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Factors that promote equity within urban school systems and how those factors can lead to increased high school graduation and entrance into post-secondary programs.
Educational Philosophy (Ontology and Epistemology)
What is my researcher positionality in this DDP? What is the ontological and epistemological framing that is behind this research design?
Positionality is that I am an urban educator. I work for St. Louis Public Schools as a school counselor. I have also been a teacher. For the last 20 years I’ve been at the same middle school in South City St. Louis. I feel that is aspect of my positionality will have the largest impact on my research.
Ontologically I believe that reality is both subjective and multiple and measurable. For example, the students I work with have a different perspective on reality than I do. Their life experiences are way different from what I experienced as a child, so their perspective on reality will be different. I also believe that you can measure aspects of reality. For example, my students graduate from high school at lower rates than their suburban peers.
Epistemologically I believe that you have to get to know people and their perspectives in order to understand a person’s reality. Measurements of a person’s reality will give one snapshot, but not the whole story. For example, if I have a classroom of students and I give them a test. The measurement tool will only tell me what they know at that moment in class. I would need to look at the results and compare them to what I know about my students to determine if the results are valid.
Rationale
Personal Interest – I want there to be social justice for my students. They deserve equity in their education. When I thought about social justice in education I first thought about access to their post-secondary goals. This might be because I’m a school counselor. I thought about how the graduation rates for my school district are around 70%. To me that means at least 30% of students are not even at the starting line for their career journey. How can we achieve social justice if 30% of urban students aren’t at the starting line? I want to research ways to bring more students to the line.
Impacts on Research or Impact in the Field – I've noticed most research on urban students and graduating high school comes from a negatively biased perspective. For example, researchers will discuss the barriers to graduation for urban students, as if these aren’t tied to the social injustice in our society. The majority of interventions researched come from outside of urban education and do not include the wider school community. Further, if the researcher doesn’t have unconditional positive regard for their research subjects you will continue to produce negative research.
Some research and researchers I'm following, but I'm continuing to check my research interests on ResearchGate to find new information.
“Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education” by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV (1995)
“Disrupting deficit notions of difference: Counter-narratives of teachers and community in urban education” by Richard H. Milner IV (2008)
“The Principal’s Role in Professional Development for Social Justice an Empirically-Based Transformative Framework” by Brad W. Kose (2009)
“School Choice, Student Mobility and School Quality: Evidence from post-Katrina New Orleans” by Richard O. Welsh, Matthew Duque, Ph.D., and Andrew McEachin, Ph.D. (2015)
“Critical Race Theory 20 Years Later: Where Do We Go from Here?” by Tyrone C. Howard1 and Oscar Navarro (2016)
“Activating student voice through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR): policy-making that strengthens urban education reform” by Chezare A. Warren & Joanne E. Marciano (2018)
“A ratchetdemic reality pedagogy and/as cultural freedom in urban education” by Christopher Emdin (2019)
“Addressing the problems of urban education: An ecological systems perspective” by Maury Nation, Brian D. Christens, Kimberly D. Bess, Marybeth Shinn, Douglas D. Perkins, and Paul W. Speer (2020)
“Aspiring Teachers and Urban Education Programs” by Adam Alvarez, Abiola Farinde-Wu, Lori Delale-O’Connor, and Ira E. Murray (2020)
“Place Matters: A Critical Review of Place Inquiry and Spatial Methods in Education Research” by Alisha Butler and Kristin A. Sinclair (2020)
“(Re)Defining Urban Education: A Conceptual Review and Empirical Exploration of the Definition of Urban Education” by Richard O. Welsh1 and Walker A. Swain (2020)
“Justice-Oriented Teaching Dispositions in Urban Education: A Critical Interpretive Case Study” by Bettie Ray Butler1, Heather Coffey1, and Jemimah Lee Young (2021)
“The Impact of Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy on Student Achievement in a Multicultural Urban School Setting” by Eunjyu Yu (2022)
“We’ve Been Had: Neoliberal Initiatives in Urban Education” by Erin T. Miller, Samuel J. Tanner, Andrea V.McCloskey, and Brian T. Kissel (2022)
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