Just Let Women of Color Lead: Creating the Conditions for Successful Policy Implementation
The idea for this project stems from working with educators across 36 community colleges since 2013, where Women of Color (WoC) have demonstrated an ability to leverage their raced and gendered experiences and expertise to imagine a more transformative approach to the requirements within reform initiatives, have sought to build community and coalitions for this work to be achieved, all the while centering students’ distinct needs and displaying an authentic level of care for communities of color. In this work, WoC more often recognize that problems of inequity within their institution need long-term, intentional, and resource-intensive solutions, not quick, one-off interventions that might look good for them as individual leaders in the short term (Felix, 2021; Felix & Nienhusser, 2023). This then positions the implementation of policy reform as a long-term endeavor that must endure beyond the time WoC lead in their formal positions on campus. Lastly, recent scholarship showcases how WoC interpret policy mandates as more than rote procedures or compliance-oriented tasks, and are able to envision more meaningful possibilities for educational reforms and seek to radically shift organizational aspects first, rather than place the onus on students to change in order to achieve equity (Felix et al., 2022). At the same time, WoC are leading policy implementation towards more transformative ends, they face significant barriers given their raced and gendered identities; having their power challenged, expertise questioned, leadership critiqued, and face oppressive forces on campus that mirror our society’s white, patriarchal, and heteronormative structures (Delgado Bernal & Alemán, 2017; Estrada et al., 2022; Martinez et al., 2016). These added barriers faced by WoC are critical to recognize, document, and remedy as they tend to be tapped for leadership opportunities given their successful track record, without adequate resources, assessment of existing capacity, or acknowledgment of how much responsibility is placed on them to carry out the implementation of large-scale organizational change efforts.
Women of Color (WoC) stand out as critical leaders who bring particular strengths to policy implementation. This strength emerges as varied funds of knowledge and skills that are rooted in their own raced and gendered identities and experiences that enable them to see, respond, and use policy mandates as tools to transform their institutions and improve the conditions and outcomes experienced by minoritized groups. We describe this particular asset, derived from the combination of their cultural background, educational expertise, and identity-based wisdom, as implementation imagination (Felix & Nienhusser, 2023). In the K12 context, Rodela and Rodriguez-Mojica (2019) describe Latina administrators leveraging policy for social justice as having “a deeper vision for equity” informed by their own lived experiences navigating education as minoritized students (Mavrogordato & White, 2019). In this work situated in community colleges, WoC have a deeper vision for policy implementation that emanates from an expanded sense of possibility where equity-oriented reforms can be used to create more equitable institutions. Both the unique ways WoC use their expertise and skill to lead implementation efforts as well as how institutions often systemically undermine the possibilities of what can be achieved through policy enactment need to be further understood.
Future work seeks to deepen these recent findings to model the ways that Women of Color –their identity, raced/gendered experiences, educational background, and implementation imaginations– influence how they initiate, lead, and carry forward more race-conscious policy efforts at their respective campuses. The use of imagination is central to this work as it centers on the ability of institutional actors to collective dream of a different “educational world” that moves us from “what is…to what can be” a possible world where students thrive and experience racial equity (Davis, 2003, p. 27; Dumas, 2016). Along this tradition of imagination and freedom dreaming, Kelley (2002) reminds us of the power and necessity of imagination in leading for social change: “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us.” Drawing on Kelley (2002), we see implementation imaginations as central to leading policy enactment towards more racially just ends and the need for institutional actors who can envision something that is yet to be, but can collectively be dreamt of and worked towards. In the community college context, imagination can be seen as the confluence of an actor’s identity (e.g., race, gender, generation status), position (e.g., faculty, staff), competence (e.g., understanding of systemic racism, collective action), and commitments (e.g., motivation, willingness, advocacy) that enable them to see and respond to policy reform in more profound ways (Nienhusser & Connery, 2021). Thus, it is critical to explore the ability of institutional actors to imagine something new and different within the process of implementation that replaces existing oppressive practices with strategies that lead to racialized organizational change (McCambly & Colyvas, 2022; Ray, 2019). In this way, Black and Brown Women/Femmes offer us the most compelling opportunity to see how racial equity can be lived out through the process of policy implementation.
Moving forward with this project, myself and some amazing colleagues Brandy Thomas, Aireale Rodgers, Maria Espino, and Malika Bratton, utilize life histories to explore, document, and understand the implementation imaginations of Women of Color leading policy efforts to close racial equity gaps across multiple community colleges. Life histories allow for multiple, in-depth conversations with WoC that center their personal narratives and help to illuminate how past and current experiences shape who they are, how they lead, and what they perceive policy as being able to achieve (Munro, 1998; Rall et al. 2021; Tierney, 2013). Life history prioritizes depth over breadth, focusing inquiry on a small number of individuals to generate an intensive exploration of one’s life (Cole & Knowles, 2001). Tierney (2013) offers that life history can provide a detailed “glimpse into one person’s life and hopefully provoke questions and ideas about how that individual” lives their life and now influences how they make sense of the world and operate within it (p. 260). In this case, life histories enable both the researchers and co-collaborators to construct narratives that map out significant events and experiences influencing Women of Color on their path to leading important community college policy reforms. Helping to bind the study and the co-collaborators included, we focus on WoC leading active policy efforts in California that seek to achieve equitable student outcomes (Student Equity and Achievement Program), dismantle developmental education tracking (AB-705), and create more student-centered, equity-oriented institutions (Guided Pathways). Understanding the year-over-year process of policy implementation and the ways that WoC leaders shape the potential success of reform at the institutional level is critical as we strive to achieve racial justice in postsecondary education. The focus on WoC within the implementation context then offers the field greater recognition of the interplay of race and gender and how these intersecting identities may influence the organizational change achieved in postsecondary education through policy reform.
As a life history project (Kishimoto & Mwangi, 2009; Matute et al., 2020; Sosulski et al., 2010) with Women of Color who lead policy implementation efforts in community college, our study is grounded by two research questions:
What events, experiences, and individual characteristics shape and inform how Women of Color understand, respond to, and lead implementation efforts in community colleges?
How do institutions diminish or enable Women of Color’s agency to carry out their implementation imaginations of policies within community colleges?
