The Challenge

There are chronic and frustrating inequalities that affect students’ opportunities to learn and develop. One in four students in the U.S. live in poverty, for example, while one in 10 are identified as English language learners. The ability to receive an excellent education is challenged by migration, homelessness, poverty, and racism. At the same time, children struggle to find identities that escape stereotypes and enable them to work across differences to thrive in the future.

Our Solution

An equity-oriented approach to learning views learners as having agency, acknowledges their full humanity, and creates opportunities for learners to access and belong within robust education opportunities in and beyond their formal schooling. It challenges us to reimagine equity as the foundation of our research, professional practices, and community engagement, envisioning and building resources from a worldview of abundance and interconnectedness.

The Equity in Learning initiative is grounded in the belief that the success of every educator and learner benefits the entire society. Centering restorative justice theory and transformative justice possibilities, the initiative leverages five pedagogical stances (5PS): history matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter, as tools to imagine, design, and sustain communities of practice.

The initiative’s work consists of:

• Recovering and analyzing social movement histories including the nuances and artifacts of impactful social movement changemaking in the past, to understand and strategize for educational equity today.
• Designing and disseminating practical toolkits and frameworks that educators, students, and administrators can use to create context-appropriate, actionable equity plans.
• Investing in educational research practice partnerships that prioritize equity, ensuring that emergent data and findings directly support learning environment and policy transformation.
• Curating conversations between students, faculty, and communities beyond the university to practice equity accountability, a culture of inclusion and continuous learning, and collective responsibility.