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Abstract

The education research community, both within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and beyond, could and should play a critical role in fundamentally transforming educational institutions and systems. Given its complexity, transformative change in education is best undertaken as a collective endeavor. Yet for researchers to be a valuable resource in educational transformation, we will need to bridge knowledge across subfields that currently have limited interaction. Through two illustrative examples, we demonstrate the need to link knowledge on educational change with knowledge on how to create more equitable, anti-racist, and decolonized spaces for formal and informal learning. While operating in different spaces and initiated at different entry points, the two change efforts exemplify a common set of commitments and actionable pathways for achieving transformational change. This article is a call to action for researchers to join together in supporting educational transformation that fundamentally challenges the inequitable arrangements persisting in educational organizations characterized by systemic racism and colonialism. Bridging knowledge bases and being accountable to serve and support communities and their intersectional identities are essential to making deep, scalable changes in education that promote social justice.

Keywords

descriptive analysis educational reform organization theory/change race social justice

The education research community, both within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and beyond, could and should play a critical role in transforming education. Transforming education is a long-term process involving a fundamental rethinking and reorganizing of educational institutions and systems to allow all people to thrive. Critically, it involves addressing the deep histories of systemic racism and colonialism that contribute to perpetuating inequitable opportunities and outcomes for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.¹ Given its complexity, transformative change in education is best undertaken as a collective and relational endeavor involving a range of stakeholders, including practitioners, policymakers, students, community members, and researchers. For researchers to be a valuable resource in educational transformation, we will need to bridge knowledge across scholarly communities that have limited interaction.

Education researchers work in a wide variety of areas that are relevant to transformation. To narrow the scope for this article, we focus on the importance of linking knowledge on educational change with knowledge on how to create more equitable, anti-racist, and decolonized spaces for formal and informal learning. There is little intersection between scholars doing anti-racist and/or decolonial work and those studying systemic change (Welton et al., 2018), and they typically do not occupy the same spaces within AERA. We argue for bridge building between these scholarly communities to support transformative, social justice, and decolonial goals in education.

As we consider educational transformation, it is important to examine change across formal and informal spaces. Students move across an ecology of formal and informal learning settings, and “educational experiences are not siloed in school and out of school; rather the experiences are intertwined” (Zollinger & DiCindio, 2021, p. 481). Unequal institutions in education are also not limited to schools. In this article, we share two examples of educational change efforts that can benefit from an inquiry approach—and a change strategy—that draws both on scholarship on educational change and scholarship on anti-racism and decolonizing efforts: (a) a national initiative to counter bigotry in schools and (b) a decolonizing initiative that redresses colonial harm in a museum, an educational organization engaged in informal learning.

Although operating in different spaces and initiated at different entry points, these two change efforts have commonalities that are elevated in a set of commitments and actionable pathways for achieving transformational change. As we explain, these principles are evident when we bridge knowledge bases but would not be apparent if we drew solely on a single area. In the next section, we discuss the knowledge bases that we believe must be bridged, noting the important intersections that result. Second, we describe the commitments and actionable pathways needed for transforming education in the current sociopolitical moment. Third, we discuss these commitments in action, providing examples of pathways toward change inherent in the two initiatives. We conclude with next steps for the field.

The Knowledge Base

The field of educational change has contributed to building an understanding of a range of topics, including the role of educators in educational change, implementing and sustaining change, how context shapes change efforts, systemic reform, and the implications of evidence-informed improvement strategies, among many other topics (e.g., Fullan, 2015; Garcia-Huidobro et al., 2017; Hargreaves et al., 2009; Malone, 2015; Peurach et al., 2022; Spillane et al., 2022; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Research on educational change has illuminated the role of educational policy in establishing accountability systems, mandating new standards, and establishing professional development networks (e.g., Daly & Finnigan, 2016; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Prior research has also illuminated struggles to shift the traditional “grammar of schooling,” how systems and schools operate and are organized (e.g., Cohen & Mehta, 2017; Mehta & Datnow; Tyack & Cuban, 1995).

Research in the field of educational change has also been informative regarding the issue of scale. Scale is one of the most critical topics in educational change and has been taken up in Educational Researcher (e.g., Coburn, 2003; Morel et al., 2019). One way to think about scale is in terms of replication, or the transfer of an innovation from one location to other locations. Coburn (2003) expanded the definition of scale to include depth, sustainability, spread, and ownership. Revisiting these concepts, Morel et al. (2019) explained the importance of examining how the adoption of reform spurs further innovation and how networks play a role in spreading innovations and encouraging adaptations. In education, scale has been discussed in terms of movement across a system of schools at the district, state, or national levels (Earl et al., 2003). Most scale-up efforts focused on building infrastructure for spread and paid less attention to the beliefs and values that guide how organizations function. Much of the earlier literature focused on change efforts that are “normatively and politically neutral,” offering limited guidance for change that has an equity dimension (Welner, 2001, p. 12). As we think about using this knowledge of scale to transform education, it is important for scholars to grapple with what it means to scale anti-racist and decolonial change efforts. Changes that involve political dimensions may complicate theories of scale, which use a rational-planning, systems approach, creating power inequalities between policymakers who are cast as experts and those at the local level who are seen as implementers (Bates, 2013). Indeed, grassroots approaches that “build power from previously marginalized groups” may be more helpful in these circumstances (Oakes & Rogers, 2006, p. 15).

From the research base on educational change, we know that educational reform unfolds in a multilayered, dynamic system in which people exercise power and agency (Biesta et al., 2015; Bridwell-Mitchell, 2015; Datnow et al., 2002). For example, teachers are active sensemakers about reform who filter and adjust new reforms and policies based on their expertise and contexts (Coburn, 2001; Datnow & Park, 2009; Gutierrez & Penuel, 2014). Teachers also take a variety of stances in educational change efforts, ranging from advocates for transformation to defenders of the status quo (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2015). Beyond schools, teachers also play pivotal roles in partnering with practitioners in informal learning spaces (Neighbors & Kleinrock, 2021). Although we understand how teachers engage with educational reform, we know less about how to move from the individual anti-racist teacher who has raised their own consciousness to a collective effort involving many teachers (personal communication, M. Pollock, 2021). Bridging knowledge bases would be helpful in this regard.

Educational change research has also informed us about the ways in which the structure and culture of educational organizations are mutually reinforcing. Structural changes must be accompanied by changes in the culture (Fullan, 2015). Unless an innovation becomes deeply stitched into the cultural fabric of an educational organization, it is unlikely to endure (Anderson & Stiegelbauer, 1994; Prenger et al., 2022; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This is apparent in informal and formal settings. Sustainable changes must also have breadth and depth and not benefit some at the expense of others (Shirley et al., 2020). This has important implications for how we think about transformative change with social justice dimensions. For example, a nonprofit educational organization engaged in informal learning may have a director who is strongly committed to anti-racism and decolonization, but unless the commitment permeates all of those involved from the boardroom to the staff who interact with the public, it will have limited impact. Indeed, recognizing systemic racism and injustice while also navigating the pandemic have caused some museums to examine their internal relationships (Truels & Fisher, 2021). Research on educational change can help us think about systemic change, but it typically does not inform us on how to address individuals’ beliefs about race and ethnicity that may constitute a barrier.

Attending to internal organizational dynamics is not enough, however, because elements in the external context profoundly affect change as well. Recent events have underscored the need for a systemic approach to change that is also guided by an “explicit commitment to serve all students underscoring anti-racism and anti-classism” (Fullan, 2021, p. 29). So, too, in the realm of informal learning, “museums faced calls to finally reconcile anti-racism rhetoric with action” (Truels & Fisher, 2021, p. 520). Many more scholars and practitioners are recognizing that transformative change in education must include these elements (Nasir et al., 2021; Welton et al., 2018); the hard work will come in creating pathways to bring these commitments to life. One such effort is the Smithsonian Museum’s We Are Not a Stereotype initiative, which brought museum educators and teachers together to cocreate resources to combat anti-Asian bias (Neighbors & Kleinrock, 2021). When change has a social justice dimension, not only must the norms and politics inside educational organizations be addressed but also those “of the larger society from which they emanate” (Oakes & Rogers, 2006, p. 15). There are important studies that have highlighted how change efforts confronted deep-seated belief systems and challenging political environments (e.g., Diamond et al., 2021; Oakes et al., 1997; Payne, 2012; Welner, 2001). Research that bridges educational change and issues of race and power is essential if we are to engage in transformative work that will help us create and sustain anti-racist and decolonized spaces in education.

When enacting change, we must recognize the culture of coloniality within education. Calderon (2014) defined coloniality in education as the “manner in which modern systems of colonialism operate epistemically, economically, ontologically, politically and spatially” (p. 314). Coloniality is systemic in education—buildings, pedagogical models, and curricula often reflect linear, settler-colonial, Euro-centric, Western-dominated constructs (Bang & Medin, 2010; Sleeter, 2010; Todd & Robert, 2018; Tuck & Tuck, 2013). Accepting that colonialism is varied and deeply embedded within educational institutions and shifting this paradigm means that the field must collectively engage in the application of anti-colonial and decolonial praxis for meaningful and sustainable change to occur (Calderon, 2014; Desai & Sanya, 2016; Sefa Dei & Lordan, 2016). Educational change scholarship can conceptually help us in planning for systemic shifts in organizations, but for transformative change to occur, it must bridge also with scholarship on how to dismantle, disrupt, and redress colonialism.

Although many educational change scholars are deeply concerned about promoting equity in diverse education contexts, a serious consideration of what it would take to create anti-racist and decolonial educational organizations has not typically been a focus. There are many scholars making critically important theoretical and empirical contributions on how to address racism and coloniality in education spaces (e.g., Bang, 2017; Diamond et al., 2021; Diem & Welton, 2020; Rodriguez, 2018), including also problematizing how research has typically been conducted on populations who have been impacted by colonization (Brayboy, 2010; Jolivétte, 2015; Patel, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuhiwai-Smith, 2005). This work is pivotal in helping us understand issues such as how leaders can address color-evasive policies in undertaking change in their schools (Diem & Welton, 2020) and how White supremacy and settler colonialism shape opportunities for students of color in suburban schools (Diamond et al., 2021). It is also important to note that equity, social justice, and decolonization should not be conflated; they are related but not interchangeable (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Commitments to Change and Actionable Pathways

Although the exercise of bridging knowledge bases in education is an evolving process, numerous core concepts are revealed through our approach to this work. Specifically, we can distill a set of principles to both guide and examine educational change efforts that fundamentally challenge the inequitable arrangements persisting in organizations characterized by systemic racism and colonialism. We have deliberately framed them in practical terms so that they are useful in the process of educational transformation, not just the study of it. We organize these principles in terms of commitments to change and actionable pathways. We list the main tenets in the following paragraphs and then animate them with case examples in the next section.

Commitments to change involve investing the time, resources, and collective effort necessary to do the ongoing institutional, interpersonal, and introspective work that will

address racism and/or colonial legacies;

honor, elevate, and listen to BIPOC voices;

confront existing power relations in society;

cultivate collective investment and coalition building;

foster community engagement;

illuminate accountability and truth telling.

These commitments are brought to life by grounding change efforts in actionable pathways that

follow a nonlinear model of change,

aim to make change locally and more broadly,

engage systemic approaches,

work across multiple contexts,

support agency at all levels,

strive for actionable and tangible change.

We believe these tenets apply to educational settings that are more typically studied (e.g., schools and districts) and to informal learning environments, such as museums and out-of-school programs, that receive less attention in the literature and where there may be more flexibility to create change. Our case examples encompass both kinds of environments.

Commitments in Action: Examples of Pathways Toward Change That Support the Need for Bridging Communities

We present two examples to demonstrate the value of bridging communities of knowledge and to elucidate the commitments to and pathways toward transformative change. To be clear, we are not reporting on an empirical study; rather, we are sharing examples that have involved members of the writing team’s prior research and/or professional engagements. Our team represents knowledge brought from the identities we hold as members of different communities, including Indigenous, People of Color, White, queer, transgender, immigrant, and of varied geographic origins. We also represent different professional communities, ranging from researcher to “pracademic” to practitioner. Our group is also composed of students and faculty in past and present professional roles in higher education, pre-K–12 teaching and counseling, social work, and nonprofit organizations. It is the braiding together of our collective knowledge across these different structures, systems, and spaces that helps us form a strong foundation to hold the information we humbly share here with the field.

#USvsHate

#USvsHate is an educator- and youth-led initiative to unite school communities against hate, bias, and injustice via “anti-hate” dialogue and public messaging that drives continuous learning and action (Pollock et al., 2022; Pollock & Yoshisato, 2021, 2022). Educators assess local needs and teach relevant anti-hate lessons, building on their curriculum or drawing from free resources from partner organizations. Then, students create antihate messages in any media to “explicitly address, explore, and refuse racism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, sexism, or other ‘hate’ forms” (usvshate.org/about/). Participants share messages locally and submit favorites to national contests. Following a voting process, winning messages are amplified online. A subset are reproduced as physical posters and stickers and sent to participating classrooms, uplifting youth voices across the United States.

#USvsHate was created in response to the spike in school-based hate since the 2016 presidential election (Costello, 2016; Costello & Dillard, 2019; Rogers et al., 2017). Teachers witnessed pervasive identity-based harassment, with incidents going unaddressed by administrators (Costello & Dillard, 2019). Teachers called for guidance about how to respond, given politically polarized contexts (Rogers et al., 2017). #USvsHate provides one pathway toward taking action. Nonetheless, pushback from school leaders, parents, and community members posed challenges to scaling anti-hate work (Pollock et al., 2022). To meet teachers where they are, #USvsHate’s design diverges from educational change scholarship that might recommend establishing a foundation of systemic support. Instead, #USvsHate bridges knowledge bases in anti-racist education (e.g., Pollock, 2008b; Tatum, 2017), social movements (e.g., Snow et al., 2007, 2019), and media, communication, and political science (e.g., Lakoff, 2004; Nyhan & Reifler, 2012). This strategy facilitated project uptake in many individual classrooms by motivated teachers and students rather than via a schoolwide or district-wide initiative.

As a participatory design research and collective action project, #USvsHate was developed by Mica Pollock and a team of scholar-practitioners in a university research center. This team, comprised of members diverse in identities, lived experiences, and expertise, deeply enriched the design, implementation, and study of #USvsHate. Piloted in partnership with educators and students in San Diego (2017–2019), #USvsHate then scaled nationally via organizational collaborations. Teaching Tolerance (now Learning for Justice) hosted #USvsHate contests, drawing participation from across the country (2019–2020). Now, #USvsHate’s expansion is powered by additional partnerships with educator- and youth-support nonprofit organizations, including The Conscious Kid, The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, and The National Writing Project, alongside original #USvsHate designers. #USvsHate’s theory of change harnesses three forms of scaling potential: (a) using an “anti-hate frame,” (b) offering an open-ended “onramp” to action, and (c) amplifying student-made public anti-hate messages.

#USvsHate project designers grappled transparently with challenges to keeping anti-hate work on schools’ agendas. Designers aimed to extend familiar concepts like anti-bullying to support rigorous interrogation of what one educator called “harder-hitting” issues, such as racism. Simultaneously, the challenge was to strategically frame the work to preserve scaling potential across politically divergent communities (Pollock & Yoshisato, 2022). Speaking empathetically about specific populations, such as LGBTQ+ people or immigrants, was seen as “too controversial” in many schools and therefore untouchable for teachers in a politically polarizing era (Pollock et al., 2022). Public educators are often expected to remain nonpartisan in classroom discussions of social issues (Levinson & Fay, 2019).

Yet in a national political climate exacerbating long-standing hateful dynamics via explicit identity-based harm and as derogatory slurs and symbols erupted across campuses (Costello, 2016), project designers reasoned teachers might be more compelled to address hate at school ethically (Levinson & Fay, 2019) and legally (Pollock, 2008a). The anti-hate frame was offered as an umbrella holding many “isms” (e.g., racism, sexism, antisemitism) and “phobias” (e.g., homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia) that might resonate with students’ experiences. Indeed, teachers noted the breadth of the anti-hate frame provided a portal into anti-racist dialogue in communities that typically did not address racism. Thus, by framing all hate forms as obviously wrong rather than debatable, project designers worked to neutralize “partisan” critiques and create a wide onramp to #USvsHate learning and action. Project designers define “onramp” as a structured invitation to enter collective efforts, starting where people are (Pollock & Yoshisato, 2022).

The team postulated that an onramp to join anti-hate work, and anti-racism particularly, would prompt contextually feasible engagement, given participants’ unique needs, resources, and capacities. Data showed the open-ended design allowed educators to introduce #USvsHate any time and take it as deeply as possible. Although the outcome of various student-created anti-hate messages remained consistent, each engagement with #USvsHate looked different. When a secondary school was defaced with a racial slur, one teacher invited students’ responses and solutions via #USvsHate essays. When a peer’s hateful note was found, an elementary class produced an anti-hate YouTube video following #USvsHate discussions. Students created anti-hate public messages in all media forms, including art installations, TED Talks, poems, fact sheets, and more.

Most teachers joined #USvsHate independently, as the only ones on their campuses. Crucially, the project website provided a key onramp to anti-hate work, ensuring that educators and youth anywhere could join #USvsHate’s collective movement any time. Educators carried their #USvsHate efforts when they changed school sites or roles, whereas traditional scaling efforts may have stalled as work contexts shifted. When schools transitioned to distance learning during the pandemic, participants could seamlessly continue anti-hate teaching and learning via online access to #USvsHate. The website infrastructure helped connect individuals in a shared effort that extended beyond their immediate environments. Furthermore, as an evolving data source representing the contributions of many, the #USvsHate website also embodies nonlinear and mutually developed change-making practices. Thus, this intentional design harnessed scaling potential by leveraging teachers’ agency to engage in anti-hate work individually and collectively and across time and space without necessarily garnering broader endorsement. Nonetheless, interviews also uncovered stories of teachers persisting with #USvsHate despite pushback, posing a scaling dilemma: How might change-making initiatives proliferate in the absence of the systemic support discussed in educational change scholarship?

Project designers posited that the amplification mechanisms of #USvsHate would drive further participation by spreading student-made anti-hate messages physically and digitally within and beyond classrooms. While considering scholarship on anti-racism in schools (Pollock, 2008b) and framing in social movements (Snow et al., 2019), this strategy also reflected educators’ beliefs about change-making possibilities given their realities of teaching during a time of extreme political division. Concerns about resistance from administrators, colleagues, and parents necessitated an approach that would sustain scaling potential in contexts lacking collective support for anti-hate work. The design could not rely on a typical approach to scale that is seen in the change literature, which would involve engaging broad support of leadership and other stakeholders. Strategically, messaging and amplification mechanisms leaned on student voices rather than administrative leadership. Here, #USvsHate drew on concepts in anti-racist communication (Pollock, 2017) and counter speech in media (Benesch et al., 2016), positing that shaping and sharing public messages might mobilize viewers to address social problems.

The opportunity to create public messages facilitated amplification of student voices against hate within and beyond schools, as with one student’s virally circulated painting denouncing xenophobia (Pollock & Yoshisato, 2022). Poster reproductions of this artwork spread the message throughout politically diverse schools and inspired public action toward immigration justice through displays in art galleries, humanitarian endeavors, and protests. #USvsHate collaborations continue to support coalition building and student leadership development, such as in a national Youth Board. These students engage in youth participatory action research and serve as #USvsHate ambassadors. These examples demonstrate the potential for collective change efforts to have real-world impacts.

Overall, #USvsHate offers one approach for harnessing the expertise of scholars, practitioners, students, and communities to bridge the work of academia, schools, and organizations in anti-hate learning and action. Such leadership by “citizen-scholars” (Harper, 2021) can create pathways toward establishing shared goals, mobilizing critical actors, and driving scalable systemic changes—particularly in crucial moments and educational contexts in which there is an urgent need for collective action toward social justice.

Decolonizing Museums

System changes centering social justice and based in decolonial praxis must be community-led and accompanied by collective action. Decolonization is a long and complex process, one that does not end based on grant deliverables or the end of a budget’s fiscal year (Macdonald, 2022). Decolonization’s purpose is to redress the harms of colonization through action-based initiatives in an effort to build a better present and future. Informal and formal education have been fortified by colonialism and simultaneously become a conduit for distributing and enforcing colonial thought, hegemony, and cultural genocide. We see examples through language and curriculum that depict Indigenous peoples as a monolith, savages, and people of the past—nonexistent in today’s society—while concurrently celebrating and justifying the work of missionaries, conquistadors, and explorers—further validating and legitimizing the innocence of settlers (Icaza & de Jong, 2019; Lonetree, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Museums are informal learning spaces where colonial justification and social distribution are present. They have become the embodiment of diverse knowledge that uplifts research, the experts, the keepers of peoples’ belongings, and a safe place to spend the day with one’s family. Many museums have an international footprint and are educational sources for diverse groups of people both internally (staff, interns, etc.) and externally (visitors, schools, etc.). Additionally, museums are founded in and benefit from the colonial enterprise. Colonial oppression toward BIPOC communities is embedded in the genetics of museums (Lonetree, 2012; Vawda, 2019). These contrasting paradigms systemically engulf the museum field; it is its birthright. Transforming museums thus requires deep knowledge of both decolonization and how educational organizations change.

Museums were born from the “cabinets of curiosity” movement where people with power and privilege took objects from Indigenous lands and added them into their private collections (Bennett, 1995). These items presented the exotic and became property of the European “civilized” society—physical validation used to further legitimize the rights for colonial expansion and power (Bennett, 1995; Crenn, 2017; Sleeper-Smith, 2009). Museums became colonial tools for perpetuating Euro-Western hegemony, sociocultural norms, and racial hierarchies through exhibitions, programming, and collecting practices (Lonetree, 2012; Maranda & Soares, 2017). Bennett (1995) discussed how museums were also structured to teach “immigrants and members of the working-class . . . [so they] ‘might learn, by imitation, the appropriate forms of dress and comportment exhibited by their social superiors’ and thereby might progressively modify their thoughts, feelings, and behavior” (Lindauer, 2007, p. 305). To this day, museums continue to be tools operating in and enabling the colonial endeavor. Some museums are now addressing the question of how to redress colonial harm when museums are founded on and actively reproduce colonization (Lonetree, 2012).

The Museum of Us (MOU, formerly the San Diego Museum of Man) is one example of an informal learning space engaged in a coordinated decolonizing effort. MOU is focusing its efforts around two key areas, organizational structure and organizational culture. Joining these two areas, the museum is able to create a decolonial pathway that affects policies, internal and external education practices, systems, language, governance, and valued stakeholders (Decolonizing Initiatives, n.d.; Garcia et al., 2019). Scholarship that bridges work on decolonization and educational change would be ideally suited for studying the initiative being undertaken at MOU.

In an educational change effort such as this, knowledge of general principles of system change are insufficient. The decolonial process is not a cookie-cutter model that can be applied indiscriminately (Macdonald, 2022). Through the guidance of Lonetree’s (2012) seminal work Decolonizing Museums and Indigenous stakeholders internationally, MOU recognized the need to integrate this fluidity by establishing guiding principles to light the path for its ongoing and evolving decolonial work (Garcia et al., 2019). Museums and other informal education settings committed to redressing colonial harm, historical and contemporary, must listen and be accountable to BIPOC peoples. Accountability means honoring and recognizing the diverse needs of BIPOC communities, creating fluid pathways toward restitution, and establishing systems that do not replicate colonial harm (Lonetree, 2012; Macdonald & Parzen, 2020).

For instance, MOU has recently launched a Google Arts and Culture exhibit titled Colonial Legacy: The Museum’s Facade. The goal was to honor the ongoing requests of community members, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, that the Museum tell the whole truth about the European colonizers’ impact instead of reiterating the ongoing dominant Euro-American historical narratives that upheld racist and colonial ways of thinking—which further contributes to the erasure of Indigenous peoples globally. To achieve this goal, the exhibit focused on four areas: (a) accountability around the museum’s role in Indigenous erasure by baring its own connection to coloniality, (b) context around historical buildings and colonial significance of architecture/monuments, (c) the nine men on the facade and their colonial legacies, and (d) connecting place, identity, truth telling, and learning (Macdonald, 2022).

One example of this is when the exhibit discusses European colonizers depicted on the building’s facade and their connection to the colonial endeavor and how society continues to uplift their oppressive actions—such as the case with Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. When illustrating Cabrillo’s impact, the interpretive slides not only speak to the museum’s facade but also connect it to bridges in California, the Cabrillo national monument, local highways, and community beaches. The interpretive content talks about Cabrillo’s violent colonial career of the enslavement, abuse, and kidnapping of Indigenous peoples (Decolonizing Initiatives Department, 2020; Macdonald, 2022). This example, which illustrates the connection between the museum’s decolonizing initiative to the broader historical and political context of colonial oppression and White supremacy in which it is situated, illuminates the complexities of educational change in this informal learning space and the need to bridge knowledge bases.

This exhibit is only one action in the process toward decolonizing practices in education—formal and informal. The MOU exhibit is built from the guiding principles and commitment that are outlined in the organization’s decolonizing initiative's strategic action plan. Underscored in this plan is the commitment to work collaboratively with multiple stakeholders and validate Indigenous authority over their own history, culture, objects, and lives (Decolonizing Initiatives Department, 2019). This happens partially by relinquishing the museum’s (and the staff’s) power and need to be the authority, and they employ the process of actively listening to what the community wants, followed by intentional actions that reflect those requests while also checking in to confirm that the action matches the community’s request. This type of decolonial approach focuses on leadership being more than about the individual or the institution’s goals; it is about the collective goals of the community. The present and future work of the MOU is to follow this pathway and practice by updating and/or creating new physical exhibits within the museum’s building under the overarching decolonial model.

Commonalities Across the Two Examples

While occurring in different kinds of settings, there are commonalities in the commitments and pathways to change that exist across the #USvsHate and MOU examples. Similar to #USvsHate, the museum’s decolonial work is emblematic of the need for broad, sustainable efforts that rely on collective investment, listening to and honoring BIPOC voices, and fluid, nonlinear models. Both examples also point to the importance of collaboration, community engagement, and supporting agency at all levels as we seek to understand and support the initiatives undertaken in formal and informal learning spaces. Both examples have made use of online opportunities in creating access points to their work and facilitating scale-up. The importance of accountability to the communities, the students, and the practitioners working in educational organizations is also apparent in both instances, as is the need for supporting their agency in the process of transformation.

Both examples underscore the need to address the racism and/or colonial legacies that are embedded systemically in policies and practices in educational organizations as well as how racism and colonialism are expressed in everyday interactions. This work requires actively confronting power relations in society, as well as in the organizations themselves, which requires working across contexts. Issues of equity, power, and access are fundamental at all levels—and persist years into the pandemic (Zollinger & DiCindio, 2021).

Next Steps

Although this article focuses on two examples of educational change where bridging knowledge bases can help transform education, there are many other instances where such bridges would also be important. Implementing anti-racist and decolonizing efforts in a systemic way would help move beyond the notion of inclusion and invite collective action to engage in the work of disrupting and dismantling inequitable structures. Such actions could also provide the groundwork for strategic and sustainable change to occur across contextual levels (Kishimoto, 2018) and formal and informal learning spaces. So, too, these and other efforts also rely a great deal on the knowledge of practitioners and community members, which must be deeply engaged in the process as well.

We seek to orient our collaborations toward transformative educational change and social justice in the current era and beyond. We find inspiration from Garcia (2020), who notes that education researchers are “in a position to substantially address the immediate needs for healing, reconciliation, resistance, and social transformation prevalent in the current social context in which students are immersed” (p. 400). Similarly, Abrego (in press) called for scholars to counter the rules of objectivity and become “invested as co-creators of a process of transformation” (p. 3). This involves embracing research as a means to foster community and supporting well-being (Abrego, in press). This is undoubtedly challenging work because it calls on us to collaborate to simultaneously improve systems in real time for the people inside them—who work within a set of policy, organizational, resource, and political constraints—while also taking a long-range view of what it will involve to transform them.

However, transformative work, both within academia and beyond it, is not only about finding new collaborators or getting the right stakeholders on board. Transformation is not a linear process, and thus we cannot offer a prescriptive playbook. This type of educational change is reflective, iterative, and deeply intertwined in the context in which it takes place, as the MOU example reveals. This work also has deeply relational and emotional dimensions, and it involves sustained interconnections between individuals, building trust, and a level of openness that is not readily apparent in many settings at the outset. Laying the foundation for transformative work takes time, and it involves careful listening to understand the different paradigms, goals, and intentions that guide our work. Our intention is to create an open space for dialogue in the field, in which there are multiple entry points to collective learning and action. Researchers wishing to engage a similar collective reflection process may wish to ask themselves the following questions:

How might our frameworks or methods facilitate or constrain efforts to bridge across knowledge bases to support educational transformation?

What institutional supports are necessary to support this work, including sustaining authentic relationships with the community?

Does our work recognize the lived experiences and elevate the voices of the communities impacted by this research process?

To guard against uncritically applying assumptions about change, how can we seek to understand contextual conditions and communities first?

What are the tangible ways we can take action to open up honest dialogue within the spaces in which we interact?

We hope these questions might offer a starting point for a productive conversation with scholars, policymakers, and educators within AERA and beyond.

We invite the field to join in this movement and be increasingly accountable to serve and support communities and their intersectional identities. Bridging knowledge bases is essential to making changes in education systemic, sustainable, and scalable. A failure to connect these knowledge bases would constitute a missed opportunity to bring transformative changes, those that confront traditional power relations around race, class, and gender, to a larger number of individuals and organizations engaged in the educational process. However, increased knowledge sharing between scholars will only go so far. We must extend collaboration into communities, acknowledging that BIPOC peoples and the practitioners that we engage with are the experts in their lived experiences and in navigating the oppressive systems in which they operate.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Amanda Datnow

Mariko Yoshisato

Brandie Macdonald

Jessica Trejos

Benjamin C. Kennedy

Notes

Authors

AMANDA DATNOW, PhD, is professor and Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair in the Department of Education Studies and associate dean in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093; adatnow@ucsd.edu . Her research focuses on educational reform and policy, particularly with regard to issues of equity and the professional lives of educators.

MARIKO YOSHISATO (SHE/HER), PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, 2800 N Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218; mcavey2@jhu.edu . Her work explores how students conceptualize and navigate pathways to postsecondary opportunities and how universities, schools, and communities leverage research-practice partnerships to collaboratively advance educational equity.

BRANDIE MACDONALD (SHE/HER; CHICKASAW/CHOCTAW), MEd, is senior director of Decolonizing Initiatives at Museum of Us and enrolled in a PhD program in Education Studies at the University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093; bnmacdon@ucsd.edu . Her work and publications focus on transformative systemic change in museums driven by anti-colonial and decolonial theory-in-practice to redress colonial harm domestically and internationally.

JESSICA TREJOS, MSEd, MSW, is a PhD candidate in education studies at University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093; jtcanela@ucsd.edu . Her research focuses on the relationship between students’ experiences of migration from Central America to the United States, their social-emotional development during adolescence, and the contexts that influence their academic experiences.

BENJAMIN C. KENNEDY (HE/HIM), MEd, is a national facilitator with Welcoming Schools and a PhD student in education studies at the University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093; bckenned@ucsd.edu . His research focuses on queer and trans inclusion in education curriculum and policy, trans student empowerment, and transgender identity development in early childhood.

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Bridging Educational Change and Social Justice: A Call to the Field

Abstract

Keywords

The Knowledge Base

Commitments to Change and Actionable Pathways

Commitments in Action: Examples of Pathways Toward Change That Support the Need for Bridging Communities

#USvsHate

Decolonizing Museums

Commonalities Across the Two Examples

Next Steps

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Notes

Authors

References