Partnering with a Purpose: Educational Equity and Cultural-Responsiveness
By Maria I. Khan & Kristen C. Wilcox
As we announced in a recent blog, the American Institutes of Research (AIR) Equity in Education initiative is supporting research-practice partnerships (including NYKids) to work on high leverage problems of practice focused on equity in education amid the pandemic recovery. For this initiative, we will be collaborating with two partner schools, Tech Valley High and Chatham in addressing critical diversity, equity and inclusion issues that affect students and families.
In today’s blog, we share some information about this initiative, AIR resources, and some key take-aways from our recent meet and greet session with our partners and colleagues across the country who are also using community-led research to influence social change, humanize complex policy issues, and address equity imperatives.
AIR-RPP Meet and Greet
Research-Practice Partnerships are intentionally organized to bring together a diversity of voices and expertise in solving complex problems. They employ various strategies to shift power relations and elevate a variety of participant voices with a focus on systems change.
The AIR-RPP Meet and Greet was held virtually over zoom on December 8, 2021, so participants could meet one another and share thoughts on advancing equity in their work and learn about equity-centered, pandemic-related work taking place in different communities across the country.
The AIR facilitators convened six teams from four states:
- Bless Collective, NY – Black Liberation in Education, Schools and Society
- Community Center for Education Results, Washington
- Edcouch-Elsa Independent School District, Texas
- Fallsburg Central School District, New York
- NY State Organizations: NYKids, Chatham, Tech Valley
- University of Miami, Florida
AIR RPP Resources
The AIR team shared RPP resources including Center for Education Equity Asset Maps and a longitudinal database (coming soon!). The asset map provides a bird’s-eye view of schools and communities to support conversations around systemic issues through data visualizations. The longitudinal database will allow users to access downloadable data for secondary analysis and conduct state, district, and county comparisons around the differential impacts of the pandemic.
NYKids Next Steps
Our goal through our partnership with AIR, Chatham and Tech Valley is to accelerate our learning about the differential impacts of the pandemic on youth while recognizing different local priorities and resources in different communities.
We look forward to providing updates about our discoveries and those of other RPPs in the AIR network, but meanwhile if you have questions and suggestions, or want to get involved in one of our improvement initiatives, please send us an email at nykids@albany.edu.
