An introduction to ecologies of engaged scholarship: stories from activist-academics

This special edition of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, ‘Ecologies of engaged scholarship: stories from activist-academics,’ is a product of a distinct form of peer review journal production. ‘Ecologies’ captures an emerging epistemology of academic activism through a process congruent with the values and work the authors live by in their commitment to their respective communities, as they perform their privilege and agency for the public good. An invitation to participate was granted to a group of academics vetted by the editors, by senior scholars, and by other witnesses engaged in social change work. The edition has been produced through a community building process, as the guest editors convened the authors in rural South Texas in February 2015 to get-to-know each other and to think collectively about each of our stories as activist-academics. We came together a day before the start of the annual conference of the North Dakota Study Group, a national organization of progressive educators dedicated to advocacy of fair and appropriate teaching, learning, and evaluation practices. We spent three-and-a-half days building community: very purposefully, we broke bread together, shared stories, and established a level of trust where we could challenge each other as critical friends to find the stories that inspire us to engage in research, service, and teaching.

This developmental process did not begin with the preparation for the February get-together, nor did it start with the proposal to guest-edit this special edition. A more accurate origin for this volume takes us to our doctoral seminars at the University of Texas and at Texas A&M, when the three guest editors, at different times, sat in the classrooms of the respective colleges of education. Each of us can point to the significance of Jim Scheurich in our lives and to the importance of finding the interrelatedness between the concepts of scholarship, advocacy, and activism that took shape as we read, wrote, talked, and engaged with Jim as part of our graduate education. We can similarly point to key mentors such as Henry Trueba, Maenette Benham, Joe Feagin, our parents, and other non-academics from our communities who have shaped the foundation of our work. Our academic genealogy is the product of stories we share with them, and with so many more. And Scheurich has been key to this development – in ways he set up his classes, in ways he provoked, in ways he behaved. One of us recalls the day of a dissertation defense, when Jim stood up for a provocative argument one of us was making, and then reflected on the moment when he admittedly used his privilege. Jim said, ‘Did you like the way I exercised my white privilege in your defense?’ We love that candor, and the vulnerability that comes with it. Jim has taught us a great deal about privilege, especially white privilege. He and our mentors showed us how to use whatever privilege we have for the greater good. That’s what this special edition is about. It is about using this place of privilege, the space that is a well-respected academic journal, to tell stories and to push for new ways of engaging scholarship and activism, and to push for ways of being as members of the academy.

The storytellers in this edition come from different geographical, classed, racial, and cultural upbringings. They come from the American Midwest, they come as Mexican immigrants into the US, they come from the Island of Oahu in Hawaii, they come from Native lands in the American Northwest, they come from Italian immigrants who settled in Michigan, they come from Haitian and African-American communities in Florida, they come from the Texas–Mexican borderlands, they come as South American immigrants, and they come from Western European stock that has comprised the mainstream of American life during the past two centuries. The author list reflects both sides of the emerging and bridging landscape of the American demography, and the stories speak to the depth and breadth of the experiences that are cultural, racial, gendered, classed, epistemological, ontological, and axiological.

We turned the peer review process into a series of practices where we brought the authors together for an extended face-to-face gathering through which we nurtured a gracious space (Hughes, 2010) and then built a creative environment to explore the origins and meaning of our personal and collective activism. We are particularly sensitive to the production of auto-ethnography, to its introspective and deeply personal nature, and set out to establish a respectful and dignified process through which we could provide feedback to each other. The values of our individual and collective activism guide us to engage our work in this manner because this is how we work in community – with each other and for each other. When the work comes to life, it informs the decisions we make as we work for the public good.

Theory and ecologies of activist scholarship

Through these qualitative reflective essays, researchers link the history of self within their school and community/activist work to present conditions as they map their collective community’s future. Authors use a method that best supports their story of development. Story and auto-ethnography are study methods based on decolonizing and liberating research perspectives proposed by, among others, feminist and post-colonial theorists Tuhiwai-Smith (1999), Moreton-Robinson (2000), Mohanty (2003), and Weiler (1988). These perspectives encourage studies in which the researcher becomes embedded in the lives of participants and engages actively in the political issues that inform their realities. These research perspectives give voice to participants, privilege the issues important to them, and explore practical applications of scholarship within participating communities, including the ecologies of self, organizations, and/or community (Guajardo et al., 2012).

We invited activist scholars to consider the philosophical understanding of the work they live. We invited them to pose questions such as: How are family and/or community involved in your work?; How do particular relationships you have cultivated through the years influence your activist work?; and How did your schooling experience affect your professional path? While we are interested in the stories of activist-academics, we believe these stories are not individualistic. We welcomed ethnographies that show movement away from the individualistic, or ‘hero’ story, toward a more collective consciousness, so encouraged authors to co-authored pieces.

We posed the following questions to participating activist scholars:

•	How can we use stories and other forms of qualitative methods to witness our personal and the community’s multidimensional growth?
•	How can educators and/or researchers link an individual’s and community’s past to her/his/its present, and contribute to future perspectives?
•	What innovations may be incorporated into the use and presentation of stories and other forms of qualitative research methods in schools, in communities, in higher education, and/or policy work?

When we convened the team to explore personal stories of activism and scholarship, to develop an emerging conceptual framework(s), and to engage the writing process, we used the theories and methods of activist scholarship to guide the conversations. The images below reflect that process and show symbolic representation of scholars’ stories of activism. The peer review process of sharing, documenting, and developing each of the emerging documents was guided by a series of pedagogies including circle sharing, one-on-one conversations, public presentation, a gallery walk, and continuous feedback consistently communicated through plática, culturally expressive and nuanced form of conversation and inquiry (Guajardo & Guajardo, 2013). We share stories through a visual representation below, as they are situated in place.

Though this text is mostly narrative, we employ visual and other multi-sensory strategies as tools for collection of observables, development of schemas, and presentation of stories (see Figure 1). The documents in this special edition are outlined below:

Figure 1. Symbolic representation of activist work.

New Mexico Team: Two young indigenous scholars explore the role of sovereign scholarship, which fundamentally reorients the notions of qualitative scholarship from an indigenous perspective and utilizes traditional indigenous methodologies to explore the concepts of scholarship, activism, and the role of story.

Tennessee Member: A Chicana explores the ontological development of her activism as she shares the values, ontology, and pedagogies of a place-based agenda guided by the organic intellectuals in her family: her mother, father, grandmother, and siblings. Her ontological position explores why and how she lives her passion as her research informs a humane public policy agenda that largely focuses on recent immigrants, second language learners, their families, and their communities.

Mississippi/Iowa: A white woman explores the roots and process of her transformation as she grows into an activist scholar in search form equity for disenfranchised communities. She finds her energy in her working-class family and the struggles they share as she was growing up.

East Carolina: A team of faculty, students, and school leaders explore how community engagement has changed their teaching, learning, and leading in a principal preparation program, and in the lives of school leaders in rural schools in North Carolina.

Hawaii: Two indigenous scholars document their struggle of resistance and survival in a predominantly white institution that sits on indigenous lands. Their activist scholarship intersects intergenerational education and cultural revitalization with elders and children alike.

Texas: Two brothers document the pedagogies of their father through stories that expound upon values, ontology, epistemology, and identity formation. Their story begins at their father’s funeral, and proceeds through a reflective process that highlights the intersections of an old school education of an organic intellectual with their work in higher education. This learning informs their activist-academic work.

Florida: A diverse group of scholars, students, and community activists describe how the frame of family both informs and is informed by their collective activism. The authors share individual and collective stories exploring efforts to orient their community work away from the transactional nature of the academy, and toward developmental relationships first learned in family.

New Jersey: This reflective essay, which is both autobiographical and historical in nature, is framed by answering the following questions posed by the editors:

(a) What is your work and what values inform it? (b) How do you do this work? (c) Why do you do this work, i.e. to what end?

The author’s response:

I suspect some of the readers will be disconcerted by my observations and experiences, but to some extent, that is precisely the point. If you are going to engage in social justice issues as part of your larger research agenda, you must become what Michael Eric Dyson calls, ‘a privileged pest.’ Those of us who are professors, particularly those of us at major research institutions, have enormous class privileges. These are then compounded if we are white, non-queer, and/or male, etc. (see Hutchinson, 1997; Valdes, 1995). We can control the nature of our labor, at least somewhat, and if we are ferociously persistent, we can see the fruits, or in my case, the fruity fruits of our labor.

Impact of research

This research expands the understanding of activist research through the stories of scholars who work on a variety of issues and who come from different walks of life. This edition provides real-life examples of activist research and how it transforms teaching, service, and research. It enhances the literature of an emerging activist ontology and epistemology that informs a new frontier of activist scholarship.

Miguel A. Guajardo
Texas State University
[email protected]
Francisco J. Guajardo
University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley
[email protected]
Leslie Locke
University of Iowa
[email protected]