Mediating systemic change in educational systems

Running Head: MEDIATING CHANGE IN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS 1

Mediating Systemic Change in Educational Systems through Socio-Cultural Methods

Elizabeth B. Kozleski

University of Kansas

Alfredo J. Artiles

Arizona State University

March 2013

Authors Note

Both the first and second authors acknowledge the support of the Equity Alliance at

ASU under OESE’s Grant # S004D080027. Funding agency endorsement of the ideas presented

in this article should not be inferred. They do not necessarily support the views expressed in this

paper. All errors are attributable to the authors. Address correspondence to

[email protected].

mailto:[email protected]

Alfredo Artiles

Kozleski, E. B., & Artiles, A. J. (in press). Mediating systemic change in educational systems through socio-cultural methods. In P. Smeyers, D. Bridges, N. Burbules, & M. Griffiths (Eds.), International handbook of interpretation in educational research methods. New York: Springer.

MEDIATING CHANGE IN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS 2

Mediating Systemic Change in Educational Systems through Socio-Cultural Methods

In this chapter, we explore the notion of technical assistance within an ethnographic

research tradition and then propose a set of approaches to interpreting and acting on

interpretations drawn from technical assistance activity. In the end, we hope to reveal to the

readers the complexity of using evidence in a variety of ways to help systems make important

shifts in their work, their cultures, and their decision-making processes so that changes in

systems produce outcomes that are equitable for the students who go to school there. The

processes that we use to collect, compile, analyze, and inform our work are steeped in

ethnographic research methods. Thus, our work could be considered as that of ethnographer

activists who participate in and influence the work of schools with particular emphasis on social

justice and equity. Through this approach we help organizational leaders understand and re-

mediate the ways that they structure and support equity in their schools.

Some of this work offers units of analysis that link macro with micro-level factors

(Artiles & Dyson, 2005; Gallego et al., 2001). For instance, we examine how federal policy makes

its way through state and district interpretations to local enacted practice at the school-wide

and classroom level, and even into specific interactions between teacher and student. This

emergent work transcends fragmented views of individuals in which single markers of

difference (e.g., race, social class, gender, etc.) constitute the focus of analysis (Ladson-Billings

& Tate, 1995). It moves beyond psychological notions of learning and development that locate

knowledge development and change within individuals to focus on learning within communities

as individuals build shared experience, explore opportunities, and hone their practice through

interaction (Engeström, 1999).

Change in participation defines learning. Systems change work embodied in socio-

cultural research methods offers an approach to engaging in change within community. In this


approach change work becomes both the method of inquiry (i.e., the process for understanding)

and the mediating context (i.e., the activity that shifts understanding) in which change occurs. In

addition to locating change in community and identifying change processes as research, there is

a third pillar of this work: Equity focus. By focusing on equity, systems divest themselves of

institutionalized racist policies and practice that, we argue, are a result of action without

inquiry, which, in turn, stems from anemic or weak methods for examining, interpreting, and

critiquing local practice.

Using the tools of ethnography to examine a system’s work in action offers opportunities

and challenges for researchers and participants alike. Participants within activity arenas like

schools and school systems wrestle with time on a minute-by-minute basis. Institutional

mandates, the 182 days that students attend school, the densely packed, test-atomized

curriculum, the unexpected daily even hourly surprises that come from large numbers of people

trying to navigate the same pathways, at the same times, following the same routines, challenge

even the most skilled time managers. Therefore, reflexivity, the luxury of considering an action

before making it and assessing its value afterwards, is rarely experienced.

Our project work with school personnel asks practitioners to take time to re-mediate

their experiences, attending to multiple influences and interpretations of the events that

surround them. We meet with small groups of school personnel with a set of questions that

help lead them through a process of questioning their daily practices, both what and how

practice occurs. Critical ethnographic methods require the accumulation of evidence in some

consistent process, the development of hunches or working hypotheses about what is

happening, followed by more and more focused evidence collection to help make meaning and

re-focus effort (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008). Vignettes from shared descriptions of everyday life

and the commentary that accompanies these vignettes become part of the evidence change that


is used to chronicle conceptual and activity shifts in school communities. In this way, together,

researchers and participants document how schools construct, manage, and sustain social

realities. Importantly, in our work, we ask ourselves and our participants to be critical

ethnographers (Anderson, 1989). We collectively examine how, through our discourse and

instructional tools, meaning emerges and the cultural work of schools is woven. As we discuss

here, entering into a critical stance complicates research efforts to warrant our processes with

participants and external audiences as we construct understanding of our data. Thus, using

ethnographic tools to mediate our activities as technical consultants creates a number of

methodological and ethnical dilemmas that we explore in this chapter.

In this chapter, we reveal a kind of double move in which the data in the system (e.g.,

vignettes and their commentaries) and our own field notes about the influence of our presence

are consulted as we move forward. How we take care to collect, compile, and use our own field

notes, status reports, and decision trees to track and examine our own work is a critical piece of

this chapter. We explore the ways in which our mission constrains our support and our

support constrains our mission. Further, while we provide support in specific ways, we are also

funded by government agencies in which vested interests define what counts as success.

Chronicling, interpreting, and theorizing about the meaning of these moves offers a telling view

of the politics of education reform. Along the way, readers will encounter sections of this

chapter that explain the context of our work, describe systemic change with educational

systems using one case as an example, highlight the methods, and then, explore the impact and

analytical opportunities by enacting our role as a method of inquiry.

Methods

Setting: Working on Equity Issues as an Arm of the Federal Government


This chapter draws from work completed through a grant from the U.S. government that

funded our work as an equity assistance center. The center was responsible for providing rights

training and advisory services for all schools and communities in three states to address equity

and access issues in public education. There were almost eight million students from preschool

through 12th

grade in these three states. We focused on prevention, intervention, and

remediation strategies with schools, local school systems, and state education agencies to reduce

racial, gender, and socio-economic disproportionalities among groups of students.

Variability in public education in the U.S. is important because local and state contexts

produce very different kinds of tensions and opportunities. States, not the federal government,

have the constitutional responsibility to ensure access to education in the United States. This

means that all 50 states and 10 U.S. territories (e.g, Puerto Rico) have their own sets of

educational laws and regulations that map, where required, onto national legislation that

finances some programs, notably those for students who meet certain thresholds for poverty,

English language skills, and educational disabilities. Local school systems raise much of the

operating costs for educating children from kindergarten through high school graduation

through local property taxes. Locally elected (in some cases appointed) school boards oversee

local school districts that have distinct and specific sets of regulations. For instance, in one

metropolitan area of more than 8 million residents there are 18 different school districts and

school boards each with their own curriculum, teacher hiring and evaluation procedures,

transportation systems and so on. Thus, working with any school district requires careful

excavation and attention to its cultural history, rules, lore, collective identity, modes of

communication, and procedural fluencies. This context is critical to understanding that

centralized and national strategies to change educational practice have had little impact on local


experience in spite of more than sixty years of sustained efforts to improve educational

outcomes through national initiatives.

What became apparent in working with individual systems was that often, districts and

schools lacked information about on two counts. First, their knowledge of current research and

emerging knowledge was fuzzy at best. Second, they were relatively or their own practices

designed to improve outcomes for students viewed as culturally and linguistically diverse (see

fieldnote 1, 2009). Further, school and school district organizational structures served as

barriers to change and improvement. Institutional structures lacked flexibility for developing

internal capacity in terms of the distribution of knowledge and inquiry strategies, the

redistribution of services and supports, and communication strategies with their employees as

well as the larger communities they served (Kozleski & Artiles, 2012). Complicated by

institutionalized practices, these structural barriers appeared to explain some of the graduation

and assessment data gaps between White and Asian American students and other ethnic, racial

groups as well as special education and EL groups.

Keep in mind the importance of our approach as a continual interpretive act based on

analyses of the institutional and structural constraints of the system that we were entering.

That is, interpretation of our work began as we made decisions about where to enter a school

system in order to increase the probability of changing practices. Understanding the local

context meant that deciding whom to call for an initial contact had implications for who would

call us back and what kind of reception we might have. What occurred in these initial

conversations had ripple effects in terms of who else in the senior administration might call us

and begin conversations. We wanted to connect with enough people in the system to help us

better understand the constraints and affordances that existed in this particular context so that

our work with them could expand and connect both quickly and deeply. Each move was based


on interpretations that were being made as we talked and began to map the relationships, the

leadership dynamics, and the local funds of knowledge (Chase, 2005). We taped these initial

conversations (with permission from our participants), wrote field notes, and involved our own

team members in interpreting the emerging story lines.

In the district that we refer to in the paper, district leaders were in flux. The

superintendent was retiring. Several senior executives each with different kinds of

responsibilities such as curriculum, personnel, and finance, each saw themselves as potential

superintendents. The interviews with each of them and the people who supported particular

promotions equivocated between offering sharply focused (a) analyses of equity issues and (b)

analyses of poor leadership decisions. In the next sections, we describe our work with schools

and districts from the first contact with a district, through data gathering, planning,

implementing, learning, and honing the remedies or processes.

Process: The Conceptual Frame

We conceptualized transformative equity assistance work as coordinated effort to build

capacity and nurture ongoing professional development through reflexivity. Ethnographic

methods provided the vehicle. Using data, we worked with organizational leaders to inform

their frameworks, develop their knowledge base, re-mediate what they emphasized through

discourse and action. We supported this work with tools designed to help mediate how people

understand the landscape in which they work and define their problem spaces in ways that

recognize and organize complexity (Engeström, 1999). In addition, we proposed that

transformative equity work is institutionalized and scaled up through a distributive model of

organizational change in which effective practices are systematically disseminated through

school networks (Kozleski & Huber, 2010). We have described this work elsewhere as

organized around five key transformative mediating structures: (a) re-mediating


understandings of the problem; (b) disrupting the view from above; (c) forging new spaces; (d)

cycles of inquiry, reflection, and action; and (e) implementing and assessing change (Kozleski &

Artiles, 2012). Critical ethnography demands that researchers examine how power and privilege

is exercised within settings (Cannella & Lincoln, 2009). Unexamined everyday practices reify

historical patterns of interaction in which some groups benefit because of the existing informal

or unspoken rules of conduct that marginalize other perspectives and frames of reference.

One district in particular had serious gaps in achievement among racial/ethnic groups.

After a series of conference calls in which the district superintendent, the chief academic officer,

and other district leaders identified a set of issues that they felt were contributing to their data

outcomes, we proposed a process for working with them. We designed this approach to

foreground organizational change for social justice and equity outcomes since addressing issues

of inequity for some families and students emerged from an initial needs assessment. Our task

was to create access to tools that captured the current landscape as well as anticipated progress

on critical equity issues that centered on differential educational achievement based on gender,

national origin, and race. We wanted to help the district team understand how a focus on

improving results for all students improves results for particular groups as well. As

ethnographers, we went back to our data to examine the relationships.

Throughout this period of time, with the consent of the individuals and the school

system involved, we audiotaped our meetings, made field notes, and shared brief summaries of

those notes with the district participants. We were beginning the work of laying an

ethnographic trail of our entry into the system. While we talked with groups, we also

interviewed key players individually to understand motivation, commitment, and the degree of

reflexivity that key individuals brought to their work and the problem spaces they inhabited. As

Charmaz and Mitchell (2001) remind us, we had to collect and sift through our data carefully.


The data connected in specific ways to the context in which we were operating. While

disclosures from individuals mounted as we built closer relationships, we had to be cautious

about introducing mediating tools based on what was emerging. As ethnographers we needed

to preserve our relationships with all the participants. We could create new tools, like

processes for conversations that we knew needed to occur but were mindful that we might

create uncomfortable dilemmas for participants about whether to disclose information or stay

silent. In these moments, we returned to data to tell the story for us. Sometimes, crucial

concerns remained buried for some time before they emerged, if at all. While we coded our data

line-by-line, we also had to stand back from our transcripts and look at whole anecdotes and

scenarios to understand the emerging relational and political map. We shared our data with our

participants, always in groups so that data that came to us looped back to groups to interpret

together.

We both established a bounded space in which individuals developed relationships and

explored assumptions and ambitions about the nature of the space and the complex of issues

that surfaced. Our technical assistance emerged as a process for troubling the spaces in which

equity issues were emerging. At the same time while we were creating the contexts for

awareness to develop and build momentum for change what we did was also critical

ethnography. It made participants aware of how they conceptualized and acted within this

bounded space.

Widening the Work: Re-mediating Whose Views Matter and How Problem Spaces

are Conceptualized

We asked the district leadership team to identify a set of key leaders among their

teachers, related services personnel (e.g., school psychologists, speech/language therapists,

counselors), principals (i.e., school heads), and district managers. Members needed to be able to


commit to working as members of a district change team in the mode of what Engeström (1999)

calls an “expansive lab” to re-imagine the landscape of the district looking at historical time

scales, patterns of migration, the emergence of the professional hierarchies, and the structures

and socialization patterns that shaped contemporary practices. This team needed to consist of

more than inside members of the organization, it also needed to include the students and

families who experienced the school culture and establishment. This mix of insiders and

outsiders was a critical move intended to disrupt practice and dialogue in its usual way. As

critical ethnographers, we needed to broaden the participation in our research since we wanted

to uncover the multiple intersections of power and privilege. The experience of family members

in schools is often a telling detail.

We asked to meet with family groups that were informally organized and serving as

critics of the system. A series of focus groups helped us to learn more about family experiences

and responses to the school experiences of their students. We also met with students in focus

groups. Data from these focus groups merged into our mapping phase described in detail in the

next section. Our ethnographic strategy was to widen the circle of reference for the work and

widen our own understanding of the cultures negotiated and transformed within the district.

Through the voices of families, we began to understand the distribution of power within the

school system. With the families, we analyzed transcripts from the focus groups from two

perspectives: the ways in which families read the official district discourses and how families

were attempting to mediate and shift those discourses to benefit their children (Anderson,

1989).

Through the focus groups, we nominated a set of family representatives and students

who joined the District Change Team (DCT). Their participation elevated concerns with district

staff and family members. At the heart of these concerns were issues around (a) expertise, (b)


the capacity of the district to meet the “demands” of families and students, and (c) how

negotiated spaces might be constituted and engaged to find ways of moving forward together.

Families and students were concerned about being drowned out and dismissed. These concerns

came from our frequent individual interviews with key participants. As ethnographers, not

only were we interested in the work of the group around making changes to improve the

opportunities for historically marginalized students, we were also interested in the individual

narratives that were traveling alongside the constructions of the larger group. We wove back

and forth between these lenses to help us understand the change project as it evolved but also to

understand its impact on individuals within the system. We sifted and analyzed the individual

and collective evidence. The ongoing data analysis accomplished two agendas. It provided

direction for our technical assistance while it also informed our ethnographic discovery method,

helping to direct us to new sources of information.

We surfaced issues that emerged in our focus groups and interviews through small

vignettes that we wrote for dyads of school and family members to read and discuss. These

anchored conversations became a way to open up conversations about the nature of knowing

and the kinds of knowledge prized in schools. Transcripts from our focus groups were analyzed

as they became available. They helped us develop hunches about the dynamics of the district,

the decision making processes, who and what was valued in decision making, and the historical

threads that seamed together some working assumptions of the group.

For our work, making hunches marked a new period of inquiry. What was being

interpreted and problematized began to seep into our work. We wrote brief memos and

vignettes that captured emerging tensions to share with the participants. In this way, without

naming sources and through describing what we called “cases”, we were able to member check

our analyses, sharpening our understanding of what we were learning and improving the quality


of our interventions. We wanted to generate insights, develop explanations for how the district

operated and used power to maintain its stasis, as well to seek understanding for why the

system operated as it did. We did this always mindful that, while the participants had

particular experiential knowledge that we lacked, they also were reconstructing their own

individual and collection social realities (Anderson, 1989).

Through the member checks, individuals began to know one another and develop

appreciation for the points of view and experiences that they brought into the DCT. Developing

a team selected for its transdisciplinary nature meant selecting school insiders who represented

a variety of teaching, learning, and operational perspectives. It also meant inviting school

outsiders who had stakes in school outcomes but weren’t employed by the system changed the

nature of the dialogue. Selecting who would be on the DCT was the first of several disruptive

moves that we made. These moves were designed to help reveal to participants the unexamined

assumptions that formed the foundations of some of their everyday practices. For instance,

while teachers said that they engaged parents, they didn’t want parents at their DCT meetings

because “they wouldn’t understand.” At each juncture and new step in the process, we made

sure to remind participants of the double moves being made by supplying participant meanings

and perspectives ethnographically: (1) the conversations and meetings formed the basis of

inquiry: and (2) the inquiry formed the basis of action. . Because of this interactive process, we

were able to get feedback frequently about our hunches about what was being observed and

interpreted.

Gathering Data: Disrupting the View from Above

We asked the district leaders to compile data from district databases to display

geographically the contours of the issues that they faced. We wanted to use maps since they

emphasize the spatial relationships that provide texture and describe patterns without words to


translate these relationships. As Paulston (1996) noted, words sometimes filter the

interpretative act, putting unnecessary barriers between the observer and the data. We mapped

a variety of data. For instance, data from the focus groups that identified schools where referrals

to the office for students of color were frequent were mapped on to geospatial google maps of

the community. We included achievement data by clusters of students grouped by (a) gender,

(b) ethnicity, (c) race, (d) ability, and (e) English Language status. Imagine a google map that

you might encounter in the local newspaper showing neighborhoods by density of the

population. Highly dense neighborhoods might be red, while moderately dense ones would be

yellow, and low-density spaces would be colored blue.

We used maps to accomplish a similar goal. This kind of data representation is so

important to visualizing the narrative in critical ethnography. Explanation gives way to

geospatial representation. The picture provides the opportunity to pinpoint social injustices

quickly without much mental effort. Mapping entailed coloring school buildings by one factor,

such as the racial make up of the student population. For example, all buildings with a student

body comprised of more than 70% Latino students were colored yellow. A district might have

120 schools, marked on the map, by location. Of those 120, 84 would be colored yellow. And

then, because the purpose of the map would be to show the spatial dimension of a problem, all

the buildings that over-identified their Latino students for special education might be shaded

with diagonal lines. In many cases, the schools that were over-identifying might be the 36

schools that were predominantly White.

This kind of data representation tells a powerful story to its users and moves the

conversation beyond what numbers represent to questions about what happens in the two sets

of schools, surrounding neighborhoods, and communities. Critical ethnographers can build a

narrative case using data in a number of visual ways. Geospatial representation reminds us at


once that we inhabit lives that have geography and this geography as Soja reminds us shapes our

lives (Soja, 1996). Curricular resources, teacher experience by years of service, building

facilities, longevity and experience of principals, student population numbers, class size, and

many other features of opportunities to learn (Oakes, 1990) were overlaid onto the maps.

Images of neighborhoods and context anchored the data, pushing the conversations forward.

By creating these maps and the space for analysis and interpretation within the DCT, we

were setting the stage for the team members to understand the educational space created within

the district in new ways. Members of the school district had been exposed to receiving numerical

data in the form of tables and charts but they had never connected the data to place so that

patterns were readily discernible across the geographic scape of the district. Further, by

overlaying different kinds of data, patterns between placement and achievement or

opportunities to learn and active, well-used community space (like parks, community farmer’s

markets, and local grocery stores) emerged. The DCT began to connect data in new ways that

accounted for the contexts in which school and student performance occurred. Together, the

DCT was able to examine context and current outcomes.

Ruitenberg (2007) notes that “representations never merely represent, they also

constitute and produce (p. 9).” Geographic data displays shaped the discourse. We constructed

geographic information systems (GIS) maps and other evidentiary sources (e.g., classroom

photographs, videos, and building walk-throughs) to disrupt simplistic explanations of the

problem. We also mapped enabling influences that might inform future intervention efforts

(e.g., collective efficacy, social networks, civic engagement) (Artiles, Kozleski, Waitoller, &

Lukinbeal, 2011; Kozleski & Artiles, 2012). The artifacts we designed also made visible the ways

in which disability constitutes a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that is highly

adaptable to local conditions “but [its] structure is common enough to more than one [social]


world to make [it] recognizable, a means to translation” (p. 393). Equity can be indexed and

more readily seen in spatial analyses that demonstrate the distribution of inequities (Artiles,

2011). Participants noted that there was “disparity in our own knowledge of the district (field

note 2, district meeting).” They began to discuss who had access to certain kinds of information,

what kinds of information were privileged, and which were dismissed. By shifting the team’s

conversation to understanding as opposed to recognition, the group coalesced around inquiry as

a mode for dialogue.

The next step in our ethnographic process was to design inquiry tools (sets of questions

that required analyzing evidence before answering) that mediated the participants’

understanding in new ways. We used available evidence and represented it in unfamiliar ways

that demonstrated the complexity of educators’ work at the intersections of policy, research and

practice (Engeström, 1999). By changing the discourse around data, we tried to disrupt binary

explanations of outcome inequity that blame either students and their families or systems.

Critical ethographers must be concerned with how the distribution of power and privilege

operates to marginalize some while privileging others. Mapping data offered what Engeström

(1999) refers to as a mirror that both reflects a picture of the district but also requires the

construction of a shared narrative that offers a way of different factions to co-construct a new

reality. Thus, our mapping venture provided a situated, improvisational, and contested space so

that narratives and counter narratives emerged from the participants. Our mapping process

required three meetings for the group to (a) move through their reactions, (b) develop shared

understandings, and (c) forge new narratives for the school district. Embedded within this

narrative were spaces to concentrate effort and innovation to shape improved outcomes around

equity.


Forging New Spaces

We continued to meet as a district change team to develop a plan based on the new

narrative around equity and inequities. Through the process of mapping, we created an analysis

and conceptual framework explaining how the system produced inequities. The next part of

our process was to use this conceptual framework to design collaboratively a plan for re-

mediating the institutional structures and cultures that maintained the status quo. Developing

this conceptual framework with our participants helped to name problem spaces while still

maintaining the drive towards understanding.

The planning process began with identifying features of good solutions to equity issues.

Small groups of three and four team members worked together to develop a set of criteria that

they would use to evaluate whether or not solutions that might be suggested would met their

criteria for “good.” This allowed the participants to delve more deeply into considering the

notion of “good.” In particular, they explored notions of good for whom and for what outcomes. This

approach was initially confusing and difficult. Participants in project of this nature want to

identify solutions. They rarely consider the features or criteria for good solutions before trying

solve the problem. At first, their conversations easily strayed into identifying what would work.

After several false starts, they began to understand the importance of considering what they

typically saw as ways of solving problems and how bringing a critical lens to finding solutions

changed the nature of problem solving itself.

This work was frustrating and slow for many of the participants. However, two aspects

of the social nature of the groups seemed to maintain their willingness to stay connected to the

process. The variety among the group members kept individual participants working. School

personnel wanted to demonstrate their professional commitment to leadership work so they

maintained their effort. Families and students maintained their participation because they


wanted to sustain their involvement over time and avoid returning to old patterns of exclusion.

Charmaz and Mitchell (2001) remind us that grounded theory development requires attention

to several dimensions: (a) the simultaneous need for data collection and analysis; (b) the search

for emergent themes in the early stages of data analysis; and (c) the opportunities that arise for

understanding basic social processes within the data.

Spirited and intense conversations generated a variety of criteria for good solutions.

Small groups presented their criteria to the entire team. Participants clustered criteria when

they seemed to have similar intent and concern. One criterion that emerged from multiple

groups was to build in a sense of urgency into each goal by setting expectations for rapid and

sustained change. Each solution included specific evidence to track progress and goal

attainment.. In this phase of the process, the group began to talk aloud about what researchers

might call internal validity. They began looping back to previous work to insure that their

sorting processes were consistent over time. Where they found anomalies, they discussed

changes in their protocols and decision trees. Where they made changes, they went back and

re-sorted criteria. The role of the group facilitators was to ask questions to help clarify

processes. The group determined the point at which all criteria for good solutions had been

determined. The next step in the change process was to examine the maps again to identify key

issues, identify possible solutions, apply their criteria for good solutions, and then craft explicit

goals for change processes. As ethnographers, our work was to focus some attention on the

process itself, ensuring that all perspectives were aired and discussed fully. We tracked these

conversations to make explicit the kinds of decision making processes that were being used.

Cycles of Inquiry, Reflection, and Action

The district change team was ready to move to a new phase of their work: the familiar

space of action. First, they needed a plan that not only had instrumental equity goals but was


designed in such a way that it expanded learning and development for practitioners, families,

and students throughout the district. Thus, the processes of mediating how people came

together to understand, reflect, and act in congruence with equity outcomes was critical to the

success of the end goals. Gutiérrez (2006) speaks to this notion of reflexivity in which critical

issues like voice and participation become key touchstones for ongoing research that is equity

minded in nature. However, the process of inquiry, reflection and then action, was unfamiliar.

It clashed with deeply held notions of the role of leadership in creating a path forward, and

conflicted with needs to make rapid advances in longstanding inequities. In this district,

leadership had meant commanding attention, issuing policy, and asking managers to carry out

the policies. Where resistance arose, staff attended professional learning workshops to learn to

perform the new policy. Political power was maintained by creating small, loyal groups that

worked behind closed doors to decide on collective public performances. This strategy

sustained over several generations of superintendents. Spending time in shared inquiry, evidence

interpretation, and critical analysis was unfamiliar territory for most of the school personnel.

The tension between technical solutions, that is what should be done and in what detail,

and a critical analysis of the power and privilege dynamics that maintain certain structures,

notions of accomplishment, forms, and functions within organizations and among people, was

continuously present in our discussions. Our constant threading of critical ethnography

methodologies in our work helped the group to be both in the process and stand back from it so

that a constant critical examination of the power dynamics happened simultaneously. The role

of our mediating tools was to surface the assumptions that undergirded solutions that were

proposed. We still needed to create social spaces to use tools productively and where particular

practices mediated people’s engagements with the tools.


The design of two kinds of social spaces was instrumental in our work. First, we

designed social spaces for labor-intensive meetings led by our staff with state Department of

Education personnel. Second, we designed learning networks among states. These two

strategies allowed us to infuse explicitly an introspective dimension through activities that

promoted a “double move” (Hedegaard, 1998) in which participation structures compelled

personnel to shift from personal/professional experiences to theoretical sense-making, based on

a new vocabulary offered in these meetings. Simultaneously, the everyday experiences of the

personnel offered a way into sense-making that was grounded in local state department problem

spaces. These two processes constituted the double move in which both the TA staff and the

government personnel engage in understanding the target problem. The TA staff created a

platform for understanding while the government personnel brought their everyday

conundrums into the space. For instance, a phone call from a mother requesting assistance

because someone wants to label her son begins to be mediated by helping to identify the

problem space (i.e., the object), as ways of engaging families and the schools that serve them.

Shifting problematizing to engagement helps the participants begin to learn more about how

they systematically categorize and organize their students in order to accomplish their own

schooling tasks rather than how they organize their work to support their students. Central in

this work is exposing the nature of assumptions about the roles that schools take on and their

public purposes, as well as the identities that are conferred to those that hold the roles. Part of

our technical assistance work is to reveal through dialogue how these perceived identities as

well as prescribed roles interact to afford certain kinds of responses to the phone while

constraining others.

Once a problem space was identified from the mapping work and the features of good

solutions were described, then small groups worked together to identify at least three strategies


for addressing priorities. The group selected a final slate of action items after considering the

work of each small group. Reviews of what to do and why, how others would be involved in

learning and developing their understanding of the agendas, how they might be shaped and

modified at a local classroom or building level was established. Then, participants designed

plans for communicating the work, the steps forward, and the outcomes. The design team

specified progress checkpoints and outcomes measures. A small group work produced a project

tracking and coordination plan that was reviewed and agreed to by the entire design team.

We used two ethnography tools consistently in our work. The first was the design and

development of a field note tool that each of us used whenever we had a face-to-face or virtual

meeting with members of the DCT. This field note extended the field note description of

Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw (2011). The field note had places to itemize what was discussed, what

was planned, and who had responsibilities for following through on tasks. The field note also

had spaces for chronicling observation in which many power laden actions were noted: (a) the

changing uses of language, (b) developments in discourse patterns that altered standing

practices around who spoke and who primarily listened, and (c) notations on the social

networks within the team.

Once a month, these field notes were compiled, looking for emergent themes. Quarterly,

the field notes compilations were fed back to the DCT as a form of reconstituting and

remediating the communication patterns and impacts within the team. At almost every

meeting, we were able to identify one or two participants who seemed to either be strongly

involved or moved to the margins in the conversations. We interviewed these individuals to

check our field note observations, get expanded points of view on the meeting, and help us

understand how we might change up the mediation patterns at the next meeting. These

interviews also became part of the data feedback loop. We sought to avoid providing


information in such detail that identities were revealed while wanting to show that we

constantly assessed our own understandings to better understand and detail the process.

Sharing the data became another form of intervention with the DCT.

Implementing and Assessing Change

Another key assumption that informed our practices was that educators’ professional

learning is promoted through data-driven and research-grounded content within the context of

educators’ practice-embedded activities (King, Artiles, & Kozleski, 2009). Thus, these social

spaces were grounded in personnel’s professional practices and evidences collected by the

system in which they worked. Moreover, in response to a critique by Davies and Nutley (2008)

of the use of research in policy and practice, we suggest that research methodologies need to

transcend linear views of knowledge work. Critical ethnography is a kind of knowledge work

as this chapter has demonstrated. It is, at best, a spiral process in which information is gathered,

interpreted, processed with participants and then examined again as perspectives within the

group shift through interrogation and interaction. No longer do ethnographers labor in specific

contexts to produce evidence that is transported into other settings. Instead, our critical

ethnography approach provides action processes for the design, modeling, and development of

research as practice. For this purpose, we followed cycles of inquiry, reflection, and action with

the DCT so a period of active data collection was punctuated by sets of meetings that required

examining evidence of how our work was changing perspectives and the power differentials

within the group. We asked the DCT to consider who benefited and who was marginalized by

our actions and their results. The data we used to examine power and privilege as an outcome of

the organization were also part of our ongoing inquiry into the process of inquiry itself.


Sharing the Data as a Form of Intervention

Our task was to help support questioning, data gathering, and the ways in which

systems change efforts were assessed against equity benchmarks such as demographic data on

discipline referrals, community involvement on the part of school staff, and the redistribution of

creative capital through, for instance, creating teacher networks to support and develop robust

teaching (Kozleski, Gibson, & Hynds, 2011). Further, the DCT team members learned to collect

multiple kinds of data that helped them to understand what, why, when, how much, and how

inequities seem to develop and sustain locally. These approaches to inquiry, implementation,

and assessing change outcomes led to changes in how principals worked with their staffs. They

began to use heuristic tools to help teachers question their practices and reposition their

approaches to learning. Together, they began to develop feedback loops that traced their initial

assumptions about what was needed locally, their efforts to implement, and the results of those

efforts on changing patterns of performance locally. In this section, we explore some of the

methodological issues that emerged as we engaged with the DCT.

Our approach was grounded in an emphasis on civil rights and cultural responsiveness,

as well as evidence from the literature that students can excel in academic endeavors if they are

provided with access to high-quality teachers, curricula, instruction, programs and resources,

and their cultures, languages, and experiences are valued and used to facilitate their learning

(Rumberger & Ah Lim, 2008). Guided by a thematic focus on enhancing both understanding of

equity in classrooms, schools, and school systems and the use of evidence-based practices, our

approach addressed the gaps and priorities identified in recent, major policy and research equity

reports (Artiles & Dyson, 2005; Donovan & Cross, 2002; Harry & Klingner, 2006; Klingner et

al., 2005; Skiba et al., 2008).

Conclusions and Next Steps


Our work focused on partnering with school systems to address equity and social justice

in schooling. We used a set of ethnographically crafted tools that both help districts examine

and understand their data in deep ways. This same data helped us as technical assistance

providers to interpret what we chose to look at, and then, to make decisions together in terms of

the change process. The entire process is ideographically complex and fraught with unknowns

that, at each step, must be fairly and productively addressed. What our data compilations

examine and omit in displays of evidence skewed participant attention and, therefore, their

activities. To maintain our stance as researcher-activists, we pushed ourselves to warrant our

data trails, insisting on integrity in member checking, and ensuring that the resulting evidence

both help us understand the process of change while powering change at the same time.

A substantial proportion of our equity work focused on the racialization of disability as a

means to address deep educational inequities for learners that live multiple marginalities , i.e., gay,

disabled, and African-American. (Artiles & Kozleski, 2007). Our critical ethnographic work

assumed a systems change stance in which macro, meso, and micro levels of systems interacted

to seek stasis while, simultaneously, individuals and groups within systems re-mediated goals,

re-interpreted events, and re-negotiated activity (Kozleski & Huber, 2010; Cole, 1996). This

required an ethnographic examination of evidence about practices that make visible the deficit

visions about some learners that permeate educational policies and practices and the subjective

nature of disability diagnostic decisions (Kozleski & Artiles, 2012).

Our perspective on technical assistance transcended previous notions of “assistance”

that sought to transfer research knowledge to the everyday worlds of practitioners. Instead, we

designed theoretically grounded artifacts with evidence from participants’ everyday practices as

a way to re-mediate their views and actions (Kozleski, Gibson, & Hynds, 2012). Next, we

engineered social spaces with practitioners in which we used these artifacts in the analysis of


the racialization of disability. What emerged from these analytical events were new forms of

understanding the problem and alternative educational futures for the affected marginalized

learners (Engeström, 2011).

We examined how researchers and scholars can engage in opening up the possibilities of

what McKenzie and Scheurich (2004) call “the gaze.” That is, we helped participants use

unfamiliar lenses to examine and understand evidence from different vantage points. Further,

once evidence is curated, how it is displayed, to what audiences, for what kinds of discussion,

analysis, and interpretation provides a set up for uncovering within group differences as well as

offering opportunities to uncover and debunk assumptions and positions that may have been

masked to participants. Evidence referred to both quantitative and qualitative information that

we asked participants to explore in novel ways that require their own participation in

constructing cases, vignettes, and other forms of intermediary analysis.

Importantly, because our work was systems change in action through critical

ethnography, the quality of the kinds of interpretations that were made and how interpretation

migrates into action causes another form of data transformation. Standing somewhat apart from

the action within the organization is our work as technical assistance providers who track the

ways in which the school, district, or state teams understand, influence, and support decisions

at each part of the process and make these data transparent to the members of the change

system.

We described, analyzed, and discussed the study, interpretation, and implementation of

ongoing educational change that explored the limits of conventional approaches to inquiry

driven projects and offers some alternative approaches to engaging change. Using data from a

case study of a recent technical assistance project concerned with educational equity for

marginalized groups, we detailed the challenges of careful inquiry and interpretation in a rapidly


changing complex environment that characterizes school systems in the United States (U.S.). In

this chapter we suggested that technical assistance offers a critical opportunity to engage

individuals and activity systems in changing the outcomes of their practice and, in doing so, shift

their praxis in ways that can mediate future work. Because we locate this work within an

ethnographic methodology that is steeped in activity theory, we described and critiqued

ethnographic methods that offered a new, critical approach to technical assistance that offers a

rich context for ongoing research and inquiry as a critical feature of systems transformation.


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