Guest editorial: A disruptive disposition: Attitudes for justice-seeking partnerships illuminating and making transparent our intentions and purposes

Sharon Hixon, Loleta Sartin, Teresa R. Fisher-Ari, Anne Martin

School-University Partnerships

ISSN: 1935-7125

Open Access. Article publication date: 21 May 2024

Issue publication date: 21 May 2024

115

Citation

Hixon, S., Sartin, L., Fisher-Ari, T.R. and Martin, A. (2024), "Guest editorial: A disruptive disposition: Attitudes for justice-seeking partnerships illuminating and making transparent our intentions and purposes", School-University Partnerships, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1108/SUP-05-2024-036

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Sharon Hixon, Loleta Sartin, Teresa R. Fisher-Ari and Anne Martin

License

Published in School-University Partnerships. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode


In constructing the call and editing this journal, we were particularly committed to an asset-based and collaborative approach to considering the critical role of Minority Serving Institutions of higher education partnering with Minority Serving School Districts. We wanted to develop an opportunity and space to highlight the individual and shared successes to see if there were ways we could collectively scale the work of equity across contexts, learning from each other and reframing innovations in the specific contexts of our work in communities. We wanted to spotlight successes and provide implications for ourselves, each other and principally white institutions who are also in partnership with minority-serving districts and schools to do so with equity and justice at the heart of their partnerships. We wanted to create a space of knowledge sharing where people could bring together the insights and opportunities of partnerships they have crafted and share and grow and learn together, replicating, building on, connecting and developing on the ideas crafted and ongoing work situated in a range of locally responsive community-based innovative partnerships working toward justice and equity. This critical connection is necessary if we, as a network of professional development communities, take collective action to advance equity, antiracism and social justice within and among schools, colleges/universities and our respective community and professional partners. If this stance is truly essential, as we believe it is, we must take up opportunities to learn with and alongside each other – and to that end, we have worked together to create this macro-community of practice alongside the practitioner-scholars. This special issue is an intentional effort toward that larger community of practice as we boundary-span (; , ) together across contexts, communities and systems of partnerships to learn and grow together (PDS Essential #8) as we engage in collaborative research and share our results and implications (PDS Essential # 5).

As we considered our work and the work made evident by the co-authors of this special issue, we saw several key and shared characteristics of these partnerships and those engaged in this work. We saw them as disruptive dispositions that worked to bring about more justice, equity, access and agency.

Deconstructing disruptive dispositions

In taking together the implications from each of the articles included in the journal alongside the lessons learned from our practice, we have identified several attitudinal dispositions necessary for working toward justice within and through our partnerships. In the next section, we will consider the dispositions of service-centered and action-oriented work rooted in the praxis of putting recursive reflection into action. We discuss critical considerations of grappling with language and power while intentionally centering the community’s and school-based partners' knowledge and voices. We discuss how these practices engender relational reciprocity and a deep sense of trust necessary for authenticity and justice-seeking when enacting partnerships.

Service centered and action-oriented

Across the articles, the importance of taking on a service-centered mindset to enable taking action now came through as foundational in forging successful partnerships. Throughout partnership work, authors of the articles have taken up their efforts to mitigate barriers, foster innovation and most significantly, respond in ways centered on community-articulated needs and hopes. Central to our practice is working with other stakeholders to ensure we were asking questions like “Who are these innovations purporting to support? -And how can those voices and people be at the center of the decision-making process?” Over time, we have seen service as work we do alongside the community rather than something we do to or for others. The only way that reforms and partnerships can become ones that meaningfully support justice and uplift all partners is to grapple with who is making decisions and who is acting for and on behalf of whom. Asking these critical questions is not only necessary to shape action but also is an ongoing praxis of reflection-in-action that must be recursive and ongoing if they are to be responsive and democratizing.

A praxis of recursive reflection

One key disposition of disruption that we note in our ongoing collaborations and the authors' work in these chapters was the commitment to entering all partnerships as learners engaged in reflective and recursive work (PDS Essential # 4). Partners worked to remind each other and themselves not to allow the fear of imperfection and the fear of misstepping to stop them from taking any action or doing the necessary work. A realization that we are all on a continuum of personal and professional development and that we will inherently misstep if we take any steps at all allows us to have the grace with ourselves and each other to return, regroup, reframe and recalibrate our work and our partnerships. While we find solace in the words of , that we sometimes must live our way into answers that could not be given to us now, his words also require a sense of humility partnered with a willingness to review, reflect, revise and to set a new course for the work. In partnerships, we intentionally review and revise as we learn and build together and together are involved in implementing the work. In the work of equity and justice, doing nothing until all the unknowable things are known and all the requisite personal and professional development has occurred sets up a silence, an omission, and an absence of action that is complicit with an inequitable status quo. Realizing that brave spaces and brave partnerships must be bold and courageous, and also pliant and flexible to recursively move into reflective and active praxis that promotes this learning leader disposition is critical for this disruptive work to transform inequities into more just opportunities. This bravery, vulnerability and growing edges are particularly evident in our language choices if we take the time to critically review our discursive moves and the opportunities for the ongoing learning they evidence.

Language and power

While compiling this special edition and reflecting on the praxis involved in our partnerships, the interplay of language and power became an important point of reflection. We began to think more about language reflexivity as we attended to how the authors use language. The focus of this edition, minority-serving institutions, includes language in need of critiquing as it reflects historical and current practices of exclusion. While the term minority connotes a smaller value; in fact, the Black, Brown and Indigenous students attending minority-serving institutions reflect the racial identities of the global-majority (, ). While we recognize that language can be powerful in terms of obtaining grants, language must also center and serve students who are too often excluded from many of our institutions. As such, we also call for reflexivity about the term minority-serving institutions.

It is of note that different words are being used as we talk about race, as we talk about power, as we talk about access and privilege and perspective. Language itself hides and reveals inequitable distributions of power within our institutions. Language itself provides us a space to grapple with our unfinishedness () and our ways of thinking about the ongoing space of partnership.

In taking on a disruptive disposition regarding language and power, we encourage reflecting on identity and language through the perspectives of students, families and educators. What labels would people use for themselves? Far too often, our unexamined language is coded, race-averse or color-blind; this is problematic as it can perpetuate inequality. We need to be able to consider how our language constructs and deconstructs, how it elevates, reveals and conceals, how it is humanizing and/or dehumanizing. We must grapple with our language and with our relationships to power and humanizing practices to create Brave Spaces () in our non-neutral and inequitable world. It forces us to grapple with what we say and do, even as it charges us to do something to make systems and spaces better and more just. It is praxis (), reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (). Justice requires that we not just sit and wait until we know and can use the least problematic discourse or know the infallible panacea and answer to all-of-the-questions. We cannot use this to avoid doing the work. We must use the words we have while we work to create new words. We must be in the places of our lives, even as we work to create new spaces.

As such, it is essential to think about the role of power in the language that we use. We realized we did not examine if the words Minority Serving Institution used in the call for manuscripts were coded, race adverse or color-blind. As we continued on our writing path, we realized our unfinishedness. Carefully attending to language can be a dismantling act by placing the act of exclusion on the group in power and asking who and what contributions have been excluded.

Centered voices of knowing

In alignment and expansion of PDS Essential #7, calling for shared governance structures and PDS Essential #9, evidencing a commitment to shared resources and recognition across partners, a central undercurrent through each of the dispositions we have discussed thus far is a belief in, commitment to and action toward centering the voices fundamental to our partnerships-caregivers and families, children, teachers and school and district leadership. In doing so, we must be intentional about who we bring to the table to work alongside us. Further, we must reject the traditional methods of exclusion upholding the ivory tower and authentically value and honor expertise in all places and spaces. It is important that in PDS work, higher education partners reject an elite savior perspective that does not honor all the critically valuable and transformative things we can learn from P-12 school-based partners. When entering schools and communities with well-intended but unexamined dispositions toward saving or empowering, universities and faculty risk the (destructive) positionality of going in once school-based partners have already done the great and critical work of equity and then at least in part claim that they have initiated those successes. Oftentimes, the university partners shape the public narrative and move these successes to publication, at times overblowing their contribution to the success of the innovation. In addition to being false, this narrative is dangerous and counterproductive.

Honoring and centering the voices of knowing – and the agentive actions of practicing educators – guards against appropriating and colonizing the efforts of those working so deeply for justice. One key reminder is that if we have painted ourselves as the sole heroine of our stories, we are not fully honoring what is happening, the expertise and effort that is located in the work and lives of teachers and we are not acknowledging the gift and contributions of our school and community-based colleagues. Honoring the contributions, value and expertise of field and classroom-based partners is necessary if we are to engage in liberatory and transformational practices. We recommend that all of us, especially those from university-based spaces and with the identities that the academy engenders, interrogate and problematize our dispositions and partnering practices, asking: “Who is framed as helping whom? Who is showing up for whom? Who is teaching whom?” Continuing to grapple with these questions of power, positionality, privilege and perspective in our partnerships can help us deconstruct frames that center and privilege the Ivory Tower of the academy and more intentionally position us alongside our partners engaged in restorative and equity-oriented work. This shift is necessary if we hope to be an accomplice of justice.

Caregivers and families are the first and most important teachers of their children, and their dreams and hopes for them- and children’s hopes for themselves and their community-must be centered as the heartbeat of the work. While PDS challenges us to uphold commitments to collective inquiry (PDS Essential # 3) for improvement and equitable student outcomes, students and families are too infrequently positioned at the center of this work. As we honor caregivers and center their voices and knowledge, we must ask what they want and need for their children and then work alongside them to make those visions, resources, and supports central in the efforts. It is one thing to use grant funding to buy books or evidence-based materials and resources for caregivers to use at home to support children-that is a step toward access and equity. However, justice requires that everyone is at the table, informing, leading and directing the work. As the primary advocates for children, caregivers and their wisdom and vision are critical partners in shaping innovation that will truly matter if we engage in collective and meaningful work with children. As we envision and develop partnerships, a relational reciprocity, and centered caregiver knowledge and insights make the work relevant in homes, communities and the lives of real people in the communities of our partnerships and support meaningful work alongside children. This relational reciprocity can also support families and caregivers through centering multilingualism and the criticality of maintaining heritage languages while debunking master narratives privileging English-only approaches. Reciprocal and mutual connections with caregivers offer us opportunities to learn and share the empowering and critical knowledge we have about the role of first language in the home. We are calling for dispositions that center the voices and contributions of caregivers at all stages of the partnership.

Children are rarely at the table informing the designs of our partnerships and innovation. In fact, few of us who are in meetings shaping and designing partnerships work daily with children in classrooms. Children know their schools intimately and deeply. They have a deep sense of fairness and know things that need to change in their spaces for them to be joyful, humanizing and honoring spaces. Some schools have active Problem-Based Learning practices where children engage together to make substantive changes in their schools and communities through an agentive process of inquiry and transformation. Centering their voices in partnerships is rare but necessary if we are going to make sure that schooling does in fact support their ability to thrive. To be sure, the answers we find together with children are ones we likely would not have come up with without their creative, hopeful, innovative spirits leading the way.

Centering teachers and their knowledge of what needs to happen for justice and equity in their classrooms is also critical. They inherently walk the journey with us. As we think of the teachers in our work, we often think of the metaphor – a teacher is a gardener. Teachers are the people who tend, who work, who nurture, who work to make conditions better for the entire ecosystem. We wonder how re-considering and attending to our metaphors for teachers and teaching might truly offer us a more humanizing, responsive and just set of alternatives for practice and our shared purpose. They are already on the journey with us, and how can we center teacher knowledge and commitment so that we do not implement yet another reform but rather work together with their leadership and vision to make their dreams and visions of just classrooms a reality?

Honoring school and district leaders and their vision for their community, schools and students is critical at every step of the partnership. District leaders run districts of anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000 children every day. They know their district, their needs, their communities, their schools and teachers, and their vision for the ongoing work. Universities who hope to partner with systems must ensure that they are not paternalistically sharing the ways that districts will benefit from the things universities will do for them. Rather, the conversations about ways that the university can support and fit in with the priorities, hopes and needs of the system and what they want and need as they work toward equity.

Trust both the precursor and the product of this centering voices of knowing and all partners

A critical and foundational part of all partnerships is the ideal of trust. If partnerships are to be mutual, reciprocal and oriented toward justice, the processes and practices must also be rooted within a sense of trust and mutuality. Establishing a foundation of trust requires that all the partners feel like they can come to the table and say, this is working, and this is not working. Critical is the idea that when something is not working for a person, partner or a group of people engaged in the work, and when this is shared, people do not feel wounded or take it personally but rather grapple together with the problem to brainstorm solutions and then take action to try them. This fix-it, break-it framework of trusting each other and taking iterative steps toward changing practices to be more just in an ongoing and unfinished way both demonstrates trust and amplifies trust. When you honor and value everybody at the table – when everybody feels safe to take risks, share their perspective and ideas, and authentically share concerns when equity is not being realized – then you can build a transformative partnership toward justice.

Doing this requires that the people and voices informing the work do not privilege one person or positionality. Everyone is needed for equity and justice, and everyone’s experience of the work is critical – the administrators, the tenured faculty member and especially the students, the families and the teachers. When any partner shares a concern, it is the role of the collective to ask, “Now, what are we going to do to fix it together?” In this way, trust is re-established with each opportunity for mutual connection, problem-solving and each time that the voices and perspectives of each person shape the direction of the work. It is this trust rooted in relational reciprocity and collective action that enables worthy work that can be disruptive of inequities in institutions, partnerships and across contexts.

Taken together, we found that disruptive dispositions toward partnerships focused on equity and justice have a number of defining characteristics, including a service-centered and action-oriented approach, a deeply engaged praxis of putting recursive reflection into action, an ongoing grappling with language and power, a centering the voices of knowing that are tending to, nurturing and engaging in the work (children, caregivers, teachers and school and district leaders), and an ongoing and continuous effort to collaborative rooted in trust built from relational reciprocity. We have come to see these components as necessary if our partnerships are going to be articulated agreements (PDS Essential #6) that act as more than just words on a page (, ), but rather steps toward more justice.

Non-conclusion – a call for continuous grappling together in our unfinished work of becoming and being partners toward equity

Partnerships (even and maybe especially grant-funded ones with well-framed words and clearly articulated plans) must be constantly renegotiated and disrupted as the words on the page become the enacted practice in community and communion with others. As we think about these disruptive dispositions evidenced in our daily efforts and the efforts of our co-authors, we note the internal coherence for which we are striving, for our actions and interactions, our processes and the practice of partnership to reflect our values. From partnerships that are newly coming to be, the ideations of equity are being shaped into more than words on a page. From long-standing collaborations, the role of ongoing reflexive grappling as we examine ourselves and what the world calls of us now challenges us to continue to vulnerably learn and grow together. This effort toward relational reciprocity is in itself a disruptive stance.

To be sure, the implications from all the articles of this journal point to the need for systematically and intentionally breaking down barriers and creating pathways for potential teachers of the global-majority (, ), through responsive programming and wrap-around supports.

  1. How do we make sure that as a field and in individual programs and partnerships we are actually mitigating or eliminating barriers to equity, access and opportunity for global majority teacher candidates, practicing teachers and leaders, and critically to the families and children of excluded communities? How might we create wrap-around supports and services which intentionally disrupt and dismantle exclusionary practices so that our actions and partnerships can be congruent with real purposes of justice and equity? How do we move toward that coherence in all our work and collaborations?

  2. How can we offer preservice teachers, in various contexts, opportunities to meaningfully develop their understanding of culturally responsive and sustaining practice in a range of communities to dismantle the ideals of within-group homogeneity and stereotype-driven beliefs about communities?

  3. How might the geographies, places and spaces of teacher-education practica and preparation be bridged to complexify teacher candidates' thinking, opportunities and reflective capacities, nesting them in engagement and responsive innovation across contexts and communities? (PDS Essential #4)

  4. How might the faculty of programs also experience that shifting toward connection through collaborations that are meaningful and reciprocal between faculties at partnering institutions of higher education with complementary visions and commitments toward equity?

These questions have been significant catalysts in our pursuit of partnerships and collaborative efforts. In our current partnership through a Department of Education SEED grant, Georgia Educators Networking to Revolutionize and Transform Education (GENERATE), we are working toward mutually beneficial and reciprocal partnerships as we create an exchange process for students and faculty to each other’s institutions, one in Macon, Georgia – an urban context where many children in the classrooms are Black, and the other in North Georgia with a significant number of children whose first language is Spanish, but a predominantly white pool of teacher candidates. We are initiating a formal partnership centered in clinical practice as a central focus and location for preservice teacher preparation and development (PDS Essential #2) to benefit teacher candidates at both institutions.

The following questions guided the development of the cultural exchange initiative.

  1. Can teacher candidates interact in other systems and partnerships to learn with and from children and peers of different cultures?

  2. Can we send faculty with them so that those faculty members have different experiences, too?

  3. How might residencies be a pipeline for school-based professionals who want to stay in their own communities while building their knowledge and credentialing to become teachers of record? How might intentional partnerships provide them with experiences in communities and with students who are not in their classrooms daily to broaden their understandings of themselves and what justice looks like and requires in various settings?

  4. How might preservice teacher programs preparing mostly white, English-dominant women create opportunities for candidates to grapple and grow in the contexts of additive partnerships and embeddedness alongside families and communities?

When we think of ways to work toward justice and equity, the efforts toward dismantling inequitable power structures in our institutions and academies seem overwhelming. However, in thinking through the implications from each of the pieces included and our takeaways throughout the process of editing this journal alongside our work in building out our partnerships, we now see that quiet, everyday actions and attitudes are also places of disruption that bend the arc of history toward justice (). We realize that the micro work of justice plays out in our interactions-in large decisions and in small interactions. We recognize, again and again, what stated as the “unfinished” work of “becoming” rather than “being” () partners. In reflecting on many of the myriad choices we made and make in partnership and the choices and decisions of collaboration and connection that were illuminated by the authors contributing to this special issue, we saw many liberatory acts that were taken up with intentionality as partners worked to “do the right thing” together. Some of these decisions were not out loud liberatory acts to dismantle inequitable systems and structures of power. Rather, they were the daily actions of valuing each other, of truly centering the knowledge, the skills and the agency of every partner.

This disruption moves the work toward spaces of co-liberation and possibility. Whenever we worked together to avoid single-sided solutions or a sense of paternalistic decision-making, we worked toward equity. We were being disruptive as we slowed down and created space for dialogue and co-construction rather than succumbing to the efficiency and urgency of holding to a single story, perspective or potential next step. We are being disruptive when we ask whose voice and knowledge is not being heard or centered and make that a critical priority in our process and practice. These spaces of rupture in traditional power distribution are micro-revolutionary acts that shift our ways of being together, doing the work and reframing who truly benefits from partnerships and collaboration and toward the ideals of democratizing practice. This work is messy. We take missteps. We work to recalibrate together. We take action. We build it and break it and build it again, together, as we work to be and become ever better and ever more just. This is true of our languaging, our practice and our purpose. Nevertheless, we have come to understand that if you wait till the perfect time to start a partnership, lift your voice and take a step toward justice, you will never get started. Rather, for all of us, history and our collective future require that we take those steps, fallible and imperfect, but now and together. Sometimes, rather than all the answers, having the questions and the partners beside you to help you grapple and move rightly is all that one can have, and all that we need to do the work. We are grateful to and for the authors, scholars and educators who joined us in this edited journal and who join us, challenge us, inspire us and grow with us in the work-both the work we have accomplished and the work that we continue.

Even as we conclude the journey we have taken alongside our co-authors through the creation and compilation of this journal, we are simultaneously looking at the spaces where this collective effort has offered opportunity and promise. This process has left us with both next steps and lingering questions we must continue to grapple with individually, institutionally and collectively. Even with these significant contributions to the field highlighting innovations toward justice and equity across contexts and partnerships, we realize there is more to be done, uncovered, unlearned and grappled with. There are more implications we have not thought of, and there are still more opportunities for growth. The world has stayed the same and changed while we have been working together on this journal. This world that we live in today continues to challenge and compel us to respond differently, to be disruptive and to make justice more real and possible. In six more months, our world will inevitably charge us to act in different responsive and engaged ways toward collaboration, community, partnership and responsivity if we align ourselves with justice in that time and in the places where we are situated. The world will continue to offer us new ways that we need to respond and disrupt. We realize, once again, that as we think about disrupting that cradle-to-prison pipeline and injustice in all of its forms, we are also constantly and necessarily-talking about our own growth and becoming, which remains, thankfully, unfinished – a stance that may be at the heart of any disruptive and transformative and just journey.

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