May 2024
On May 23, AERA held a virtual forum, “Critical Approaches to Education Policy Research—Improving Researchers’ Capacity to Address Injustice,” featuring key ideas and insights motivating critical research concepts and methodologies. This webinar complements and amplifies upon the June 2024 special issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA).
Drawing a highly engaged audience of over 1,000 attendees from 56 countries, the event furthered conversation, understanding, and attention regarding critical approaches to education policy analysis and research findings of consequence for just and democratic schools and society. EEPA is one of AERA’s seven peer-reviewed journals.
EEPA co-editor Sylvia Hurtado (University of California, Los Angeles) opened the forum with an overview of the new special issue. She noted, “The ideas in the issue came from the insight of the previous editors of EEPA about the need to reflect the critical equity research of many social justice–oriented scholars, and also to expand new scholarship in EEPA.”
Erica O. Turner (University of Wisconsin, Madison), co–guest editor, took the lead in moderating this event joined by co-guest editor Dominique Baker (University of Delaware). The panel included authors from two of the articles – Heather McCambly (University of Pittsburgh) and Tasminda K. Dhaliwal (Michigan State University) – and Michelle D. Young (University of California, Berkeley), who was the commentator.
McCambly presented on her co-authored article “Constructing an Educational ‘Quality’ Crisis: (E)quality Politics and Racialization Beyond Target Beneficiaries,” which looks at how the concepts of equity and quality became discursively linked and contested in postsecondary education policy administration over time, finding that once an (e)quality politics paradigm is established, racialized policy designs can persist.
“‘Making the familiar strange’ is one way I think about the contribution of impactful critical research in education,” said McCambly. “We urge education scholars to take up historicized measurement in order to see transformation in how we engage with quantitative analysis around things like educational equity.”
McCambly concluded her formal remarks by asking how education researchers can move in resistance rather than acquiesce to the current wave of equality and political world building.
Dhaliwal too gave an overview of her co-authored article “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child? A Critical Discourse Analysis of State Corporal Punishment Policies and Practices,” which investigated which discourses pervade policy texts and how corporal punishment (CP) is practiced in U.S. schools. She emphasized that color-evasive and deficit language to justify CP practices that are disproportionally applied to minoritized students.
“The use of CP ties back to a broader history of racialized violence to maintain a racial hierarchy through slavery and Jim Crow,” said Dhaliwal. “Black students were more than 1.5 times more likely to be punished than their White peers. Students with disabilities were punished at similarly disparate rates.”
“State policymakers and education leaders should immediately act to prohibit CP,” Dhaliwal said.
The presentations were followed by comments from Young who offered insightful comments from a systemic perspective. She emphasized that both journal articles demonstrate the power of discourse and the utility of engaging in critical discourse analyses.
“They do a wonderful job of examining these two policy areas and enlightening the reader about things you take for granted or don’t question in depth, that we ought to question as educators and education researchers,” said Young. “This is similar to what happens in the rest of the special issue.”
The Q&A segment of the webinar was marked by high engagement of a sizable audience. Attendees asked about identifying strategies for engaging with policymakers, how to deal with anxiety over proposing findings that go against the status quo, and how to grow their skills in translating critical education research for the public.
“When we think about the future of higher education and how we are preparing our faculty, is it enough to make them excellent researchers, or do we also need to be thinking about their ability to communicate their research?” Young said, in a response to a question about training education researchers to engage with policy.
The webinar concluded with panelists offering brief takeaways.
“One of the things that resonates is how this is an exciting time to be a researcher who is interested in using critical approaches,” said Dhaliwal. “It’s an incredibly exciting time to think about how to move the field forward, to reimagine and dream about what our future policy possibilities could look like.”
A recording of the webinar is now available. The complete special issue, “Critical Approaches to Education Policy Research,” can be viewed open access on EEPA’s website.