Our work: Equity in Learning

Community collaboration for equitable learning

The Equity in Learning initiative works to ensure that more children, families, educators, and communities benefit from meaningful learning opportunities through which they imagine, plan for, and build thriving futures.

Our Solution

An equity-oriented approach to learning views all 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 plans for their work.
  • Investing in educational research practice partnerships, 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 accountability, a culture of continuous learning, and collective responsibility.

Faculty Director

Headshot of Maisha T. Winn

Maisha T. Winn

Faculty Director, Equity in Learning Initiative