation praxis enabled the school community to (1) continually revisit and concretize core principles of dignity, equity, and Indigeneity into actionable policies and practices; (2) work through systemic contradictions by transforming germ-cell ideas into context-specific programs and relational practices; and (3) build bottom-up, community-led forms of implementation that redefined discipline as community building rather than exclusion. Through ongoing reflection and iterative refinement, the behavioral support system was reconceptualized as a dynamic, evolving artifact, positioning systemic change not as a one-time intervention but as a sustained commitment to educational justice. This study illustrates how context-specific, community-led implementation praxis can catalyze systemic transformation and suggests that future discipline reform efforts should prioritize relational trust, the school community’s agency, and critical reflection to develop locally meaningful responses to racialized school discipline.