"Building Effective Tools to Encourage Consistent, Constructive, and Explicit Discourse About Issues of Equity in a School Setting"
ABSTRACT:
As a bicultural person of color, issues of equity have strongly shaped my identity and career, and I have subsequently spent a large portion of my career working with educational organizations and staff in creating safe spaces for self-reflection and action regarding these issues. Within an organization such as High Tech High that intentionally integrates its student population, these conversations and safe spaces become even more important, as integration without understanding can tend towards increased feelings of isolation by members of non-dominant groups, as well as general conflict between groups. Therefore, I chose to focus my Action Research on working to encourage consistent, constructive, and explicit discourse about issues of equity among staff and students across HTH sites. This work consisted largely of individual interviews and conversations with staff and students across multiple HTH sites, as well as facilitating large-group workshops and conversations with all faculty at High Tech Middle School, and a select group of students at High Tech High International. Based on participant feedback, I was successful in creating safe spaces in my own workshops, and helped teachers and students feel more aware and motivated to increase the level of equity conversations in their own classrooms. However, I did not have the same level of success in terms of capacity-building, as many participants struggled to follow up on their desires to do this work due to a perceived lack of knowledge of how to carry it out. To deal with this, as I continue this work in the future, I will do more work building capacity with a select group of individuals prior to bringing the whole group together. On an HTH-specific level, I believe that very intentional reflection on how the HTH “culture of autonomy” can sometimes clash with the consistency and structure necessary to achieve regular, safe, and constructive conversations about issues of equity would be necessary for work along these lines to be carried out effectively across the organization in the future.
(for more detail, read my full thesis, and/or download and test the ALPHA of my Facilitation App for Android below)
As a bicultural person of color, issues of equity have strongly shaped my identity and career, and I have subsequently spent a large portion of my career working with educational organizations and staff in creating safe spaces for self-reflection and action regarding these issues. Within an organization such as High Tech High that intentionally integrates its student population, these conversations and safe spaces become even more important, as integration without understanding can tend towards increased feelings of isolation by members of non-dominant groups, as well as general conflict between groups. Therefore, I chose to focus my Action Research on working to encourage consistent, constructive, and explicit discourse about issues of equity among staff and students across HTH sites. This work consisted largely of individual interviews and conversations with staff and students across multiple HTH sites, as well as facilitating large-group workshops and conversations with all faculty at High Tech Middle School, and a select group of students at High Tech High International. Based on participant feedback, I was successful in creating safe spaces in my own workshops, and helped teachers and students feel more aware and motivated to increase the level of equity conversations in their own classrooms. However, I did not have the same level of success in terms of capacity-building, as many participants struggled to follow up on their desires to do this work due to a perceived lack of knowledge of how to carry it out. To deal with this, as I continue this work in the future, I will do more work building capacity with a select group of individuals prior to bringing the whole group together. On an HTH-specific level, I believe that very intentional reflection on how the HTH “culture of autonomy” can sometimes clash with the consistency and structure necessary to achieve regular, safe, and constructive conversations about issues of equity would be necessary for work along these lines to be carried out effectively across the organization in the future.
(for more detail, read my full thesis, and/or download and test the ALPHA of my Facilitation App for Android below)
activityapp.apk | |
File Size: | 220 kb |
File Type: | apk |