CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1638548
This article is part of the Research TopicSituating Equity at the Center of Continuous Improvement in EducationView all 10 articles
Practicing Equity-Centered Improvement
Provisionally accepted
- University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
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Equity-centered improvement is - necessarily - deeply relational, political, and adaptive. Improvers must regularly navigate uncertainty, negotiate conflicting priorities, and make situated decisions amidst organizational, political, and interpersonal constraints. However, too often, research and guidance focus on naming what improvers should do, with less attention to how improvers actually engage in the ongoing, improvisational, judgment-filled work of practicing improvement for equity. This conceptual article introduces design tensions (Tatar, 2007) as a conceptual tool for naming and navigating ongoing tradeoffs that arise in equity-centered change efforts. Drawing on existing research, we describe three design tensions: (1) reconciling needs for timeliness, learning, and collaboration, (2) negotiating between clarity for action and systemic complexity, and (3) mediating political dynamics and systemic disruption. We propose that practicing equity-centered improvement involves ongoing satisficing within these tensions and examine the potential power of bringing the lens of these tensions into the practice of, learning about, and study of equity-centered improvement.
Keywords: Continuous improvement (CI), Design tensions, improvement practice, educational equity, equity-centered improvement
Received: 30 May 2025; Accepted: 04 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Resnick, Farrell and Bristol. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Alison Fox Resnick, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, United States
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