Expansive Ways of Knowing and Improving: Using Equity Tools and Approaches to Support Equity of Participation in Learning Activities

Abstract

This symposium brings together projects that are developing and testing equity analytics in education. Equity analytics are a genre of learning analytics that attends to the distribution of and participation in opportunities to learn, with attention to inequities linked to students’ social identities and wider systems of marginalization and oppression that impact classrooms and schools. Each of the projects has engaged not only in developing tools for gathering data related to inequities of participation but also for helping educators take action to reduce inequities in their classrooms and schools. Findings generated from each project illustrate how, through working in close partnership with educators, equity analytics systems can be developed that are feasible to use and that can inform practice. These projects also underscore the challenges of implementing equity analytics within inequitable systems that emphasize goals of accountability and with educators with varied conceptions of what constitutes equitable participation and learning.