By: Max Altman
As I write this blog, I am sitting in my office on the 16th floor of a high-rise building in downtown Atlanta. It is a beautiful space, quiet and organized, with colleagues working down the hall and a comfortable shared area for staff meetings and conversations at the far end. There is little physical sign of the large numbers of people my work is ostensibly intended to actually support – students attending schools, their families*, local community members…in fact, through my transition over the last fifteen years from a high school teacher working with students every day to a graduate student and now a researcher, I feel like I’ve seen those folks less and less.
I work for the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education justice organization, and we frequently meet with and speak with young people, their families, and community activists, among many other community voices. It is key to our work, and we work hard to do it well. However, from our office up here it is still worth noting that there is much more work to be done to better incorporate community voices into all aspects of the work we do – right from the very beginning and continuing throughout each step. When we design our projects, we always think carefully about how to build in student, family, and community voice…but those designs are still generally created by us, my colleagues and I, here in our office or working remotely from our homes.
What’s more, “the community” is of course not a monolith, and although we work hard to build communication channels, we know that often the voices that are most valuable in helping us to understand what is needed in our education equity work may be the hardest for us to access – those whose phone is turned off, who aren’t seeing the postings or in the locations to spot the notices, who don’t know the activists we connect with when we look for a range of community input (and, for that matter, often are not familiar with us at all).
Developing authentic strategies for including a much broader range of community input in the earliest stages of our work is hugely important, and a huge challenge. And working to solve that challenge shouldn’t just be the responsibility of the folks in the community whose input we are seeking: coming up with a better way to do it which does not add undue burden to others and reflects and incorporates the reality of those who inform our work is our responsibility as brokers.
Some of you – particularly those who do direct community engagement work – may at this point be feeling a little frustrated: “Another researcher, complaining about how hard it is to connect with the community. The community should be leading this work, not just ‘informing’ it!” I agree! The challenge is that it is simply a matter of fact that this is often not the case. Many of us, myself certainly included, occupy a privileged position in the education ecosystem and have access to tools and resources that not everyone can easily access, that not everyone is even aware of. We can work as hard as possible to democratize those tools and resources, but we cannot simply transfer our grants and projects to “the community.” Further, our partners in the philanthropy sector have shared their own difficulty in effectively routing funds to community organizations to support authentic local initiatives. They need to do better. We all need to do better. But simply knowing that does not mean that we know how – the question of how to most effectively build in inclusive community voices in all aspects of the work we do (and your work may be very different from mine) is a legitimate one that requires real study and investigation.
The Education Knowledge Broker Network is about developing shared knowledge among many knowledge brokers in many different roles to answer the hard questions in our work, and few, if any, are harder than this: given the current reality of education improvement work, which is far too rarely led by actual representative community groups and individuals, how do we bring in key community voices right from the beginning? How do we transfer ownership of community-focused work to the community? To ask a famously simple but famously difficult question repeated by everyone from organizers to activists to researchers to educational leaders, how do we ensure that our work is with the community, not for it?
There is of course no one right answer to this question. Best practice depends on local context and structures, on the particular work and the wants and needs of those with whom it is done, on the breadth and scale of focus, on the specifics of the mechanisms and policies and structures in play.
But this is not a question it is acceptable not to answer. This is not a question we can reserve for later while we work from our own positionality without acceptable regard for the problematic nature of so much of the thinking we may be doing, even if inadvertently, for others. We do not know what people want and need until they tell us, and if our work begins only based on our own knowledge and in our own heads we run the risk of getting it wrong right from the start.
The Education Knowledge Broker Network is here to work to answer the hard questions – we have not marshalled resources for a group like this just to answer the easy ones. This is a topic that is ripe for discussion, and one for which we must create better approaches, better practices, and better knowledge. We all work and broker in different ways, but ensuring that key community members inform and shape our work centrally and right from the beginning is a necessity no matter our specific role. Work that is for others is really for no one.
Join us in this endeavor, and please share your expertise, your thoughts, and your challenges as we work to build answers together! We invite you to consider and address these questions along with us, and to join our future conversations and events, to discuss this hugely important topic.
*Obviously it largely goes without saying that some of my coworkers are parents – including some with local school-aged children – so it would be inaccurate to suggest there are no family members in my office, but I’m sure you, the reader, get my drift here.
Max Altman is the Director of Research and Policy at the Southern Education Foundation, where he oversees SEF’s research agenda and its research-informed policy positions and advocacy initiatives, including the recently released report, Miles To Go: The State of Education for Black Students in America. He previously served as the technical assistance lead for the Pacific Regional Educational Laboratory at McREL International in Honolulu, where he designed and facilitated ongoing support projects to meet the needs of educators in Pacific jurisdictions. Max has also served as a teacher and curriculum writer. Connect with Max on LinkedIn.