Equity work is under real pressure right now, and the field is splintering as some people quietly drop terms like diversity, equity, and inclusion and others keep them despite the backlash and political risk.
Kris Gutiérrez has spent more than three decades building an alternative.
Kris is a Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley and holds a long list of accolades for her scholarship and leadership. Her longstanding collaborations with immigrant and migrant communities include afterschool programs Las Redes and El Pueblo Mágico, and the UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Program for California youth from migrant farmworker backgrounds. Kris is also a founding voice in the connected learning community.
One of Kris’s many contributions in setting the initial agenda of the Connected Learning Research Network was to advocate for the term “non-dominant” instead of “minority” to recenter the focus from young people’s identities to the systems of power around them. As Chair of the 2015 Digital Media and Learning Conference (the predecessor to the Connected Learning Summit), she coined “Equity by Design” as the conference theme, highlighting how equity requires intentionality to yield meaningful outcomes. In this Q&A, Kris brings that same kind of insight and precision to push us forward once again.
Question: What is this moment asking of us?
Kris Gutiérrez: I’m always hopeful. I want to begin there, because it’s where I always begin. Hope and possibility are central to my vision of equity.
This is a very difficult moment. Politically, culturally, materially. Federal interventions about anything related to equity have been relentless, at a time when there is more injustice and there are more inequities than ever. There are people who are capitulating and others who are over-correcting. It’s a challenging time, and I certainly don’t have all the answers.
What we need is a hard reset, an opportunity to bring different sectors together to craft a new vision in which equity is made central. This isn’t just about language — I don’t care if we use the word “equity” or not. I care about the commitments we have to human flourishing, and how we make those commitments concrete. A hard reset wouldn’t just help us get smarter about navigating this political moment but it would make our work better in ways that have material outcomes for people.
Q: What does the conventional framing of equity get wrong?
Kris: Equity can’t just be about demographics, access, and inclusion. Those all remain important. But I always say: “Inclusion into what?” I want us to transform the systems and structures of power that create inequities in the first place. Conventional frames maintain the status quo.
Equity in education should be about supporting processes of becoming — not who a child is, but who a child can become — with the supports and infrastructures needed to realize that possibility. The conventional frame keeps the hope but strips out the work of transformation that it requires.
Q: Where have you seen pitfalls in trying to move beyond the conventional frame?
Kris: There are so many important examples of people showing how we can make equity material, but some can get distorted in practice. I champion the intent behind “strengths-based” or “culturally-relevant” approaches, but when they’re not strategically used or well-understood, I worry they can get taken up in reductive ways. Culturally-relevant pedagogy, for example, must center a dynamic notion of culture or you end up with broad generalizations like “All Latinos learn this way.”
In my work, I’m much more interested in knowing youths’ repertoires of practice. When designing programs for young math learners, for example, I’d want to know: what are the learners’ histories with math? In different spaces in their everyday lives, not just when they’re students in a classroom? You can understand youths’ possibilities if you see how they appropriate and leverage their knowledge and tools across multiple settings.
Q: What conceptualization of “equity” should replace the conventional one?
Kris: For me, equity functions as a miner’s canary. Maybe it’s because I’m the daughter of a copper miner that this metaphor means so much to me — the canary was the first signal of whether there were poisonous gases in the mine. If you think ecologically, equity does that. It’s a bellwether about the health and stability of the ecosystem.
Even when that ecology is healthy, it isn’t self-sustaining: maintaining a healthy ecology requires deeply shared, ongoing mutuality and reciprocity. An orienting question for my work in schools, afterschool spaces, or communities is: Are they better off with me having been there? Mutuality, and the dignity that should be at the center of all relationships and partnerships, that’s closer to what equity should mean. What justice should mean.
Q: What would that look like?
Kris: It would look like transformation.
Early in my career, I directed an academic program for so-called “provisionally admitted” college students. When the students first came in, all of their coursework was remedial. But what I have learned is that all remedial programs do is create very good remedial students. They never get to the main event. They never get into the things they really need. So the first thing I did was to ban all remedial courses. We had badges that said, “Stamp out remedial teaching.” What we did instead was put students in regular, rigorous courses — and then develop expansive supports to ensure their success. By all measures it worked: more students passed by a large margin. We also knew our approach was working when we saw that traditional students wanted to enroll in our courses because they were so effective. We expanded our approach to math learning to biology and then to English composition. Importantly, it changed the way the institution dealt with provisionally admitted students.
Transformation requires us to design in the present for the future. Because I work with non-dominant communities, I must both imagine a better world to come and attend to the needs of the here-and-now. I can’t get lost in the struggles of today and assume a trauma frame, because then I would stop imagining youths’ social futures. Doing both requires a world-building frame.
I draw inspiration from speculative and utopian methods, which do a great job of designing for the here-and-now and for social futures at once. I think of Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia. José Lizárraga, Arturo Cortez, and Eddie Rivero are doing really nice work in digital worlds. Antti Rajala is doing excellent work on concrete utopias. Michael Cole did some of the earliest utopian work in the cultural-historical tradition. They’re all fellow travelers.
Q: Where do we go from here?
Kris: I see a real hunger to do things differently. I recently developed with my campus a research initiative built around interdisciplinary, intergenerational work on climate and environmental equity, and more people applied for this internal grant than ever before.
Even without dedicated funding, I think there are ways to act within our own spheres of influence. One important place to start is with supporting the next generation of scholars — graduate students and early career scholars. In my own lab I never believed in one-to-one mentoring, it never resonated with me theoretically or culturally. So I designed communities instead. I’d have undergraduates, mostly women of color, in my office; my graduate students and postdocs right next door; and our projects pulled all of them in together. The graduate students mentored the undergraduates, the undergraduates got access to knowledge and people they’d never had before, and everyone problem-solved and learned together. That’s when I started thinking systematically about the importance of co-creating a relational infrastructure. You could see knowledge and practices and relationships travel across the developmental ecology, from the kids in the afterschool program to the graduate students. I think that’s why those projects sustained for fifteen years, with former graduate students creating sister-projects around the country.
Universities and schools are constrained, no question. And I empathize with people in so many states where the political constraints are tight. Everyone has to leverage their own degrees of freedom to push forward and think differently and find institutional spaces where we can innovate. We can’t just try to rebuild what we’ve lost. Instead we can treat every new opportunity as small-scale instantiations of the future, leveraging the significant resources we have in partnering with people and communities.
This Q&A was originally published in Kaleidoscope, the monthly Q&A series powered by the Connected Learning Alliance. Subscribe to Kaleidoscope on LinkedIn or sign up for the CLA’s newsletter to get the next conversation in your inbox.
