“You can’t build a revolution with no education”: Deepening equity-mindedness in professional learning activities

Abstract

Institutes of higher education have adopted equity-minded frameworks as potential solutions to dismantle the permanence of racism within them. Yet, little empirical evidence documents the outcomes of these frameworks, which often include professional learning experiences for faculty and staff. Drawing on critical race discourse analyses of interview data from a 16-week professional learning seminar on race and racism in higher education, the authors of this study posit that equity-mindedness is a process where one becomes aware of oppressive structures of harm and one’s participation in, and reproduction of, these structures. This claim expands previous scholarship on the topic, which fails to articulate the importance of reflexive equity-mindedness. The authors conclude with a call for P-20 practitioners to focus on the contexts of interpersonal transformation as necessary to create more equitable and just educational settings for all students in addition to institutional policies and practices.

KEYWORD:

• critical race theory
• critical discourse analysis
• equity mindedness
• community college
• Hispanic serving institution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges (HSCC) are two-year HSIs. We utilize HSCC to “center the community college in the HSI literature” (Abrica et al., 2020) but also “to challenge the four- year centric default and subsequent overlooking of minority-serving community colleges. Nearly half of all undergraduates attend community colleges and the majority of Hispanic serving institutions are community colleges, my calling them HSCCs acknowledges the nuances of MSI contexts and contexts matter” (Zamani-Gallaher, Director of Office of Community College Research & Leadership, personal communication, February 2019).