Reproducing or Challenging Power in the Questions We Ask and the Methods We Use: A Framework for Activist Research in Urban Education

Many have argued that educational research does little to change (and may actually reproduce) the social-structural inequalities shaping the quality of high-poverty urban schools. Building from this premise, this paper asks: How can university-based scholars of urban education do research that encourages, produces, or informs change in urban schools and the conditions that shape them? I examine two broad aspects of urban educational research: the questions we ask and the methods we use. In both cases, I critique the dominant paradigm of technical rationality—one in which school failure is approached as a localized technical problem unveiled through neutral, objective, and experimental research methods. In contrast, I propose a paradigm of “political rationality” (Klees, Rizzini, & Dewees, 2000, Children on the streets of the Americas: homelessness, education and globalization in the United States, Brazil and Cuba. New York: Routledge) that approaches school failure and research practice as political issues situated within and shaped by social relations of power. Innovations in urban education research that reflect the logic of political rationality include: more contextualized and politicized analyses of urban schools, and the expanded use of engaged, collaborative, and participatory research methods. Drawing on this work and my experience implementing a participatory research project, I propose a framework for activist research in urban education, and critically evaluate the limits and possibilities of such work to effect change in urban schools.Kysa Nygreen is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Community Studies Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.     

Competing Paradigms of Educational Justice: Parent Organizing for Educational Equity in a Neoliberal Reform Context

This article examines a grassroots parent organizing effort in a large, high-poverty, urban school district. Drawing from ethnographic field research at a community-based popular education organization, the study describes how parent organizers worked to educate and mobilize Latina/o immigrant parents on issues of educational justice and equity. It identifies three pillars of their approach—a social theory, a theory of change, and a theory of knowledge— and argues that these were not reducible to a set of practices or methods; rather, they constituted a coherent paradigm of educational justice. This paradigm differs in significant ways from the neoliberal justice paradigm that currently dominates education reform and policy. By examining points of tension between these two competing paradigms, this article seeks to accomplish two aims. First, it aims to deepen our understanding of how underlying paradigms of educational justice shape the work of educating, organizing, and reforming schools. Second, it aims to expose the cultural specificity, or non-universality, of the neoliberal paradigm in order to challenge its hegemonic status in education reform and policy.     

Latina/o Parent Organizing for Educational Justice: An Ethnographic Account of Community Building and Radical Healing

This article describes a parent organizing effort with Latina/o immigrant parents in a large, high-poverty, racially and linguistically diverse urban school district. Drawing from ethnographic research and the theoretical framework of mujerismo, it examines the relational processes of community building and radical healing that occurred in weekly community-based parent workshops. Findings suggest the need for more research that empirically examines the relational, embodied, and pedagogical dimensions of parent organizing work.