Mediating systemic change in educational systems

Running Head: MEDIATING CHANGE IN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS 1
Mediating Systemic Change in Educational Systems through Socio-Cultural Methods
Elizabeth B. Kozleski
University of Kansas
Alfredo J. Artiles
Arizona State University
March 2013
Authors Note
Both the first and second authors acknowledge the support of the Equity Alliance at
ASU under OESE’s Grant # S004D080027. Funding agency endorsement of the ideas presented
in this article should not be inferred. They do not necessarily support the views expressed in this
paper. All errors are attributable to the authors. Address correspondence to
elizabeth.kozleski@ku.edu.
Kozleski, E. B., & Artiles, A. J. (in press). Mediating systemic change in educational systems through socio-cultural methods. In
P. Smeyers, D. Bridges, N. Burbules, & M. Griffiths (Eds.), International handbook of interpretation in educational research
methods. New York: Springer.

MEDIATING CHANGE IN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS 2
Mediating Systemic Change in Educational Systems through Socio-Cultural Methods
In this chapter, we explore the notion of technical assistance within an ethnographic
research tradition and then propose a set of approaches to interpreting and acting on
interpretations drawn from technical assistance activity. In the end, we hope to reveal to the
readers the complexity of using evidence in a variety of ways to help systems make important
shifts in their work, their cultures, and their decision-making processes so that changes in
systems produce outcomes that are equitable for the students who go to school there. The
processes that we use to collect, compile, analyze, and inform our work are steeped in
ethnographic research methods. Thus, our work could be considered as that of ethnographer
activists who participate in and influence the work of schools with particular emphasis on social
justice and equity. Through this approach we help organizational leaders understand and re-
mediate the ways that they structure and support equity in their schools.
Some of this work offers units of analysis that link macro with micro-level factors
(Artiles & Dyson, 2005; Gallego et al., 2001). For instance, we examine how federal policy makes
its way through state and district interpretations to local enacted practice at the school-wide
and classroom level, and even into specific interactions between teacher and student. This
emergent work transcends fragmented views of individuals in which single markers of
difference (e.g., race, social class, gender, etc.) constitute the focus of analysis (Ladson-Billings
& Tate, 1995). It moves beyond psychological notions of learning and development that locate
knowledge development and change within individuals to focus on learning within communities
as individuals build shared experience, explore opportunities, and hone their practice through
interaction (Engeström, 1999).
Change in participation defines learning. Systems change work embodied in socio-
cultural research methods offers an approach to engaging in change within community. In this

approach change work becomes both the method of inquiry (i.e., the process for understanding)
and the mediating context (i.e., the activity that shifts understanding) in which change occurs. In
addition to locating change in community and identifying change processes as research, there is
a third pillar of this work: Equity focus. By focusing on equity, systems divest themselves of
institutionalized racist policies and practice that, we argue, are a result of action without
inquiry, which, in turn, stems from anemic or weak methods for examining, interpreting, and
critiquing local practice.
Using the tools of ethnography to examine a system’s work in action offers opportunities
and challenges for researchers and participants alike. Participants within activity arenas like
schools and school systems wrestle with time on a minute-by-minute basis. Institutional
mandates, the 182 days that students attend school, the densely packed, test-atomized
curriculum, the unexpected daily even hourly surprises that come from large numbers of people
trying to navigate the same pathways, at the same times, following the same routines, challenge
even the most skilled time managers. Therefore, reflexivity, the luxury of considering an action
before making it and assessing its value afterwards, is rarely experienced.
Our project work with school personnel asks practitioners to take time to re-mediate
their experiences, attending to multiple influences and interpretations of the events that
surround them. We meet with small groups of school personnel with a set of questions that
help lead them through a process of questioning their daily practices, both what and how
practice occurs. Critical ethnographic methods require the accumulation of evidence in some
consistent process, the development of hunches or working hypotheses about what is
happening, followed by more and more focused evidence collection to help make meaning and
re-focus effort (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008). Vignettes from shared descriptions of everyday life
and the commentary that accompanies these vignettes become part of the evidence change that

is used to chronicle conceptual and activity shifts in school communities. In this way, together,
researchers and participants document how schools construct, manage, and sustain social
realities. Importantly, in our work, we ask ourselves and our participants to be critical
ethnographers (Anderson, 1989). We collectively examine how, through our discourse and
instructional tools, meaning emerges and the cultural work of schools is woven. As we discuss
here, entering into a critical stance complicates research efforts to warrant our processes with
participants and external audiences as we construct understanding of our data. Thus, using
ethnographic tools to mediate our activities as technical consultants creates a number of
methodological and ethnical dilemmas that we explore in this chapter.
In this chapter, we reveal a kind of double move in which the data in the system (e.g.,
vignettes and their commentaries) and our own field notes about the influence of our presence
are consulted as we move forward. How we take care to collect, compile, and use our own field
notes, status reports, and decision trees to track and examine our own work is a critical piece of
this chapter. We explore the ways in which our mission constrains our support and our
support constrains our mission. Further, while we provide support in specific ways, we are also
funded by government agencies in which vested interests define what counts as success.
Chronicling, interpreting, and theorizing about the meaning of these moves offers a telling view
of the politics of education reform. Along the way, readers will encounter sections of this
chapter that explain the context of our work, describe systemic change with educational
systems using one case as an example, highlight the methods, and then, explore the impact and
analytical opportunities by enacting our role as a method of inquiry.
Methods
Setting: Working on Equity Issues as an Arm of the Federal Government

This chapter draws from work completed through a grant from the U.S. government that
funded our work as an equity assistance center. The center was responsible for providing rights
training and advisory services for all schools and communities in three states to address equity
and access issues in public education. There were almost eight million students from preschool
through 12th
grade in these three states. We focused on prevention, intervention, and
remediation strategies with schools, local school systems, and state education agencies to reduce
racial, gender, and socio-economic disproportionalities among groups of students.
Variability in public education in the U.S. is important because local and state contexts
produce very different kinds of tensions and opportunities. States, not the federal government,
have the constitutional responsibility to ensure access to education in the United States. This
means that all 50 states and 10 U.S. territories (e.g, Puerto Rico) have their own sets of
educational laws and regulations that map, where required, onto national legislation that
finances some programs, notably those for students who meet certain thresholds for poverty,
English language skills, and educational disabilities. Local school systems raise much of the
operating costs for educating children from kindergarten through high school graduation
through local property taxes. Locally elected (in some cases appointed) school boards oversee
local school districts that have distinct and specific sets of regulations. For instance, in one
metropolitan area of more than 8 million residents there are 18 different school districts and
school boards each with their own curriculum, teacher hiring and evaluation procedures,
transportation systems and so on. Thus, working with any school district requires careful
excavation and attention to its cultural history, rules, lore, collective identity, modes of
communication, and procedural fluencies. This context is critical to understanding that
centralized and national strategies to change educational practice have had little impact on local

experience in spite of more than sixty years of sustained efforts to improve educational
outcomes through national initiatives.
What became apparent in working with individual systems was that often, districts and
schools lacked information about on two counts. First, their knowledge of current research and
emerging knowledge was fuzzy at best. Second, they were relatively or their own practices
designed to improve outcomes for students viewed as culturally and linguistically diverse (see
fieldnote 1, 2009). Further, school and school district organizational structures served as
barriers to change and improvement. Institutional structures lacked flexibility for developing
internal capacity in terms of the distribution of knowledge and inquiry strategies, the
redistribution of services and supports, and communication strategies with their employees as
well as the larger communities they served (Kozleski & Artiles, 2012). Complicated by
institutionalized practices, these structural barriers appeared to explain some of the graduation
and assessment data gaps between White and Asian American students and other ethnic, racial
groups as well as special education and EL groups.
Keep in mind the importance of our approach as a continual interpretive act based on
analyses of the institutional and structural constraints of the system that we were entering.
That is, interpretation of our work began as we made decisions about where to enter a school
system in order to increase the probability of changing practices. Understanding the local
context meant that deciding whom to call for an initial contact had implications for who would
call us back and what kind of reception we might have. What occurred in these initial
conversations had ripple effects in terms of who else in the senior administration might call us
and begin conversations. We wanted to connect with enough people in the system to help us
better understand the constraints and affordances that existed in this particular context so that
our work with them could expand and connect both quickly and deeply. Each move was based

on interpretations that were being made as we talked and began to map the relationships, the
leadership dynamics, and the local funds of knowledge (Chase, 2005). We taped these initial
conversations (with permission from our participants), wrote field notes, and involved our own
team members in interpreting the emerging story lines.
In the district that we refer to in the paper, district leaders were in flux. The
superintendent was retiring. Several senior executives each with different kinds of
responsibilities such as curriculum, personnel, and finance, each saw themselves as potential
superintendents. The interviews with each of them and the people who supported particular
promotions equivocated between offering sharply focused (a) analyses of equity issues and (b)
analyses of poor leadership decisions. In the next sections, we describe our work with schools
and districts from the first contact with a district, through data gathering, planning,
implementing, learning, and honing the remedies or processes.
Process: The Conceptual Frame
We conceptualized transformative equity assistance work as coordinated effort to build
capacity and nurture ongoing professional development through reflexivity. Ethnographic
methods provided the vehicle. Using data, we worked with organizational leaders to inform
their frameworks, develop their knowledge base, re-mediate what they emphasized through
discourse and action. We supported this work with tools designed to help mediate how people
understand the landscape in which they work and define their problem spaces in ways that
recognize and organize complexity (Engeström, 1999). In addition, we proposed that
transformative equity work is institutionalized and scaled up through a distributive model of
organizational change in which effective practices are systematically disseminated through
school networks (Kozleski & Huber, 2010). We have described this work elsewhere as
organized around five key transformative mediating structures: (a) re-mediating

understandings of the problem; (b) disrupting the view from above; (c) forging new spaces; (d)
cycles of inquiry, reflection, and action; and (e) implementing and assessing change (Kozleski &
Artiles, 2012). Critical ethnography demands that researchers examine how power and privilege
is exercised within settings (Cannella & Lincoln, 2009). Unexamined everyday practices reify
historical patterns of interaction in which some groups benefit because of the existing informal
or unspoken rules of conduct that marginalize other perspectives and frames of reference.
One district in particular had serious gaps in achievement among racial/ethnic groups.
After a series of conference calls in which the district superintendent, the chief academic officer,
and other district leaders identified a set of issues that they felt were contributing to their data
outcomes, we proposed a process for working with them. We designed this approach to
foreground organizational change for social justice and equity outcomes since addressing issues
of inequity for some families and students emerged from an initial needs assessment. Our task
was to create access to tools that captured the current landscape as well as anticipated progress
on critical equity issues that centered on differential educational achievement based on gender,
national origin, and race. We wanted to help the district team understand how a focus on
improving results for all students improves results for particular groups as well. As
ethnographers, we went back to our data to examine the relationships.
Throughout this period of time, with the consent of the individuals and the school
system involved, we audiotaped our meetings, made field notes, and shared brief summaries of
those notes with the district participants. We were beginning the work of laying an
ethnographic trail of our entry into the system. While we talked with groups, we also
interviewed key players individually to understand motivation, commitment, and the degree of
reflexivity that key individuals brought to their work and the problem spaces they inhabited. As
Charmaz and Mitchell (2001) remind us, we had to collect and sift through our data carefully.

The data connected in specific ways to the context in which we were operating. While
disclosures from individuals mounted as we built closer relationships, we had to be cautious
about introducing mediating tools based on what was emerging. As ethnographers we needed
to preserve our relationships with all the participants. We could create new tools, like
processes for conversations that we knew needed to occur but were mindful that we might
create uncomfortable dilemmas for participants about whether to disclose information or stay
silent. In these moments, we returned to data to tell the story for us. Sometimes, crucial
concerns remained buried for some time before they emerged, if at all. While we coded our data
line-by-line, we also had to stand back from our transcripts and look at whole anecdotes and
scenarios to understand the emerging relational and political map. We shared our data with our
participants, always in groups so that data that came to us looped back to groups to interpret
together.
We both established a bounded space in which individuals developed relationships and
explored assumptions and ambitions about the nature of the space and the complex of issues
that surfaced. Our technical assistance emerged as a process for troubling the spaces in which
equity issues were emerging. At the same time while we were creating the contexts for
awareness to develop and build momentum for change what we did was also critical
ethnography. It made participants aware of how they conceptualized and acted within this
bounded space.
Widening the Work: Re-mediating Whose Views Matter and How Problem Spaces
are Conceptualized
We asked the district leadership team to identify a set of key leaders among their
teachers, related services personnel (e.g., school psychologists, speech/language therapists,
counselors), principals (i.e., school heads), and district managers. Members needed to be able to

commit to working as members of a district change team in the mode of what Engeström (1999)
calls an “expansive lab” to re-imagine the landscape of the district looking at historical time
scales, patterns of migration, the emergence of the professional hierarchies, and the structures
and socialization patterns that shaped contemporary practices. This team needed to consist of
more than inside members of the organization, it also needed to include the students and
families who experienced the school culture and establishment. This mix of insiders and
outsiders was a critical move intended to disrupt practice and dialogue in its usual way. As
critical ethnographers, we needed to broaden the participation in our research since we wanted
to uncover the multiple intersections of power and privilege. The experience of family members
in schools is often a telling detail.
We asked to meet with family groups that were informally organized and serving as
critics of the system. A series of focus groups helped us to learn more about family experiences
and responses to the school experiences of their students. We also met with students in focus
groups. Data from these focus groups merged into our mapping phase described in detail in the
next section. Our ethnographic strategy was to widen the circle of reference for the work and
widen our own understanding of the cultures negotiated and transformed within the district.
Through the voices of families, we began to understand the distribution of power within the
school system. With the families, we analyzed transcripts from the focus groups from two
perspectives: the ways in which families read the official district discourses and how families
were attempting to mediate and shift those discourses to benefit their children (Anderson,
1989).
Through the focus groups, we nominated a set of family representatives and students
who joined the District Change Team (DCT). Their participation elevated concerns with district
staff and family members. At the heart of these concerns were issues around (a) expertise, (b)

the capacity of the district to meet the “demands” of families and students, and (c) how
negotiated spaces might be constituted and engaged to find ways of moving forward together.
Families and students were concerned about being drowned out and dismissed. These concerns
came from our frequent individual interviews with key participants. As ethnographers, not
only were we interested in the work of the group around making changes to improve the
opportunities for historically marginalized students, we were also interested in the individual
narratives that were traveling alongside the constructions of the larger group. We wove back
and forth between these lenses to help us understand the change project as it evolved but also to
understand its impact on individuals within the system. We sifted and analyzed the individual
and collective evidence. The ongoing data analysis accomplished two agendas. It provided
direction for our technical assistance while it also informed our ethnographic discovery method,
helping to direct us to new sources of information.
We surfaced issues that emerged in our focus groups and interviews through small
vignettes that we wrote for dyads of school and family members to read and discuss. These
anchored conversations became a way to open up conversations about the nature of knowing
and the kinds of knowledge prized in schools. Transcripts from our focus groups were analyzed
as they became available. They helped us develop hunches about the dynamics of the district,
the decision making processes, who and what was valued in decision making, and the historical
threads that seamed together some working assumptions of the group.
For our work, making hunches marked a new period of inquiry. What was being
interpreted and problematized began to seep into our work. We wrote brief memos and
vignettes that captured emerging tensions to share with the participants. In this way, without
naming sources and through describing what we called “cases”, we were able to member check
our analyses, sharpening our understanding of what we were learning and improving the quality

of our interventions. We wanted to generate insights, develop explanations for how the district
operated and used power to maintain its stasis, as well to seek understanding for why the
system operated as it did. We did this always mindful that, while the participants had
particular experiential knowledge that we lacked, they also were reconstructing their own
individual and collection social realities (Anderson, 1989).
Through the member checks, individuals began to know one another and develop
appreciation for the points of view and experiences that they brought into the DCT. Developing
a team selected for its transdisciplinary nature meant selecting school insiders who represented
a variety of teaching, learning, and operational perspectives. It also meant inviting school
outsiders who had stakes in school outcomes but weren’t employed by the system changed the
nature of the dialogue. Selecting who would be on the DCT was the first of several disruptive
moves that we made. These moves were designed to help reveal to participants the unexamined
assumptions that formed the foundations of some of their everyday practices. For instance,
while teachers said that they engaged parents, they didn’t want parents at their DCT meetings
because “they wouldn’t understand.” At each juncture and new step in the process, we made
sure to remind participants of the double moves being made by supplying participant meanings
and perspectives ethnographically: (1) the conversations and meetings formed the basis of
inquiry: and (2) the inquiry formed the basis of action. . Because of this interactive process, we
were able to get feedback frequently about our hunches about what was being observed and
interpreted.
Gathering Data: Disrupting the View from Above
We asked the district leaders to compile data from district databases to display
geographically the contours of the issues that they faced. We wanted to use maps since they
emphasize the spatial relationships that provide texture and describe patterns without words to

translate these relationships. As Paulston (1996) noted, words sometimes filter the
interpretative act, putting unnecessary barriers between the observer and the data. We mapped
a variety of data. For instance, data from the focus groups that identified schools where referrals
to the office for students of color were frequent were mapped on to geospatial google maps of
the community. We included achievement data by clusters of students grouped by (a) gender,
(b) ethnicity, (c) race, (d) ability, and (e) English Language status. Imagine a google map that
you might encounter in the local newspaper showing neighborhoods by density of the
population. Highly dense neighborhoods might be red, while moderately dense ones would be
yellow, and low-density spaces would be colored blue.
We used maps to accomplish a similar goal. This kind of data representation is so
important to visualizing the narrative in critical ethnography. Explanation gives way to
geospatial representation. The picture provides the opportunity to pinpoint social injustices
quickly without much mental effort. Mapping entailed coloring school buildings by one factor,
such as the racial make up of the student population. For example, all buildings with a student
body comprised of more than 70% Latino students were colored yellow. A district might have
120 schools, marked on the map, by location. Of those 120, 84 would be colored yellow. And
then, because the purpose of the map would be to show the spatial dimension of a problem, all
the buildings that over-identified their Latino students for special education might be shaded
with diagonal lines. In many cases, the schools that were over-identifying might be the 36
schools that were predominantly White.
This kind of data representation tells a powerful story to its users and moves the
conversation beyond what numbers represent to questions about what happens in the two sets
of schools, surrounding neighborhoods, and communities. Critical ethnographers can build a
narrative case using data in a number of visual ways. Geospatial representation reminds us at

once that we inhabit lives that have geography and this geography as Soja reminds us shapes our
lives (Soja, 1996). Curricular resources, teacher experience by years of service, building
facilities, longevity and experience of principals, student population numbers, class size, and
many other features of opportunities to learn (Oakes, 1990) were overlaid onto the maps.
Images of neighborhoods and context anchored the data, pushing the conversations forward.
By creating these maps and the space for analysis and interpretation within the DCT, we
were setting the stage for the team members to understand the educational space created within
the district in new ways. Members of the school district had been exposed to receiving numerical
data in the form of tables and charts but they had never connected the data to place so that
patterns were readily discernible across the geographic scape of the district. Further, by
overlaying different kinds of data, patterns between placement and achievement or
opportunities to learn and active, well-used community space (like parks, community farmer’s
markets, and local grocery stores) emerged. The DCT began to connect data in new ways that
accounted for the contexts in which school and student performance occurred. Together, the
DCT was able to examine context and current outcomes.
Ruitenberg (2007) notes that “representations never merely represent, they also
constitute and produce (p. 9).” Geographic data displays shaped the discourse. We constructed
geographic information systems (GIS) maps and other evidentiary sources (e.g., classroom
photographs, videos, and building walk-throughs) to disrupt simplistic explanations of the
problem. We also mapped enabling influences that might inform future intervention efforts
(e.g., collective efficacy, social networks, civic engagement) (Artiles, Kozleski, Waitoller, &
Lukinbeal, 2011; Kozleski & Artiles, 2012). The artifacts we designed also made visible the ways
in which disability constitutes a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that is highly
adaptable to local conditions “but [its] structure is common enough to more than one [social]

world to make [it] recognizable, a means to translation” (p. 393). Equity can be indexed and
more readily seen in spatial analyses that demonstrate the distribution of inequities (Artiles,
2011). Participants noted that there was “disparity in our own knowledge of the district (field
note 2, district meeting).” They began to discuss who had access to certain kinds of information,
what kinds of information were privileged, and which were dismissed. By shifting the team’s
conversation to understanding as opposed to recognition, the group coalesced around inquiry as
a mode for dialogue.
The next step in our ethnographic process was to design inquiry tools (sets of questions
that required analyzing evidence before answering) that mediated the participants’
understanding in new ways. We used available evidence and represented it in unfamiliar ways
that demonstrated the complexity of educators’ work at the intersections of policy, research and
practice (Engeström, 1999). By changing the discourse around data, we tried to disrupt binary
explanations of outcome inequity that blame either students and their families or systems.
Critical ethographers must be concerned with how the distribution of power and privilege
operates to marginalize some while privileging others. Mapping data offered what Engeström
(1999) refers to as a mirror that both reflects a picture of the district but also requires the
construction of a shared narrative that offers a way of different factions to co-construct a new
reality. Thus, our mapping venture provided a situated, improvisational, and contested space so
that narratives and counter narratives emerged from the participants. Our mapping process
required three meetings for the group to (a) move through their reactions, (b) develop shared
understandings, and (c) forge new narratives for the school district. Embedded within this
narrative were spaces to concentrate effort and innovation to shape improved outcomes around
equity.

Forging New Spaces
We continued to meet as a district change team to develop a plan based on the new
narrative around equity and inequities. Through the process of mapping, we created an analysis
and conceptual framework explaining how the system produced inequities. The next part of
our process was to use this conceptual framework to design collaboratively a plan for re-
mediating the institutional structures and cultures that maintained the status quo. Developing
this conceptual framework with our participants helped to name problem spaces while still
maintaining the drive towards understanding.
The planning process began with identifying features of good solutions to equity issues.
Small groups of three and four team members worked together to develop a set of criteria that
they would use to evaluate whether or not solutions that might be suggested would met their
criteria for “good.” This allowed the participants to delve more deeply into considering the
notion of “good.” In particular, they explored notions of good for whom and for what outcomes. This
approach was initially confusing and difficult. Participants in project of this nature want to
identify solutions. They rarely consider the features or criteria for good solutions before trying
solve the problem. At first, their conversations easily strayed into identifying what would work.
After several false starts, they began to understand the importance of considering what they
typically saw as ways of solving problems and how bringing a critical lens to finding solutions
changed the nature of problem solving itself.
This work was frustrating and slow for many of the participants. However, two aspects
of the social nature of the groups seemed to maintain their willingness to stay connected to the
process. The variety among the group members kept individual participants working. School
personnel wanted to demonstrate their professional commitment to leadership work so they
maintained their effort. Families and students maintained their participation because they

wanted to sustain their involvement over time and avoid returning to old patterns of exclusion.
Charmaz and Mitchell (2001) remind us that grounded theory development requires attention
to several dimensions: (a) the simultaneous need for data collection and analysis; (b) the search
for emergent themes in the early stages of data analysis; and (c) the opportunities that arise for
understanding basic social processes within the data.
Spirited and intense conversations generated a variety of criteria for good solutions.
Small groups presented their criteria to the entire team. Participants clustered criteria when
they seemed to have similar intent and concern. One criterion that emerged from multiple
groups was to build in a sense of urgency into each goal by setting expectations for rapid and
sustained change. Each solution included specific evidence to track progress and goal
attainment.. In this phase of the process, the group began to talk aloud about what researchers
might call internal validity. They began looping back to previous work to insure that their
sorting processes were consistent over time. Where they found anomalies, they discussed
changes in their protocols and decision trees. Where they made changes, they went back and
re-sorted criteria. The role of the group facilitators was to ask questions to help clarify
processes. The group determined the point at which all criteria for good solutions had been
determined. The next step in the change process was to examine the maps again to identify key
issues, identify possible solutions, apply their criteria for good solutions, and then craft explicit
goals for change processes. As ethnographers, our work was to focus some attention on the
process itself, ensuring that all perspectives were aired and discussed fully. We tracked these
conversations to make explicit the kinds of decision making processes that were being used.
Cycles of Inquiry, Reflection, and Action
The district change team was ready to move to a new phase of their work: the familiar
space of action. First, they needed a plan that not only had instrumental equity goals but was

designed in such a way that it expanded learning and development for practitioners, families,
and students throughout the district. Thus, the processes of mediating how people came
together to understand, reflect, and act in congruence with equity outcomes was critical to the
success of the end goals. Gutiérrez (2006) speaks to this notion of reflexivity in which critical
issues like voice and participation become key touchstones for ongoing research that is equity
minded in nature. However, the process of inquiry, reflection and then action, was unfamiliar.
It clashed with deeply held notions of the role of leadership in creating a path forward, and
conflicted with needs to make rapid advances in longstanding inequities. In this district,
leadership had meant commanding attention, issuing policy, and asking managers to carry out
the policies. Where resistance arose, staff attended professional learning workshops to learn to
perform the new policy. Political power was maintained by creating small, loyal groups that
worked behind closed doors to decide on collective public performances. This strategy
sustained over several generations of superintendents. Spending time in shared inquiry, evidence
interpretation, and critical analysis was unfamiliar territory for most of the school personnel.
The tension between technical solutions, that is what should be done and in what detail,
and a critical analysis of the power and privilege dynamics that maintain certain structures,
notions of accomplishment, forms, and functions within organizations and among people, was
continuously present in our discussions. Our constant threading of critical ethnography
methodologies in our work helped the group to be both in the process and stand back from it so
that a constant critical examination of the power dynamics happened simultaneously. The role
of our mediating tools was to surface the assumptions that undergirded solutions that were
proposed. We still needed to create social spaces to use tools productively and where particular
practices mediated people’s engagements with the tools.

The design of two kinds of social spaces was instrumental in our work. First, we
designed social spaces for labor-intensive meetings led by our staff with state Department of
Education personnel. Second, we designed learning networks among states. These two
strategies allowed us to infuse explicitly an introspective dimension through activities that
promoted a “double move” (Hedegaard, 1998) in which participation structures compelled
personnel to shift from personal/professional experiences to theoretical sense-making, based on
a new vocabulary offered in these meetings. Simultaneously, the everyday experiences of the
personnel offered a way into sense-making that was grounded in local state department problem
spaces. These two processes constituted the double move in which both the TA staff and the
government personnel engage in understanding the target problem. The TA staff created a
platform for understanding while the government personnel brought their everyday
conundrums into the space. For instance, a phone call from a mother requesting assistance
because someone wants to label her son begins to be mediated by helping to identify the
problem space (i.e., the object), as ways of engaging families and the schools that serve them.
Shifting problematizing to engagement helps the participants begin to learn more about how
they systematically categorize and organize their students in order to accomplish their own
schooling tasks rather than how they organize their work to support their students. Central in
this work is exposing the nature of assumptions about the roles that schools take on and their
public purposes, as well as the identities that are conferred to those that hold the roles. Part of
our technical assistance work is to reveal through dialogue how these perceived identities as
well as prescribed roles interact to afford certain kinds of responses to the phone while
constraining others.
Once a problem space was identified from the mapping work and the features of good
solutions were described, then small groups worked together to identify at least three strategies

for addressing priorities. The group selected a final slate of action items after considering the
work of each small group. Reviews of what to do and why, how others would be involved in
learning and developing their understanding of the agendas, how they might be shaped and
modified at a local classroom or building level was established. Then, participants designed
plans for communicating the work, the steps forward, and the outcomes. The design team
specified progress checkpoints and outcomes measures. A small group work produced a project
tracking and coordination plan that was reviewed and agreed to by the entire design team.
We used two ethnography tools consistently in our work. The first was the design and
development of a field note tool that each of us used whenever we had a face-to-face or virtual
meeting with members of the DCT. This field note extended the field note description of
Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw (2011). The field note had places to itemize what was discussed, what
was planned, and who had responsibilities for following through on tasks. The field note also
had spaces for chronicling observation in which many power laden actions were noted: (a) the
changing uses of language, (b) developments in discourse patterns that altered standing
practices around who spoke and who primarily listened, and (c) notations on the social
networks within the team.
Once a month, these field notes were compiled, looking for emergent themes. Quarterly,
the field notes compilations were fed back to the DCT as a form of reconstituting and
remediating the communication patterns and impacts within the team. At almost every
meeting, we were able to identify one or two participants who seemed to either be strongly
involved or moved to the margins in the conversations. We interviewed these individuals to
check our field note observations, get expanded points of view on the meeting, and help us
understand how we might change up the mediation patterns at the next meeting. These
interviews also became part of the data feedback loop. We sought to avoid providing

information in such detail that identities were revealed while wanting to show that we
constantly assessed our own understandings to better understand and detail the process.
Sharing the data became another form of intervention with the DCT.
Implementing and Assessing Change
Another key assumption that informed our practices was that educators’ professional
learning is promoted through data-driven and research-grounded content within the context of
educators’ practice-embedded activities (King, Artiles, & Kozleski, 2009). Thus, these social
spaces were grounded in personnel’s professional practices and evidences collected by the
system in which they worked. Moreover, in response to a critique by Davies and Nutley (2008)
of the use of research in policy and practice, we suggest that research methodologies need to
transcend linear views of knowledge work. Critical ethnography is a kind of knowledge work
as this chapter has demonstrated. It is, at best, a spiral process in which information is gathered,
interpreted, processed with participants and then examined again as perspectives within the
group shift through interrogation and interaction. No longer do ethnographers labor in specific
contexts to produce evidence that is transported into other settings. Instead, our critical
ethnography approach provides action processes for the design, modeling, and development of
research as practice. For this purpose, we followed cycles of inquiry, reflection, and action with
the DCT so a period of active data collection was punctuated by sets of meetings that required
examining evidence of how our work was changing perspectives and the power differentials
within the group. We asked the DCT to consider who benefited and who was marginalized by
our actions and their results. The data we used to examine power and privilege as an outcome of
the organization were also part of our ongoing inquiry into the process of inquiry itself.

Sharing the Data as a Form of Intervention
Our task was to help support questioning, data gathering, and the ways in which
systems change efforts were assessed against equity benchmarks such as demographic data on
discipline referrals, community involvement on the part of school staff, and the redistribution of
creative capital through, for instance, creating teacher networks to support and develop robust
teaching (Kozleski, Gibson, & Hynds, 2011). Further, the DCT team members learned to collect
multiple kinds of data that helped them to understand what, why, when, how much, and how
inequities seem to develop and sustain locally. These approaches to inquiry, implementation,
and assessing change outcomes led to changes in how principals worked with their staffs. They
began to use heuristic tools to help teachers question their practices and reposition their
approaches to learning. Together, they began to develop feedback loops that traced their initial
assumptions about what was needed locally, their efforts to implement, and the results of those
efforts on changing patterns of performance locally. In this section, we explore some of the
methodological issues that emerged as we engaged with the DCT.
Our approach was grounded in an emphasis on civil rights and cultural responsiveness,
as well as evidence from the literature that students can excel in academic endeavors if they are
provided with access to high-quality teachers, curricula, instruction, programs and resources,
and their cultures, languages, and experiences are valued and used to facilitate their learning
(Rumberger & Ah Lim, 2008). Guided by a thematic focus on enhancing both understanding of
equity in classrooms, schools, and school systems and the use of evidence-based practices, our
approach addressed the gaps and priorities identified in recent, major policy and research equity
reports (Artiles & Dyson, 2005; Donovan & Cross, 2002; Harry & Klingner, 2006; Klingner et
al., 2005; Skiba et al., 2008).
Conclusions and Next Steps

Our work focused on partnering with school systems to address equity and social justice
in schooling. We used a set of ethnographically crafted tools that both help districts examine
and understand their data in deep ways. This same data helped us as technical assistance
providers to interpret what we chose to look at, and then, to make decisions together in terms of
the change process. The entire process is ideographically complex and fraught with unknowns
that, at each step, must be fairly and productively addressed. What our data compilations
examine and omit in displays of evidence skewed participant attention and, therefore, their
activities. To maintain our stance as researcher-activists, we pushed ourselves to warrant our
data trails, insisting on integrity in member checking, and ensuring that the resulting evidence
both help us understand the process of change while powering change at the same time.
A substantial proportion of our equity work focused on the racialization of disability as a
means to address deep educational inequities for learners that live multiple marginalities , i.e., gay,
disabled, and African-American. (Artiles & Kozleski, 2007). Our critical ethnographic work
assumed a systems change stance in which macro, meso, and micro levels of systems interacted
to seek stasis while, simultaneously, individuals and groups within systems re-mediated goals,
re-interpreted events, and re-negotiated activity (Kozleski & Huber, 2010; Cole, 1996). This
required an ethnographic examination of evidence about practices that make visible the deficit
visions about some learners that permeate educational policies and practices and the subjective
nature of disability diagnostic decisions (Kozleski & Artiles, 2012).
Our perspective on technical assistance transcended previous notions of “assistance”
that sought to transfer research knowledge to the everyday worlds of practitioners. Instead, we
designed theoretically grounded artifacts with evidence from participants’ everyday practices as
a way to re-mediate their views and actions (Kozleski, Gibson, & Hynds, 2012). Next, we
engineered social spaces with practitioners in which we used these artifacts in the analysis of

the racialization of disability. What emerged from these analytical events were new forms of
understanding the problem and alternative educational futures for the affected marginalized
learners (Engeström, 2011).
We examined how researchers and scholars can engage in opening up the possibilities of
what McKenzie and Scheurich (2004) call “the gaze.” That is, we helped participants use
unfamiliar lenses to examine and understand evidence from different vantage points. Further,
once evidence is curated, how it is displayed, to what audiences, for what kinds of discussion,
analysis, and interpretation provides a set up for uncovering within group differences as well as
offering opportunities to uncover and debunk assumptions and positions that may have been
masked to participants. Evidence referred to both quantitative and qualitative information that
we asked participants to explore in novel ways that require their own participation in
constructing cases, vignettes, and other forms of intermediary analysis.
Importantly, because our work was systems change in action through critical
ethnography, the quality of the kinds of interpretations that were made and how interpretation
migrates into action causes another form of data transformation. Standing somewhat apart from
the action within the organization is our work as technical assistance providers who track the
ways in which the school, district, or state teams understand, influence, and support decisions
at each part of the process and make these data transparent to the members of the change
system.
We described, analyzed, and discussed the study, interpretation, and implementation of
ongoing educational change that explored the limits of conventional approaches to inquiry
driven projects and offers some alternative approaches to engaging change. Using data from a
case study of a recent technical assistance project concerned with educational equity for
marginalized groups, we detailed the challenges of careful inquiry and interpretation in a rapidly

changing complex environment that characterizes school systems in the United States (U.S.). In
this chapter we suggested that technical assistance offers a critical opportunity to engage
individuals and activity systems in changing the outcomes of their practice and, in doing so, shift
their praxis in ways that can mediate future work. Because we locate this work within an
ethnographic methodology that is steeped in activity theory, we described and critiqued
ethnographic methods that offered a new, critical approach to technical assistance that offers a
rich context for ongoing research and inquiry as a critical feature of systems transformation.

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