The Six Equity Stances of Liberatory Project-Based Learning

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PUBLISHED December 14, 2021

The Six Equity Stances of Liberatory Project-Based Learning creates a way to identify, challenge and critique the social forces that reproduce inequity and oppression. We were inspired by several sources, so let’s begin by acknowledging the people who significantly influenced our thinking. The National Equity Project designed a way to routinely and regularly identify the structures that reproduce oppression: they identified internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and structural lenses to sharpen our ability to understand how racism, sexism, patriarchy, classism, colonialism, etc. works. So I would like to name them first as an influence on our work. Naturally, our work stands on the shoulders of other writers, thinkers, and educators. In the same way that bell hooks said that Paulo Friere gave her the language to challenge and critique systems of oppression, bell hooks gave us language focused on themes related to love and justice. Jeff Duncan Andrade, Aaliyah el-Amin , Chris Emdin, Gloria Ladson Billings, and Ibram X. Kendi provided ways for us to see how structural racism and structural inequities exist. Across cultures and institutions, and especially within school systems, we focus on raising critical consciousness so that students learn to critique, challenge, and perhaps make their worlds anew. Finally, Dr. Greg Carr, professor of Afro-American studies at Howard University, developed a framework for his “African Diaspora Studies” course that requires students to engage in discourse using the following six categories for social analysis: Social Structure, Governance Structure, Ways of Knowing, Systems of Thought, Science and Technology, Movement and Memory, and Cultural Meaning-Making. Then the last, most important category, in my opinion is: “How does this make us more free?” We found this compelling as a way to organize lines of inquiry, dialogue, and collective action. One of the tricky things about creating a framework is that categories tend to fragmentize whatever you are looking at, and emphasize distinctions rather than connections. To connect this point to equity work, I want to emphasize that the equity stances are not a “checklist,” and the work of liberatory project-based learning is not about checking off “identity work” in order to demonstrate that you’ve “achieved equity.” Rather, our Equity Stances naturally overlap and they are mutually interdependent and we hope they might support folks with a structured, scaffolded way of asking more critical questions.

Place An invitation to explore, learn, and reconnect to place and the land through contextualized extended experiences. Place is about where you are from, where your peoples are from, and the social, political, and economic landscape of those places. And it’s about the relationships people of that place have to the natural world and the built environment. Key questions to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students:

Where is the place you feel most connected in your heart, mind and soul?
How can we inhabit our planet so that it might be here for many generations to come?
How does the land bear witness?

Identity Explore issues of identity, ancestry, indigeneity and place. Identity is about asking “Who are my people and where are they from dating back several generations?”, “Who am I?” and “What’s my relationship to others?” In this country, we need to acknowledge that we’re born into an underlying caste system of hierarchy, privilege and exclusion. “White-ness [for example] is an American innovation,” as described by Isabel Wilkerson in her classic Caste: Origins of Our Discontent. If you were Irish or English, Hungarian or Polish, or German, in the formative years of this country, whether you wanted to or not (out of survival instincts, more than likely), you shed the European ethnic identity of your foremothers and forefathers for the social safety, economic access, and political solidarity with a group of people called “white.” Exploring identity includes factors like ancestral history, race, class, ethnicity, caste, gender expression, sexual orientation, and others while understanding how they intersect. Key questions to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students:

In what ways have your past neighborhoods and communities shaped who you are?
What is a unifying identity that includes all of us without suppressing difference?
In this moment, am I who I want to be?

Dialogue Engagement in co-generative dialogue and reflection, seeking to understand in a spirit of solidarity. Critical conversations are not easy. They entail a spirit of humility in which a pair of people, or a group, can collectively commit to understanding one another. Dialogue demands this level of curiosity, empathy, and attentiveness. It is entirely different from debate, in which only one viewpoint can win, or casual discussions over dinner, which are more about maintaining group cohesion than engaging in a shared inquiry and achieving mutual understanding. Key questions to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students:

When have you felt truly heard and understood?
When are you able to reflect with others in order to co-create opportunities for the future?
How do you demonstrate “deep understanding” of another person’s point of view?

Belonging Sourcing and developing one’s gifts for the community, critiquing exclusion, and deepening relationships with self, others & place. Belonging is particularly personal to me because there was a period in my life where I felt like I was losing myself in order to satisfy someone else’s idea of who I was supposed to be. When I intentionally decided to reclaim my identity, I began to closely study the history of the American education system and found it hard to ignore the extent to which American education has demanded that students give up their own cultural connections and identities in order to “belong” to a broader, hegemonic, white-dominant culture. Thus, in our conception, “belonging” is not about what we expect people to give up, but how we welcome them—that is, all of who they are—to the community. Key questions to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students:

When have you felt that you were an important part of something bigger than yourself?
In which spaces do you feel the most seen, heard, and valued?
When have you felt like your skills and talents were needed and valued in a community?

Democratization An invitation to explore & learn how systems of exclusion work and how to reclaim freedom and collective power. Democratization is trying to get at what Dr. Carr, in his Africana Studies framework, calls the “governance structure” of our communities. That is, how do we make decisions that affect all of us? Who is empowered to take part in those decisions, whether officially or unofficially? In America, we claim to love democracy, but how many of us actually experienced it? If you are a teacher, think honestly about your classroom. To what extent do your students have a sense of collective power together? To what extent or do you engage them in meaningful democratic processes, as opposed to structures designed to lead them to a plan you already set, as the teacher? And if you’re a school leader, I invite you to ponder these questions in regard both to the staff and the students at your school. Key questions to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students:

When was a time when you worked with others to make a decision that would affect a larger community?
Who is in the game? Who is out?
How might you amplify the voices of the vulnerable and silenced?

Liberation Explore, unlearn and resist systems of domination while reclaiming and reinhabiting diverse ways of knowing and being. In the HTH GSE, Dr. Michelle Pledger draws a distinction between what we are trying to get free from and what we are trying to get free to do. That framing has helped me pose more critical questions about liberation. I hope it’s useful to you too. I’ve also been informed by indigenous scholars such as Marie Battiste, author of Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of Decolonizing Methodologies. These scholars inspired me to think more deeply about Dr. Pledger’s distinction: I know that liberation is the aspiration, that is, what we want to be free to do, but what are we trying to get free from? Battiste and Smith frame liberation explicitly as liberation from colonization. Colonization is inextricably linked to assimilation: it demands not just the military subjugation of people, but control over their minds. What this means is that you can be all about “equity, equity, equity,” but if you’re ignoring the role of power and assimilation, you’re only advancing a colonial perspective of an individual’s identity, which demands that they separate themselves from their cultural identity. Key questions to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students:

What does it mean to you to be free, or unfree?
How would our community be different if we were working towards collective liberation?
What is a small step towards your own liberation?

References Battiste, M., & Bouvier, R. (2019). Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. UBC Press. Carr, G. and Hunter, K. (n.d.). Africana Studies Framework: Conceptual Categories. Knubia. National Equity Project. (n.d.). The Lens of Systemic Oppression. https://www.nationalequityproject.org/frameworks/lens-of-systemic-oppression Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed. Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House.