A Vision for the Future of Learning

Na’ilah Suad Nasir nsnasir@spencer.orgView all authors and affiliations Educational Researcher

It is increasingly clear that we are at a fork in the road in education. As the COVID-19 pandemic lingers, continuing to make apparent anew the deep inequities in accessing robust learning in education systems nationally and internationally (Carver-Thomas et al., 2021; DiNapoli, 2021; Ladson-Billings, 2021; Schwartz, 2022), the need for new models and new structures for education feels urgent and pressing. Yet, while we know that existing systems are inadequate and inequitable, we are not sure how to fix them, nor are we clear about what kinds of education and learning systems we need for the future. In this article, based on my Presidential Address for the 2022 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, I offer some thoughts on the education and learning systems we need for the future. Specifically, I take up two core questions:

1. How do we organize education and learning systems for a multicultural democracy?

2.How do we build systems that transcend and transform how we have been doing “education” and that are designed to support rich and engaging learning and critical thinking skills, and to fully educate young people in ways that honor their whole humanity, their developmental needs, and their families and communities?

I take up these concerns, building explicitly on AERA presidential addresses from the last several years. In 2019, Amy Stuart Wells (Wells, 2019) focused on education policy and the ways our commitment as a nation to standardized testing and accountability has contributed to what she called the New Jim Crow of education and has worked to maintain a fundamentally inequitable education system. In 2020, Vanessa Siddle Walker (Walker, 2020) traced the history of the connection between AERA and the National Education Association (NEA) and described the research traditions and connections with practitioners and community that were gained when Black teacher organizations merged with NEA in 1966 but then were lost when NEA and AERA split in 1968. She imagines the kinds of community and educator connections that might have been possible for education research had this split not occurred. In 2021, Shaun Harper (Harper, 2021) issued a call to action to us as an education research community to take responsibility for how our work is used and how our field disrupts or perpetuates the very systems that we study and to also take seriously our ethical commitments to each other and to a more just world. Taken together, these talks take seriously that education has continued to perpetuate inequity (with the accountability era as the most recent iteration), and they consider how the way we do our work as an education research community needs to build on the insights of and be accountable to stakeholders outside of our research world—themes that I explicitly build upon in this article. Underscoring these core ideas is that a new way of approaching equitable teaching and learning in schools, and a new way of utilizing research to support high-quality teaching and learning, should occur in the service of creating learning systems that support human wholeness and thriving.

To start, I will define the terms I use in the title. First, vision: a vision is about creating a blueprint for something that does not yet exist, imagining something we cannot yet see. In that spirit, this article is about what we can imagine together for learning spaces across the developmental span, including early childhood, K–12, higher education, and beyond. But it is also a vision rooted in the wisdom of the past, in the glimpses of the powerful spaces for learning and being that have always existed—informally, in snippets sometimes, across cultures and communities (Espinoza et al., 2020; Mehta & Fine, 2019; Rogoff, 1990; Rose, 1995).

Second, future: here, I mean the commonsense notion of the future—something off in the horizon that is not yet happening. The future is what we steward for the generations to come—our children, grandchildren, and human kin of no relation. I also think about work in African American, Indigenous, and queer futurity and the ways it signifies more than just a time-space not here yet but also hope, optimism, joy, and possibility (Grant et al., 2020; Gutiérrez, 2022; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).

And finally, learning: my early work (drawing on the work of many others) sought to understand cognition in out-of-school learning spaces (Cole, 1996; Greeno, 1998; Nasir et al., 2006; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Rose, 2004; Saxe, 1991; Scribner, 1997). Thus, for me, learning has always signified something beyond school. Learning is a natural act; it’s what babies do as their human inheritance. They interact with the environment and learn to be and do in relation to their caregivers and the community around them (Rogoff, 2003). Learning also has meaning as a part of the Black tradition, where the acts of seeking knowledge and learning were radical acts of self-determination and community uplift (Anderson, 1988; Givens, 2021). Thus, the question is not “How do we get people to learn?” People always have and always will engage in learning. The question is, “How do we make our education systems humane and connect places that provide enriching forms of learning—the kind that contributes to civically minded, empowered, joyful, generous, and intellectually engaged people?”

In this article, I begin with a few grounding ideas, then make three key points as follows:

1.We can theorize learning in ways that respect diversity and multiplicity and support people’s thriving.

2.We can build equitable education and learning systems that provide access to robust learning.

3.We can use our research expertise in ways that support equitable systems if we do our work in new ways.

My thinking centers on hope and the possibility of imagining something different. Hope in the radical tradition of bell hooks and others (Freire, 2014; hooks, 2013; Jackson et al., 2014). But I want to make clear that while I will be focused on hope and a vision of what we can build, I do so fully mindful of the issues of power that underlie learning, as well as how power and privilege reproduce themselves in our current system (Darling-Hammond & Darling-Hammond, 2022; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Howard, 2019; Milner, 2012; Oakes, 2005). We know that these structures of power are not easy to change, and they resist and morph (Horsford et al., 2018; Rhoda & Wells, 2013). At the same time, I am aware of the power of a people who want something better for the next generation and of the power we hold individually and collectively as the education research community. And I am suggesting that we not cede our power but garner it and use it for collective good.

In order to contextualize my three main points, I begin with several grounding ideas. First, there are important hopes and cautions in the history of Black education that we can learn from as we think about the future. Second, we are amid a historical, social, and political moment ripe with the possibility of building something new, even as it presents us with a myriad of challenges. And third, the inequity that we, as a society, have worked very hard to maintain in our systems of education (and in all of our social systems) is costly, and not just for those who are marginalized by the current system—they cost all of us. I will take up each of these ideas in turn.

Grounding Ideas

Hopes and Cautions of Black Education

The first grounding idea is that if we want to understand the complexity of schooling with respect to issues of equity, a look into the history of Black education provides a useful illustration, as well as some cause for both hope and caution. Education, particularly the education of Black people and others from marginalized communities, has always been a contentious endeavor in this country (Anderson, 1988; Brayboy et al., 2015; Donato, 1997; García, 2018). On the one hand, schools have been a social mobility mechanism; people from marginalized communities have used education to better their material conditions, personally and as a community (Anderson, 1988). On the other hand, the historical and contemporary record shows that schools were designed to be unequal (Darling-Hammond & Darling-Hammond, 2022). For instance, under segregation, Black schools were vastly underfunded and underresourced. On the other hand, there was a brief period in the late 1970s and the 1980s, during the time of the implementation of desegregation, when racial disparities in schooling experiences and outcomes lessened. But they have become steadily worse in the decades since (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Johnson, 2011). Similarly, Indigenous boarding schools were intended to disrupt historical and cultural continuity, to oppress and contain (Lomawaima, 1995). Thus, the historical record shows both progress and a remarkable lack of movement on providing equitable schooling experiences.

At the same time, there are important lessons about teaching and learning to be gleaned from schooling in Black communities in the era of segregation. Scholarship by educational historians (Anderson, 1988; Foster, 1997; Givens, 2021; Walker, 1996, 2009, 2018) has documented Black schools where teachers and administrators held high expectations for students, where pedagogy was rooted in love, and where there were deep and abiding connections between schools, families, and communities. This work has also revealed the belief in learning as a means to liberation, as a means to both psychological and actual freedom, and as important to developing one’s own highest potential (Walker, 1996). We can learn from these rich traditions. These schools are centered on wholeness, identity, and the connections between academic content, intellectual development, and commitment to community and nation (Nasir, 2011).

Building learning spaces that center this connection between intellectual development, emotional safety, and community support is more necessary now than ever. In her new book, The Trayvon Generation, Elizabeth Alexander (2022) focuses on the experiences of young Black people who have grown up in the era of police killings and the very public violence toward Black men, women, and youth. She beautifully articulates the developmental needs (without using that term) of this generation of young people—the mental health needs, the deep and vast experience of trauma, the lack of trust in institutions and systems, the need to be seen and heard, and the need for wholeness to be stewarded. When juxtaposed against some of the vibrant and rich historical examples, we are offered a call to action and a charge to build on the fruitful directions from the past.

We Are Having a (Collective) Moment

The second grounding idea is about understanding the historical moment we are in nationally and in the field of education. Building the education and learning systems we need at this moment holds some challenges. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has not only wreaked havoc—isolation, illness, loss of loved ones, and depression—in so many lives (Horton, 2020), but it has also heightened and deepened our awareness of what many have called the “other pandemics” of our time: systemic racism, the climate catastrophe, and the economic crisis (Ladson-Billings, 2021).

In this context, we have seen educational inequity deepen, and the effects of existing inequities become even more extreme (Carver-Thomas et al., 2021; DiNapoli, 2021; Schwartz, 2022). Our time is marked by these crises, resulting in the deepening of long-term societal fissures, astronomical student loan debt, housing insecurity, and the decline of public institutions and infrastructure, not to mention the academic and emotional effects of the pandemic on students, bitter conflicts over so-called critical race theory and the rights of trans students, and ongoing efforts to privatize public educational resources (Desmond, 2022; Dynarski, 2022; Howard & Williams, 2022; Noguera & Syeed, 2020; Pollock et al., 2022; Sawchuk, 2021; Scott, 2013; Scott et al., 2020).

What is clear is that past solutions will not serve us in reaching the future we want. These challenging times may be creating the desire, the demand, and the readiness for something else: an opening for us to imagine something new. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2021) has talked about this as a moment of possibility we may not see again in our lifetimes. Our collective future depends on opening up opportunities, transforming systems that have perpetuated inequity and oppression, and finding a new way to support people and communities in developing their highest potential.

Inequity Costs All of Us

In order to realize the power of this moment, we must change our frame. Heather McGhee, in the book The Sum of Us (2020), looks over time at several major public issues, including access to good jobs and pensions, purchasing a home, clean air, high-quality schools, and so forth. For each issue, she notes how racism (and more specifically, racist policy) at key moments in history prevented an opening of access right at the point when it would have served Black people and other historically marginalized communities. And in closing down access for Black people, access was also shut down for poor Whites, women, and others who might benefit, thus creating structures that worked against the goal of creating a prosperous society. Her point is that everyone loses when we double down on inequality, both materially and psychologically. One of the greatest lies is that supporting one group comes at the cost of the well-being of other groups.

McGhee (2021) writes:

The task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I’ve come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air and better-funded schools. (p. 2)

This is a profound argument for multiplicity, for creating systems that provide many ways for people and communities to succeed and thrive. And it must be at the base of how we imagine the kinds of education and learning systems that are possible.

Now, I will turn to the three core arguments of the article as I draw on scholarship across the field to weave an argument about how we move forward toward an education system that truly serves the needs of young people and is in service to a multicultural democracy.

We Can Theorize Learning in Ways That Respect Diversity and Multiplicity and Support People’s Thriving

If our goal is to create education systems that serve a multicultural democracy, we must, first and foremost, consider how we theorize learning. At the core of what is necessary is to understand learning as a culturally rooted and whole-person endeavor (Cantor & Osher, 2021; Cantor et al., 2018; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; de Royston et al., 2020a; Lee, 2010; Nasir et al., 2020, 2021b; Osher et al., 2020).

A Brief History of Learning Theory

How we theorize the nature of learning has direct implications for how we teach and arrange classrooms and other learning settings and how we organize schools. Over the last 100 years, we’ve theorized learning in three primary waves (Greeno, 1998). The first was behaviorism (Skinner, 1988; Thorndike, 1932), which conceived of learning as the accumulation of facts and skills through processes of reinforcement (think rote memorization and recital). The second was cognitivism (Bransford et al., 2000; Greeno et al., 1996), which saw learning as the storage, retrieval, and processing of information and teaching as cultivating active exploration in the service of real-world tasks (think project-based learning). And the third was sociocultural theory (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003), which viewed learning in terms of transformations of participation and identity, coupling learning “how to know and do” with learning “how to be.” From this perspective, teaching must attend to the social routines and connections that support learning (Brown et al., 1989; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). Each of these theories has contributed partial truths, but what we really need is a theory of learning that integrates these insights and holds at its core a holistic perspective of learning and young people.

There is another problem from the prior science to which we need to attend: what is required is a science of learning that takes multiplicity, difference, and cultural context very seriously. This has yet to be our history as a field. Our science is built on a focus on Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic people (WEIRD) (Henrich et al., 2010). Ninety-six percent of studies in psychology are conducted with WEIRD samples, even though those people reflect only 12% of the student population (Vossoughi et al., 2021). Vossoughi et al. (2021) note:

This broad scale sample bias as well as experimental design bias (Thalmayer, Toscanelli, & Arnett, 2021; Hruschka et al., 2018; Baumard & Sperber, 2010) reflect field level flattening of our understandings of human diversity and cultural variation. As a result sample and researcher non-diversity (Medin et al., 2017), scientific instruments and measures of intelligence have projected deficit conceptions across cultural communities, with Western researchers presuming their own frames of reference as the universal norm (Medin & Bang, 2014). (p. 8)

In other words, we need to better attend to cultural diversity with our science. Not doing so leaves us at risk for a science rooted in deficit theories and misunderstandings.

The RISE Principles of Learning

Many in the field of the learning sciences have been working on elaborating more nuanced alternatives to these approaches in studies of learning. For example, my colleagues Carol Lee, Roy Pea, and Maxine McKinney de Royston and I recently edited the Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning (2020), which brought together scholars to reflect on what we know about learning from studies that take to heart the strengths that exist in communities and which don’t essentialize learning in reductive ways. Out of this volume emerged the RISE¹ principles of learning. The RISE principles of learning (Nasir et al., 2021b; de Royston et al., 2020a) represent learning as follows:

Rooted in the evolutionary, biological, and neurological systems of our bodies and minds, and inseparable from our social and cultural activities;

Integrated with all other aspects of development, including cognition, emotion, and the formation of identity—to establish a wide-angle view of the whole child;

Shaped by everyday life cultural activities, both in and out of school and across the lifespan; and

Experienced in our bodies through coordination with social others and the natural and designed worlds.

Each of these principles encapsulates what we have learned in the science of learning and development and centers young people and their communities. Each principle also wrestles with the aspects of learning that are fundamentally human and takes as core that learning involves multiple pathways and involves heterogeneity and diversity of experience.

Rooted in evolutionary, biological, and neurological systems

Learning is a pervasive and fundamentally human activity that arises out of our biological need to be connected to social others and to adapt to the environment. As just one example, human adaptability is underscored by evidence from the neurosciences, which find that not only are human brains malleable, but the brain is also quite social. We learn from implicit and observational stimuli (Lee et al., 2020). In fact, our brains are hardwired to learn implicitly and observationally from others and to do so from a place of emotional connection (Cantor & Osher, 2021; Cantor et al., 2018; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; Immordino-Yang, 2016; Osher et al., 2020). So even those systems we’ve viewed as organic—biological, neurological, and evolutionary—are cultural and social in nature (Lee, 2010; Nasir, 2011; Nasir et al., 2021b).

Integrated with all aspects of development: cognition, emotion, and the formation of identity

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (2022) writes: “Our schools tend to be preoccupied with what kids know and can do. However, it seems to be how kids think and feel, their dispositions of mind and heart, that have the strongest effects on their learning, civic engagement, personal well-being, and even brain development” (p. 59). When a sense of belonging and emotional safety is present, and when identities, including racial identities, are integrated into the classroom, learners are better able to engage and learn (Brown, 2019; Nasir, 2011; Rowley et al., 1998; Spencer et al., 2020). It is also important to recognize what happens when this isn’t true. Membership in marginalized gender, racial/ethnic, disability status, language proficiency, and immigration status groups can mean that one must manage environments that are not set up to meet one’s developmental needs and indeed are sometimes designed to reinforce marginalization by not meeting these needs (Rogers et al., 2020; Spencer et al., 2020; Way & Rogers, 2015). For example, my work has noted the conundrum facing Black boys during adolescence; precisely when adolescents have developmental needs for competence and autonomy, care and community, and a sense of identity and place in the world, they are too often treated in schools with suspicion as the “other” and are met with a profound lack of care (de Royston et al., 2020b; Nasir et al., 2006). The overarching point here is that psycho-social development is integral to learning processes, not a “nice to have” that layers on top of a set of universal cognitive processes.

Shaped in everyday life by cultural practices across the life course

This is rather obvious, though we rarely attend to it in schools. Learning happens in many settings, including and beyond schools (Baldridge, 2019; Heath et al., 2020; Peele-Eady & Moje, 2020; Saxe, 1991). This perspective acknowledges that learning unfolds across lives on multiple pathways at once and that learning at its best is a tapestry where what is learned in one setting (like communities) is expanded and built upon in another setting (like schools) in ways that honor and enrich the experiences of learners (Bell et al., 2009; Bransford et al., 2006; González et al., 2006). And yet, learning is not neutral. We are more willing to “see” learning in practices associated with formal learning spaces and less inclined to see the complexity of the learning that occurs elsewhere. Learning settings are power-laden, historically located, and weighted with complex histories. What we learn—the curriculum, the core ideas embedded within it—and who we learn from are not neutral (Alim et al., 2020; Annamma & Booker, 2020; Apple, 2012; Hand et al., 2012; Warren et al., 2020). Thus, learning must be viewed as occurring ubiquitously and as being naturally occurring in people’s lives. At the same time, we must recognize the ways we silo and privilege school learning, often to the exclusion of a range of ways of being and knowing that show up life-wide.

Experienced as embodied and coordinated through social interaction

And finally, we recognize that we experience the world through our bodies and through representations. Uses of the body and representational systems like language, as well as nonverbal communication—such as gestures, eye gaze, and bodily orientation; joint attention; and negotiation of meaning—are key to how learning activity is organized and coordinated (Green et al., 2020; McDermott & Pea, 2020). This includes language, which relates to learning in many ways: it is a direct mediator of learning and functions to position learners into identities, thus operating as a tool by which power is instantiated and negotiated (Flores & García, 2020). These embodied and representational aspects of learning matter for the kinds of learning settings we would optimally design.

We Can Build Equitable Education and Learning Systems That Provide Access to Robust Learning

If we know what learning is, and we hold at core this complex, multifaceted, and adaptive concept of learning, and we take seriously that identity, emotion, and social engagement are core to learning, then how should we teach? And how do we create education and learning systems to support this kind of learning?

As we think about building systems, it is important to note that our systems were not designed with this kind of learning in mind and were certainly not designed for all students to learn (Anderson, 1988). Linda Darling-Hammond (2022) sums it up as follows:

The belief that only some students are worthy of investment—and that students need to be ranked and sorted according to their different levels of potential—is deeply rooted in the organizational design of our schools, our funding priorities, our testing and grading policies, and our system of tracking students. (p. 55)

If we are thinking about the public function of schooling—the notion that experiences of education should be designed to support our multicultural democracy—then we must also think about the kinds of skillsets and mindsets that people need to be engaged and to be critical participants in that democracy. This was the focus of a recent report by the National Academy of Education (Lee et al., 2021), which connected learning in the disciplines to civic engagement. Here again, the kinds of learning we support—critical reading and writing, understanding and evaluating sources of evidence, and the ability to take others’ perspectives—matter to our very ability to educate for participation in a multicultural democracy.

But what should such education and learning systems look like?

Reimagining Education for Equity

In a recent series of articles that ran in the Phi Delta Kappan (Ball, 2022; Darling-Hammond, 2022; Ishimaru, 2022; Lee, 2021; Mehta, 2022; Nasir et al., 2021a; Penuel, 2021), the Spencer Foundation invited scholars to imagine the kinds of education systems we could create with a time horizon of 25 years if we put equity at the core (Nasir et al., 2021a). The set of articles, taken together, articulate a vision that outlines the following critical features of an equitable education system:

1. A K–12 curriculum design to prepare all young people for civic engagement (Lee, 2021)

1. Equitable systems of assessment: grounded in cultural theories of learning, centering student work, connecting families, communities, and schools (Penuel, 2021)

1. Schools that respect the agency and diversity of learners; provide purposeful, connected, and authentic learning; create learning communities that model the society we want (Mehta, 2022)

1. Engaging community-based leadership in schools and districts (Ishimaru, 2022) and honoring family and community as learning partners

• Disrupting the reproduction of “normal” teaching practice, diversifying teaching, humanizing teaching practice, and embracing wholeness (Ball, 2022)

• Policies that foster all the above to be brought into fruition (Darling-Hammond, 2022)

This set of articles establishes an ambitious and exciting vision. But it is important to note that an exciting vision, especially one that breaks from what we have done in the past, can spark a kind of cognitive backlash rooted in the way things are now, the way things have always been, and the technical constraints of current systems. Creating something new will require a radical imagination to think something better is actually possible, the faith to believe we can use our power to bring it into being, and the will to do it.

Features of Equitable Learning Systems

There has been promising work over the past few years by some innovative groups thinking about how we build on the science of learning and development and our commitments to an equitable multicultural democracy to design education systems in alignment with these values and goals. In Figures 1 and 2, I’ve represented two key frameworks, one from the SOLD Alliance (Darling-Hammond et al., 2021) and the other from the BELE Network (2021).

Figure 1. The BELE framework for equitable learning. From The Bele Framework, by Building Equitable Environments Network, 2021 (https://belenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-BELE-Framework.pdf). In the public domain.OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2. The SOLD framework. From Design Principles for Schools: Putting the Science of Learning and Development Into Action, 2020 (https://k12.designprinciples.org/). In the public domain.OPEN IN VIEWER

Both of these frameworks underscore several key features of education and learning systems that support culturally sustaining and rigorous learning and that call for new types of relations with families and communities. They each center on rigorous and rich learning, as well as the importance of critical thinking skills and mindsets. Each also represents how the learning environment must attend to issues of safety, belonging, and cultural affirmation, and how providing these kinds of loving systems will require a transformation of discipline systems to focus on restorative justice and shared power. In the kinds of learning and schooling environments described by these frameworks, positive developmental relationships are key, and there is a recognition that learning spaces must also be productive spaces for identity development. Importantly, these frameworks call out that providing these kinds of rigorous and robust learning environments involves thinking about both (a) classroom-level approaches, such as culturally affirming pedagogy and curricula, and intellectually rich, relevant, and challenging instruction, and (b) school-level organizational features, such as looping, detracking, teacher learning communities, and restorative justice practices.

Underlying Beliefs of Educators and Systems

These frameworks for redesigning our education systems are compelling and provide a powerful roadmap. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2021) cautions us that this work is about more than techniques and structures; it must consider the underlying beliefs that teachers and school systems hold about young people. Writing about the extraordinary teachers that she studied, Ladson-Billings notes:

Rather than techniques or teaching strategies, I learned that what the teachers shared was a set of underlying beliefs that drove their teaching. . . . A set of beliefs about themselves and others, about how to structure social relations, and about the nature of knowledge. These beliefs helped the teachers focus on improving student learning, cultivating cultural competence, and supporting sociopolitical or critical consciousness. . . . I could ignore the actual strategy (lecture, discussion, cooperative groups, etc.) and more clearly see how the belief systems were driving what and how they taught. (2021, p. 3)

Ladson-Billings makes clear that there is no way to make the necessary changes in our systems by enacting technical solutions. Creating equitable education systems requires changing hearts, minds, and ideas about what learning is, who can learn, and how learning happens (Nasir et al., 2014).

Coordinated Aspects of a Learning Ecology

The classroom and school-level work described requires a set of enabling conditions or aspects of the ecology of learning spaces and systems that must all be pulling in the same direction (Darling-Hammond, 2022). Some of these elements were reflected in the Phi Delta Kappan series referenced above. The broader ecology must involve several key elements, all working together toward a shared end. Elements of that ecology include the teacher pipeline; considerations of accreditation requirements; pre- and in-service professional development; and attending closely to recruitment, retention, and wellness issues. The focus on the teacher pipeline has all been made even more urgent during the pandemic, as we’ve seen massive numbers of people leaving the profession and widespread teacher shortages, impacting the diversity of the teaching profession (Bristol, 2020; Darling-Hammond et al., 2018).

Another key aspect of the learning ecology, which is too often left out of the conversation, is the role of families and communities in young people’s education. This involves more than simply “parent engagement” and is perhaps better conceptualized as a two-way street where families support teachers and schooling but also where schools operate in service of family and community goals and desires for their children (Ishimaru, 2022; Tuck, 2009). At best, such efforts would expand the types of learning opportunities that “count,” including after-school, community, and summer learning experiences (Baldridge, 2019; Bang et al., 2021; Nasir, 2011; Pinkard et al., 2020).

Of course, reimagining schools to create more robust learning experiences for young people and to deliver that learning in more equitable ways requires adequate and equitable funding (Baker, 2017; Darling-Hammond, 2022). This involves equitable funding formulas at the district and state levels but also entails spending on the things that matter most for students. It may entail spending on aspects of the learning ecology that are less often considered, such as summer learning opportunities and community-based learning supports.

District- and school-wide practices and policies can also serve to support or inhibit equitable learning. This includes attending to neighborhood racial segregation, school assignment policies, school tracking practices, and providing access to diverse curricula (Dee & Penner, 2017; Holme & Finnigan, 2018, p. 12; Oakes, 2005; Orfield & Frankenberg, 2014; Sleeter & Zavala, 2020; Wells et al., 2005). These aspects of school and district practices are key to ensuring that young people are learning in diverse environments that support their identities.

And finally, a robust learning ecology includes attention to supportive accountability and continuous improvement systems (Darling-Hammond, 2022). When it comes to assessment, in particular, we are in a kind of renaissance moment where many are realizing that what we’ve been doing isn’t working well, and there has been a call—from practitioners and scholars alike—for the kinds of assessment systems that align with what we know about learning and that contribute to equity rather than double down on inequity (Bennett, 2022; Furtak et al., 2020; Gordon, 1995, 2013; Mislevy, 2018; Penuel, 2021).

It is important to note that building the kinds of education and learning systems we’ve been discussing requires us to lean into a solidarity dividend frame of the kind Heather McGhee (2020) articulates. In other words, when education systems are designed not to hoard opportunity for an elite subset but rather to value the ways of being and learning of young people in multiple communities, then we all win—in the form of better and more fully educated people, prepared to take on the social and scientific challenges of our time (McGhee, 2020).

Bringing such systems to fruition is both a matter of what we know from science and also a matter of political will; it is entirely clear that the current system will not carry us into the future as a nation. The question is whether we are willing to fully engage schools as a key aspect of building a true multicultural democracy.

We Can Use Our Research Expertise in Ways That Support Equitable Systems if We Do Our Work in New Ways

This last part is tricky. I want to share some thoughts about how, as a research community, we might act in service to this goal of building equitable learning systems. But before I get there, a couple of things are necessary to acknowledge. First, from the historical record, we know that communities of color have a troubled history with research (Guthrie, 2004; Nix, 2017; Williams, 2008). That includes the glaring examples we know well—in medical research like the Tuskegee experiments (Nix, 2017)—but also the smaller-scale harms, such as in education research, where scholars misrepresented or misunderstood families, communities, and teachers; developed and implemented harmful interventions; or where studies perpetuated negative stereotypes. Research has been used in disingenuous ways, in ways that exploit communities and young people. Joyce King has referred to one version of this as the “data plantation” (King, 2021, personal communication).

When we do learn something important and implementable from research, it is not as if it gets taken up into education systems and implemented (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2022). For instance, we’ve long known about the ill effects of high-stakes testing conducted on a large scale, as we do it in this country (Penuel, 2021; Wells, 2019), and of punitive discipline practices (Milner, 2020); yet we have remained committed to those practices in far too many places. We also have a robust database on the tremendous benefits of culturally affirming and sustaining approaches (Alim & Paris, 2017; Dee & Penner, 2017; Sleeter & Zavala, 2020), and yet we are moving in the opposite direction and even legislating against those practices. My point is that good research tells us many things that we don’t act on for the betterment of schools or learning or students, particularly students of color. I don’t want to pretend that, if we do more good research with relevant findings, those findings will automatically be taken up into practice. Research use also has a political dimension and is (again) about power and upholding systems that maintain privilege. Thus, I enter this part of the conversation gingerly, with all these caveats in mind.

In some ways, we are facing an almost existential set of conundrums. Can schools that were founded on principles of exclusion and oppression be redeemed? Transformed? Similarly, can a research field with traditions rooted in exploitation and neglect for the young people and communities that are most marginalized be rebirthed to something fundamentally different from that? And can we imagine a world where policy supports what we know from research, even as we find ourselves in an era of the declining significance of evidence? If the answer to these questions is a resounding no, then there is no point in having this discussion. So, for me, the answer has to be yes. Our collective belief in that is why we are doing this work. And if that is the case, then we have to give rise to an ethic of research and a way of doing our work that is in alignment with and in service to the kinds of deep and rich learning supported by systems committed to the equity that we’ve been discussing. So that’s the place I am starting from in this discussion.

From that place, the task of determining a direction for education research in support of equitable systems means we need to focus on (a) the kinds of scholarship we are producing as a field, and (b) the issue of research use and utilization and knowledge mobilization. In doing so, we must recognize that the limited utilization of research for policy and practice is both about our research habits not being aligned with what we say our goals are and about how power operates in which research gets taken up and which doesn’t. So, while keeping these caveats in mind, I will share a few thoughts about how our scholarship, at a field level, might be better equipped to support transformations to education systems in the service of learning. As I do so, I will draw heavily on the recent and influential report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine regarding the future of education research (NASEM, 2022).

The Role(s) of Research

Research has many potential uses when we consider its impact on practice, policy, and knowledge building (NASEM, 2021). In the public sphere, we have recognized only some of those uses. We typically think about only a few of them. First, we think a core job of research is to help us understand what works for whom, under what conditions, and why (though we focus far more on the “what” than the “for whom, under what conditions, and why”). Second, we use research to describe existence proofs of the kinds of practice we want to see. Third, we use research to find key levers for improvement (within systems or classrooms) and to inform design, practice, and policy.

However, we less often include or see research as having the following potential uses:

1.

To offer conceptual insight on an issue or problem (e.g., philosophical approaches that offer new ways of thinking about what the “public” means in public education)

2.

To understand how things came to be (e.g., historical approaches that point out pitfalls or innovations from the past)

3.

To question assumptions and reimagine possibilities (that is, to help us think about things anew)

We must hold the full range of education research purposes in mind and thus broaden how we think about research usefulness. And as we do so, we must also reexamine our research habits, as a field, to better understand how our ways of being and our ways of doing our research may be working against our aspiration that our scholarship be consequential for practice and policy in education.

Research Habits We Need to Break (As a Field)

Some ways we do our work (as a field) are not well aligned with building education systems for learning. These include siloing, divergence, and disconnection; overemphasis on intervention models; and a focus on small-scale and short-term studies. I’ll discuss each of these in turn.

Siloing, divergence, and disconnection

The first habit that we need to break as a field is what I’m calling siloing. One version of siloing is that as researchers we are trained into habits of speaking to (and working with) very narrow circles of specialists rather than speaking and working more broadly. Our studies are also methodologically and conceptually siloed; for example, quantitative studies on educational disparities too often fail to engage critical or rich theories of race to make sense of those disparities (García et al., 2018). Divergence is our habit, pointing out differences rather than finding points of convergence—it’s kind of a habit of mind. This prevents consensus and field-level insights that could be really powerful, as we are poised to find points of disagreement and highlight the nuances of that disagreement rather than finding and leaning into the broader points of convergence. Disconnection is another form of siloing. By disconnection, I mean siloing inside the ivory tower, away from the rest of the world—the disconnection of the academic enterprise from places where scholarship could and does matter. For example, designing studies without stakeholder input of relevant communities of practice, such as teachers, families, students, or the community. This also includes focusing too often on individual studies or individual researchers rather than field-level knowledge or programs of research; too often, we are disconnected even from other scholars doing work on related topics and issues.

Overemphasis on intervention models

Conventional wisdom suggests that research made its way into practice by piloting successful interventions that were then adopted more widely (because of their success) and “scaled up.” However, this model turns out to be vastly oversimplified, if not completely inaccurate. Turns out, it is much more complicated than this, and traditional models of dissemination fail to capture the ways policy and practice are established, the political complexity of curriculum and textbook adoption, and the working lives of teachers and administrators. Fostering deeper connections between research and practice and policy will require the development of more nuanced and accurate models of the various pathways by which research comes to impact practice and policy in the real world (NASEM, 2022).

Short-term and small-scale studies

By and large, studies in education take place on a three-to-five-year time horizon. This time scale is a match for typical funding structures from public and private philanthropy and fits academic career and tenure timelines. However, these short timelines mean that we rarely study long-term or cumulative effects, and our scholarship tends to be relatively small scale. It is also the case that research in education is geographically clustered in regions where there are more research universities, primarily located in heavily populated urban areas, which under-samples the kinds of small and rural districts many students attend. All of this together means that our scholarship is, overall, smaller scale, geographically limited, and short-term, which does not leave the field well-poised to conduct studies that explore long-term effects or experiences or that provide multisited examinations of processes, practices, and outcomes.

Research Habits We Need to Strengthen (As a Field)

There are also research habits we need to strengthen as a field. As we’ve been discussing, inequitable structures and systems are a core issue for education. Our scholarship must take up these issues of equity as a central and abiding question. And further, we must be oriented not simply to describe the processes and causes of inequity but to envision, propose, and explore new potential approaches to support equitable systems and outcomes. We must believe we can do something different and work from an imperative to do so.

Centering equity in our research

Research that is “equity-centered” suggests that not only are we asking questions with equity at their core and seeking to envision new ways to build equitable and truly rigorous systems, but throughout the research process, we are attending to how we do our work as scholars. This includes the way we conceptualize projects and programs of research, the research questions, design, methods, measures, the constitution of the research team, and our relationships with whom we are researching. It also means shifting the power dynamics between the researcher and the researched. Key to this work is that our work must view communities and people with an asset lens. By asset lens, I mean from the perspective that people bring valuable and important skills, lenses, and ways of being and doing to the table, which need to be honored in the education process (Gray et al., 2022).

Building our collective muscle for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and integrated research

This second research habit needs to be strengthened across field and subfield, across methodological approaches. This means doing our work in collaboration with scholars from disciplines other than ours who have complementary skill sets and perspectives to help us reach beyond the limits of our own perspectives, disciplines, and methods. This could also mean collaborating with those outside of the research community in new ways—to design and enact research informed by stakeholders—in relation to the needs of teachers, communities, schools, and families. If integration is our goal, we might also more regularly offer research syntheses around key policy- and practice-relevant topics. Providing clear syntheses of what we do and do not know from research, and also attending to the strength of our evidence, could be quite valuable. Integration also calls for us to view our work, fundamentally, as a whole, where we are together creating a cumulative body of scholarship that builds, expands, and deepens over time—where we orient to how we are building on what has come before rather than focusing on how our work stands apart from what came before us.

Making ambitious research studies the norm

Making ambitious studies the norm means utilizing expanded outcomes and measures, including those at the school and systems levels and those that align with more complex notions of teaching and learning. There is certainly some compelling work happening in this direction in the field. However, we need more longitudinal work, comparative work, larger-scale studies, and scholarship that integrates conceptual insights with ambitious empirical studies. I don’t just mean quantitative research but also qualitative and mixed-methods research. In the learning sciences, in particular, we tend to study small snippets of learning over short time horizons. Visionary scholarship would engage with longer time horizons—over the life course and across settings—and would entail large-scale investments.

Focusing on systems change

If our work is to be implemented and bring about systems change, it is critically important that we understand the policy system; the governance structures, laws, and regulations that shape our schools; and the ways that systems operate—at the federal, state, district, and school levels—in response to these. Without this understanding, we tend to exhort educators to do things they are constrained from doing without getting to the root of the problem that holds inequitable and disempowering education in place.

There is evidence that our field is moving in some of these directions. As one example, there is a litany of longstanding and emerging research methods that fall under the banner of “improvement research.” Donald Peurach, Jennifer Lin Russell, Lora Cohen-Vogel, and William Penuel (2022) recently released a handbook codifying this work into a field. Improvement research refers to methodological approaches that are community-engaged, whereby scholars work alongside and in partnership with schools, districts, teachers, and/or community-based organizations to work iteratively on a problem of practice that the system, school, or teacher is facing. While work such as this is happening in the field, falling under many names (research-practice partnerships, community-engaged research, design-based research, participatory action research, improvement science, networked improvement communities, social design experiments, etc.), it often lacks full structural support and robust funding mechanisms.

Implications for Research Training, Academic Incentives, Research and Development Infrastructure, and Funding

If we are to embrace these ways of working as a field, then we must also consider how the ecology of education research might need to change to better support our new research habits. To enact the kinds of research habits I’ve described, we must also attend to research training, academic incentives, research and development infrastructure, and funding.

It is clear that the kinds of shifts needed in the research ecology have rather obvious implications for research training. This includes reconsidering the training experiences scholars need to do the kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary, deeply connected research outlined here. This is not a simple or straightforward task, and we know that both education schools and universities, in general, tend to be underfunded and overstretched. However, we must build on the interests and ambition of the next generation of education scholars to reimagine how we train scholars of education and place collaboration (across discipline, method, and stakeholder group) at the center of doctoral training in education.

Academic incentives refer to how the academy’s values and reward structures reinforce certain types of scholarship and work to disincentivize some of the important characteristics and processes we’ve been discussing. More collaborative, interdisciplinary, and relevant research will need nurturing structures inside and outside of higher education to hold it. And in many cases, university life fosters exactly the opposite. Our incentive structures in the academy privilege “unique contributions,” not how we build on each other’s work as a field. Shifting these incentive structures could involve revising tenure and promotion standards to privilege collaborative scholarship, as well as to value (and count) products of scholarship beyond publications in academic journals to include curriculum, policy reports, teacher professional development workshops, and other transformative forms of research findings that impact policy and/or practice.

We also need to address the shortcomings in national infrastructure for R&D. Education R&D is vastly underfunded as compared to other key industries, such as medicine or defense (NASEM, 2022; Shelton, 2011a). The United States spends approximately 0.2% of the total national K–12 expenditures on education R&D compared to 10–20% spent in knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy, like technology and health. For example, while the Department of Defense spends $70 billion per year on R&D, the Department of Education spends less than $1 billion (Shelton, 2013). This underfunding impacts the possibilities for research findings to result in curricula, pedagogies, educational products, or systems that excel. This underfunding is a missed opportunity to build a culture of innovative R&D that focuses on building systems and practices to address what has been viewed as intractable challenges (Shelton, 2011b).

Quite simply, for the kind of scholarship I have outlined to become the norm, we will need to invest in building more robust structures to support ambitious studies, including investing in federal, state, and local R&D capacity in ways that allow research to be instrumental in creating and maintaining education systems rooted in equity and to support ambitious learning (NASEM, 2022). This will also mean structures that support our field to work with grassroots organizers, families, and communities to ensure that the kinds of reforms we are working toward are the ones communities want to see and to enable us to work alongside communities (not simply on their behalf). As we have noted, the funding of education research needs to be vastly increased, with more education funders funding research as a part of their strategy and more federal investment in education research, and funders need to align RFPs and expectations with some of the future directions outlined here and elsewhere, including a focus on funding scholarship that utilizes asset and solidarity dividend lenses.

Conclusions

I have argued a three-part vision for the future of education. First, we need to theorize learning in ways that respect diversity and multiplicity and support people’s thriving. Second, building on this expanded definition of learning, we need to transform education and learning systems to provide access to robust learning. And finally, we need to use our research expertise in ways that support equitable systems, which is possible if we do our work in some new ways.

The vision outlined in this article will require more intentional coherence and collaboration on multiple levels. And it will also require another kind of intention—one rooted in creating loving systems. And so I’ll end where I started. We are having a collective moment in education. It is one of those rare moments, not unlike where we are with climate change or racial injustice, where it seems clear that our choice is to do the same thing and perish or figure out a new way of being and doing so that we might all thrive. It is a time for radical hope and collective action.