Educational Equity in Community Colleges

This series centers theory and practice in enacting educational equity, and, ultimately, educational justice at the administrative, institutional/programmatic, governance, and pedagogical levels of community colleges and other institutions of higher learning (Woods & Harris, 2016; Nevarez & Wood, 2010). There is a corpus of literature on the pernicious effects of oppressive pedagogy at the K-12 level, especially for traditionally marginalized, minoritized students (Nasir, 2011; Delpit, 2012; Leonardo, 2010). However, this is not the case at the community college level even though these same traditionally marginalized, minoritized students overwhelming start their college careers in two-year community colleges. Frankly, though there are many valuable contributions to community college education, overall there is a dearth of literature on critical, justice-centered pedagogy, theory and practice (i.e., praxis) within community college administration, governance, programming, and pedagogy. Community college practitioners are interested in enacting educational equity. However, there is little community college-specific literature for them to use to reimagine and, ultimately, reconstruct their administrative, programmatic, and pedagogical practices so that these institutionalized practices become commensurate with educational equity and justice (Tuck & Yang, 2018). Therefore, the goal of this series is to blend the work of university researchers and community college practitioners to illuminate best practices in achieving educational equity and justice via a critical-reality pedagogical framework (Giroux, 2004; Emdin, 2017; Sims, 2018). This series aims to highlight work that illuminates both the successes and struggles in developing institutionalized practices that positively impact poor ethno-racially minoritized students of color. Therefore, we will be looking at pedagogies, policies, and practices that are intentionally developed, curated and sustained by committed educators, administrators, and staff at their respective college campuses that work to ensure just learning conditions for all students.