Examining Equity in (Education) Collaborations: A Conceptual Framework

Samantha Shewchuk^*Sophia Vilceus

• University of Delaware, Newark, United States

Collaborative research approaches such as co-design, co-creation, and co-production are increasingly promoted as strategies for advancing equity in education by strengthening relationships between researchers, practitioners, and communities. While equity is widely referenced as a guiding principle in these approaches, little consensus exists regarding how equity is defined, enacted, or evaluated within collaborative work. As a result, well-intentioned initiatives may reproduce existing power imbalances rather than disrupt them. This scoping review examines how equity is conceptualized and operationalized across collaborative research initiatives in education and allied fields and proposes a unifying framework to guide equity-centered practice. Following established scoping review methodology, we conducted a systematic search across major academic databases, yielding 7,123 records, which were reduced to 295 open-access articles after deduplication, screening, and full-text review. Automated and manual screening processes were used to identify studies involving substantive collaborative approaches and explicit stakeholder engagement. Using a mixed-methods analytic strategy, we combined computational text analysis with qualitative thematic synthesis to examine how equity was defined, pursued, and assessed across collaborative projects. Equity-related data were extracted at three analytic levels: goals, processes, and outcomes. Findings revealed that explicit definitions of equity were rare; only 58 studies offered definitional clarity. However, recurring themes emerged from the literature, including shared decision-making, tailored support, justice and fairness, participatory processes, representation, culturally responsive practice, and attention to historical and structural inequities. Equity was most frequently articulated through practice rather than formal definition, appearing implicitly within goals and processes. Three dominant process dimensions were identified: participatory (who is involved and how), relational (how trust and power are negotiated), and distributional (how resources, time, and authority are allocated). Equity-oriented outcomes included improved access, community capacity-building, shifts in institutional practice, and enhanced legitimacy of interventions. Drawing on these findings, we propose the Equity-Centered Collaboration Framework, which situates equity across three interdependent domains: goals, processes, and outcomes. The framework offers conceptual clarity and practical guidance for designing, evaluating, and strengthening equity-focused collaboration. By making equity explicit and observable, this framework aims to support more accountable, effective, and just collaborative research practice in education and beyond.