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This chapter provides an introduction to and description of educational equity. It outlines common traps to avoid when engaging equity-oriented practices in community college contexts.

Addressing the Conceptual Challenges of Equity Work: A Blueprint for Getting Started

Erin L. Castro

What is equity? I want to begin this chapter by asking what it means to think about equity in a particularly difficult social moment, one of widening economic inequality and social fracture. A seemingly obvious question, but perhaps this is why it begs further attention. Many of us routinely use the word equity, participate in and facilitate programs that aim to increase equity, and work for institutions that espouse commitments to equity. But what does equity really mean? And, conversely, what might it mean to think about equity? I am interested in how we think about equity and how this thinking influences practice: how it influences our perceptions of students, our interactions with students, and the programs we design to help facilitate their success.

Although it is rather easy to agree with broad rhetorical commitments to a more just and equitable society, the barriers to practicing equity are many. In fact, equity-oriented practices are difficult to engage because of a complex system of sociopolitical and economic relations. Thus, walking the walk, so to speak, requires a thoughtful understanding of how community colleges are situated within a larger social landscape and accordingly, how community college practice affects the scope of opportunities made available to students on campus. In their latest book, Dowd and Bensimon (2015) contend that equity can be thought of as a standard. Equity as a standard can then be used in community college practice to judge "whether a state of affairs is just or unjust" (p. 9). Thinking about equity as a standard is useful because it surfaces important considerations related to ideas of fairness. What do we believe that people deserve, and why? In the context of community college practice, what do we believe that our students deserve, and why?

Although our individual answers may slightly differ, I believe that we all want students to be successful and we want them to be provided with the tools and resources to thrive. We know, however, that not all students-or potential students-are provided with what they need in order to realize their full potential and this is really at the heart of equity. What I'd like to propose in this first chapter is that it is not only important for us to design programming around equity but also to think deeply about what equity means, what it might look like, and what it might feel like on community college campuses. Practice is greatly influenced by the way we think about equity and what we think equity means. Because equity is a contextually dependent construct, how we consider that context-that is, where we decide to look and what we decide to see-greatly matters. In fact, I might go so far as to say that vision is the most important element of engaging equity-oriented practice: to see our current circumstances for what they are and then to envision a reality-based path toward equitable change. Accordingly, my purpose in this chapter is to focus on vision and in so doing, encourage a rethinking of commonplace approaches, attitudes, and assumptions toward persistent challenges of disparity in community college spaces and to outline common pitfalls in attempting equity work.

What Is Equity (and What Is It Not)?

Popular rhetoric around difference in U.S. higher education routinely includes buzzwords such as "diversity" and "inclusion," but these terms are not synonymous with equity. Issues of diversity and inclusion are important concepts to understand, to be certain, but they are not the same thing as understanding equity. To understand equity is to understand power and the ways in which power operates throughout society.

Power may feel like an intimidating subject, but it need not be. Understanding power is really about seeing how privilege and disadvantage operate throughout society and, therefore, how these operations affect individuals and groups of people over time. Concepts like privilege and disadvantage emphasize structural and institutional patterns that, when examined from a macro level, position individuals and groups of people in particular advantageous and/or disadvantageous ways throughout society. In the context of community college practice, privilege and disadvantage can be seen in the ways that students interact with and are positioned by the resources made available to them: financial aid policies, academic advising practices, student support services, and everyday interactions with college administrators, faculty, and staff, among other resources.

Plainly stated, equity in higher education is the idea that students from historically and contemporarily marginalized and minoritized communities have access to what they need in order to be successful. This is not a radical proposition and in the abstract, it is probably something with which we can all agree. Providing students with what they need in order to be successful is not simply reasonable, it's our job. However, understanding equity as a function of power can quickly become complicated; what if we aren't quite sure what students need? How do we know if we are adequately providing students with what they need? Because some students' needs are different from others', is it fair to give different kinds of resources to different groups of students?

The answers to these questions are varied, but asking them is an important step in the process of engaging equity-oriented practices in community colleges. The unfortunate reality is that we do not spend enough time asking these kinds of questions and as a result, we may not have the opportunity to think deeply about how to achieve equity. Accordingly, our attempts to appropriately address disparities in student access, experience, and outcomes may be misguided.

Because equity is about power, to engage equity-oriented practices in community college contexts means to work toward changing powerful systems: systemic practices, regulations, norms, and habits of the institution. This is difficult work, at least in part, because it can be hard for the individuals performing habits and norms to see them. In order for policy and programming to be equity oriented, they need to be aimed at transforming permanent institutional assumptions and practices that privilege some student groups and not others. An emphasis on diversity or inclusion falls short of this aim.

Commitments to diversity or inclusion do not require a critical attention to power in the same way as equity. For example, we can appeal to notions of diversity and never disrupt the practices that make it difficult for lower income students to persist. Or, we can commit to notions of inclusivity without ever addressing hostile campus climates for students of Color. Or, we can celebrate difference through ceremonial gatherings and special weeks dedicated to disenfranchised groups without adequately addressing deeply held assumptions about particular student communities, including undocumented students; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+) students; or pregnant and parenting students; among others. Certainly, these kinds of events serve a purpose on campus and I am not arguing that we need to eliminate them, but we need to recognize them for what they are and what they do, as well as where they fall short.

I would like for us to move us away from ideas of diversity and inclusion, not because they do not matter, but because they are simply not enough to address entrenched disparity in higher education. We need a politics of equity in community college practice that moves beyond simply increasing numerical representation of underrepresented groups or celebrating difference, because the mere presence of difference does not equal equity. Normative structural and institutional patterns that place underrepresented students in disadvantaged positions must be addressed, and the only way to do this is to see them for what they are and understand how they operate. Certainly numerical representation is one aspect of this work, but creating the capacity to successfully and humanely serve and support growing numbers of underrepresented students should be the ultimate institutional goal.

Challenges in Doing Equity Work

There are a number of challenges in transforming community college spaces to become more equitable. In what follows, I focus on three broad challenges that are common throughout higher education in general, as well as community college practice. My fundamental assumption in providing the following challenges is that equity is about power. Many of the following examples may alleviate short-term issues; however, they collectively neglect to address structural conditions that perpetuate inequity. The following dispositions all function to alleviate the immediate, which is surely an important component of working toward equity but not enough to engage transformational change. Falling into any of the following thinking patterns ultimately works to sustain inequity in the long term because the following habits do not disrupt the root causes of inequity: unfair distributions of power.

Focusing on the Student Instead of the Institution

Throughout higher education there exists a commonsensical culture as it relates to addressing disparity. If a group...