A Year of Equity literacy: community actions and invitations

Abstract

School inequity is a persistent and 'wicked' problem communities have a responsibility to solve. Here, we argue that critical literacy advocacy within community-based settings provides an unprecedented opportunity to examine and disrupt school inequity and promote sustainable actions towards justice-based solutions. This article connects critical literacy and equity literacy theoretical frameworks to describe a series of invitations and actions that focused on addressing school inequity in one town. Here, authors offer lessons learned from a community-led school equity literacy campaign where researchers and participants collectively organised and reflected on a public event series entitled 'Year of Equity' (YoE). Three key YoE processes are described: facilitating book clubs, facilitating a community conversation event and forming action committees. These processes relied on critical equity literacies through the promotion of new relationships and shared experiences centring on engagement with a variety of texts, through a focus on incremental change over time.

Positioning self and other: building equity literacy in collaboration

“…While focal data in this manuscript come from Julie's work in creating, facilitating and gathering data on the Digital Dialogue Project (DDP), we engaged in collaborative theorisation and joint analysis (Cornish et al, 2014). This analysis stems from 10 years of informal sharing/thinking around issues in literacy collaboration; we have separately orchestrated collaborative literacy projects across neighbourhoods, schools, grade levels, expertise and cultures with teachers and youth (Rust and Ballard, 2019; Wessel‐Powell et al, 2021). Bolstered by a commitment to social justice, we imagine that fostering partnerships across a range of differences were everyday sites of civil engagement (Pahl, 2019).…”

“…‘Equity literacy’ is defined as understanding how inequity works and actions that promote increased equity (Swalwell, 2011; Wessel‐Powell et al, 2021). The goals of developing equity literacies are to recognise biases, respond immediately to them, redress inequities in the long term and ultimately build equitable, sustainable schools (Gorski and Swalwell, 2015).…”

Advocacy Stories: Equity Literacy Practices of White Low Income Mothers Navigating School Reform

“…As a collaborative research team, we are interested in how equity is positioned locally. We have used media-based narratives to anchor public conversations and events (Wessel-Powell et al, 2021). Authors and co-researchers also regularly participated in other public conversations related to school equity, such as at school board meetings focused on budget, redistricting, and reform efforts at Wrightway.…”

“…In the context of schooling inequity, such as in school districts where segregation by race and class abounds and state-level interference varies by school, parent advocates' choices and advocacy can be directed towards equity issues at the intersection of racism and classism. These actions, when intentionally focused on redressing schooling inequities, can be seen as practicing equity literacy Wessel-Powell et al, 2021). Literacy's role in equity advocacy is essential because you must get informed Equity Literacy Practices of White Low Income Mothers about equity issues in order to engage effectively with them.…”

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

“…Sometimes these decisions were not clear-cut. For example, an article was excluded which explored a community equity initiative (Wessel-Powell et al, 2021) in which local residents were involved in a range of literacy-related activities as there was no direct reference to schoolbased activity. This initiative may well have involved or been relevant to children in the area and relate in important ways to literacy in school.…”