EQUITY & JUSTICE
This section on the Caspari group’s website reflects our beliefs, commitments, and enactments with regards to equity and justice. It was created in a group process that resulted in several different clusters. In these clusters, you can learn about our process of developing this website including transparency and accountability, our developing values, our learning and unlearning, how we work towards caring and solidarity, and how this all directly and indirectly impacts our research and practice.
Transparency & Accountability. We acknowledge that there are systemic injustices/inequities in academia. We believe that as agents within that space conducting research, we have a responsibility to work towards dismantling these systems of oppression, and to do so requires us (1) to be transparent about the actions we take, and (2) to be accountable towards taking these actions and making change. We believe that there is a need to prioritize instituting clear and concrete guidelines for our work and revisiting our statement regularly. Thus, we commit to making our perspective, our process, our decisions, and our limitations transparent while holding ourselves accountable to actions that put what we claim to stand for into practice both as individuals and as a collective. Some examples of how we enact our commitment and where we see limitations of our work:
We will revisit this website internally at least once per year to update in a way that reflects our learning process and the perspectives of new members of the group.
On this website, we attempt to define technical language to make it as accessible as possible.
In December 2023, all research group members who were actively engaging in research during this time contributed to writing this website. We agreed on a broader vision that captured a range of our different perspectives and reflected diversity in our group in the details of this page as best as possible. This means that not every statement in every cluster represents every individual perspective, rather, a comprehensive account of all of our perspectives is shown. New group members have since reviewed and modified this website so that it encompasses their perspectives as well.
We created each section of this website in a manner that expresses our beliefs, our commitments rooted in these beliefs, and what we concretely do to hold ourselves accountable and be transparent. In this process, it was important to us to also highlight limitations.
We are always open to any input from those who visit our website, please email ira.caspari@tufts.edu
Values. As we lay out our specific commitments in our research, our teaching, and our group culture below, our values as a group are guided by some overarching principles and beliefs about society and our role and responsibility within society as educators and education researchers. First of all, we acknowledge that the United States and much of the world at large exists in a culture of deeply entrenched white supremacy, and that this white supremacy culture intersects with other systems of oppression, such as those based on gender, class, age, disability, and sexual orientation. We believe that one goal of science education is to reform learning environments, educational systems, and structures to empower all learners fairly, particularly those who are marginalized in their lives within and beyond the academy, to work towards collective liberation. Through our research, we recognize education's often authoritarian/unitary nature and hope to identify ways to create more equitable and liberating learning environments. As we act in our community at Tufts, we thus commit to critically reflecting on power structures and how we ourselves perpetuate them. As we grow as researchers, educators, and scholars, we believe it is important to constantly ask ourselves and hold ourselves accountable towards instantiating our goals and values so they are not empty and performative and to contribute to growing a better and more just world. We acknowledge that we do not always recognize oppression when it occurs and that we do not always feel empowered to act upon oppression we recognize. Some examples of how we enact our commitment and where we see limitations of our work:
Ira as a teacher and PI of the group tries to recognize racialized dynamics and intervenes by explicit conversation with students and mentees.
We reform learning environments as we see these as empowering tools/resources for students.
Some of us read critical STEM education literature, and we incorporate critical principles in some of our research projects while they are not centered in other projects.
Learning & Unlearning. We believe that our equity, justice and anti-oppression work is an ever-evolving goal that puts us in a constant learning and unlearning process; additionally, the nature of our research also prompts us to unlearn traditional approaches that uphold unequal systems in academia, creating a space where we welcome and embrace discomfort as an agent of growth. We acknowledge that our group members hold many different intersectional identities, e.g., with regards to race, gender, and class, that lead to different lived experiences of oppression and discrimination and different proximities to privilege and power within academia and within a white supremacist society, and that these identities deeply influence where we are at in our learning/unlearning process. We acknowledge that those we interact with both in research and teaching also hold these rich and multifaceted intersectional identities and that they also might be undergoing a learning and unlearning process due to the nature of the classroom structure and research interview questions. Since we may introduce those we interact with to a learning and unlearning journey, we hold ourselves responsible to continue to foster an environment where we take what we have learned and unlearned and put it into practice. We commit to engaging in a constant process of unlearning internalized systems of oppression and relearning more just ways of doing and being in all spaces we walk within and beyond the research group, and to transform this cycle of learning into practice. In this process, we commit to learning with and from each other, embracing discomfort, and recognizing that the responsibility for teaching justice does not fall on those who experience injustice. Some examples of how we enact our commitment and where we see limitations of our work:
Some group members regularly participate in different formal and informal learning experiences, such as the Tufts How to be an Anti-Racist STEM Educator class, book clubs around anti-racism and dismantling whiteness, etc.
We read literature by experts in critical theory and grapple with how this challenges our worldviews, and commit to changing those, both individually and within our group.
We meet others where they are at and listen to and engage with their lived experiences that are different from our own.
We reflect on our own biases and work towards embracing our own discomfort.
We cannot learn everything at once and we will always make mistakes, and learn from them as we are in a constant [un]learning process.
Caring & Solidarity. We believe that caring and solidarity start with listening. We believe in respecting and honoring each other's lived experiences in order to foster a space in which every community member (research group members, students, learning assistants, other research participants, etc.) feels valued and as safe and secure as possible. We thus commit to listen and respond to one another with compassion and to amplify marginalized voices. We commit to building a brave space and to actively support each other in finding ways to engage, challenge ourselves, and grow. Some examples of how we enact our commitment and where we see limitations of our work:
We engage in inviting others to share their perspective via clarifying thoughts and rebroadcasting thoughts, and are open to additional means of communication if we do not understand somebody else’s perspective yet.
In our research group, we embody these values through reciprocal mentorship practices and by recognizing that we are all in different stages of learning, in addition to giving all group members autonomy to voice their perspectives and lead group meetings.
In our research participant interviews, we design interview protocols that empower interviewees to speak freely, take a non-judgmental stance, and prioritize care and connection.
As a professor in the classroom, Ira gets both excited and nervous when she hears student thoughts that she does not understand, as this is a time for her to expand the borders of her listening capacity and broaden her perspective — excited because there is an opportunity to learn a lived experience that is not her own, nervous because responding with compassion might be difficult.
Research & Practice. We believe all humans embody diverse ways of being, thinking, and doing and that they bring these qualities with them to the spaces in which they learn and where we conduct our research. We acknowledge the research we conduct reciprocally influences the practice of teaching and learning; and that education research is not neutral and can lead to the social reproduction of injustices. As one way to reflect this diversity and disrupt the reproduction of injustices, we commit to taking on sociocultural and asset-based perspectives as well as using methodologies that center participants’ unique experiences in our research. Some examples of how we enact our commitment and where we see limitations of our work:
We collect data from diverse classrooms across multiple institutions with different student populations in terms of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.
We collect multiple data streams such as classroom recordings and interviews with students, learning assistants, and professors.
We combine different frameworks that guide our data analysis as each one of them sheds light on different aspects of the complex classroom system
We attend to and acknowledge social dynamics in our data that may emerge from participants’ marginalized identities and interactions with oppressive systems in the classroom.
We challenge one way of interpreting the data with other ways such as by contrasting insights from multiple frameworks, comparing different perspectives group members have on the data, and checking in with the participants on their views of our interpretations.
We recognize that the theories we employ have serious limitations, such as sociocultural theory not fully capturing how participants are positioned and how they experience racialized dynamics. While we are more well-versed in sociocultural frameworks thus far, we are now working to learn more about critical theories to use them to guide us in our work.
Questions that we grapple with in our everyday research activities are: When should we only observe as researchers and work towards longer-term impacts on practice and when should we as researchers intervene with the practice as it is happening over the course of a semester to disrupt harm immediately? When should we take an asset-based perspective on a research participant’s actions and when is it more appropriate to reveal the marginalizing impact their actions might have on other research participants in the system?