Cheryl Ching PhD 鈥17, who completed her dissertation on constructing and enacting equity at a community college, is recipient of the 2017 Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education (CUE). Throughout her graduate studies, she worked at the Center for Urban Education, and she has returned to the center this year as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate. Her work is being supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We spoke to her about the meaning of equity in her work.
Why is equity such a challenging term?
For me, equity falls into the same bucket as 鈥渄emocracy鈥 or 鈥渓ove.鈥 My dissertation examines how a college defines what equity means. The faculty and administrators I interviewed each had their own way of expressing what equity means to them. With all of these individual expressions of equity, imagine the challenges this college and others can have with agreeing on an organizational definition. By the end of my data collection, practitioners at my research site still had trouble articulating the meaning of equity for their college.
The thing is, as I worked on piecing together the story, I found that despite the feeling of uncertainty around the college鈥檚 definition of equity, in fact, they were constructing a meaning, in part through the actions of campus leaders and faculty. So, even without an explicit document or plan that clearly stated a shared definition of equity, the college had one.
Much of CUE鈥檚 work revolves around 鈥渆quity-mindedness,鈥 which is about approaching inequalities in educational outcomes for students of color from a perspective of race, agency and change. Was equity-mindedness apparent at your research site?
I found that this college adhered closely to one facet of equi颅ty-mindedness, which is that practitioners are responsible for their students鈥 learning, experiences and outcomes. The leaders continually expressed that they cannot control many of the factors that impact their students 鈥攊ncome issues, housing instability, food security 鈥 but there are many other things they can control, and they were going to take responsibility for those things.
Were there ways in which they didn鈥檛 adhere to equity-mind颅edness?
For CUE, race and race-consciousness are fundamental as颅pects of equity mindedness. At this college, while there was a consciousness of race, equity-mindedness was sometimes used in a race-blind matter. I heard on several occasions how being equity-minded is about serving all students, not just students of color.
Why is race fundamental to equity-minded thinking?
All too often, talk about students is in the aggregate. 鈥淥ur stu颅dents are engaged.鈥 鈥淥ur students are learning.鈥 鈥淥ur students are not learning.鈥 But CUE tries to disrupt that thinking by asking, 鈥淲ho are you talking about when you say 鈥榮tudents鈥? Who do you imagine when you say 鈥榮tudents鈥? When you say that your teaching works for students, which students are we actually talking about?鈥
In particular, CUE tries to get practitioners to think about whether and how teaching, advising and other prac颅tices work for African-Americans, Latinx and other racially minoritized students since many higher education practices were not designed for their benefit. So the question be颅comes, how does a practice work for an African-American student, a Latinx student?
What is CUE doing to ensure that practitioners develop equity-mindedness in the way you described?
We鈥檙e starting to think about equity-mindedness as a 鈥渃ompe颅tency,鈥 and to break it down into its component parts. What is the knowledge that practitioners need to have to be equi颅ty-minded? What are the skills that they need to develop? What are the behaviors that they need to enact? What are the kinds of belief changes that need to happen in order for this concept to be real? These are the questions we are asking, and with any luck, the answers will help us refine our tools and our approach with campuses.
