SIUE’s Houston Joins Interdisciplinary Conversation on Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Derek Houston, PhD, associate professor in educational leadership, convened with fellow researchers, policymakers and practitioners at the Spencer Foundation’s convening on culturally responsive and sustaining education. Houston took part in the conversation in hopes to create future research collaborations across various disciplines.
“The conversations made me re-think my understanding of broad collaborative and transformative research,” said Houston. “Transformative research agendas that are crafted by an interdisciplinary group of people can be complicated, but it is within the nuances of those complications that truly transformational possibility exists.”
The Spencer Foundation is the only national foundation focused exclusively on supporting education research. The foundation, in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, brought together scholars and practitioners from many areas of expertise.
“Rarely has such an eclectic group of people been convened in a single space for the purposes of dreaming about bold education research that has input from researchers, policymakers and practitioners,” Houston added. “Education is truly an interdisciplinary field, yet conversations between these key constituency groups tend to not happen collectively. Collective conversations are likely to be more impactful for the field writ large.”
Photo: Derek Houston, PhD, associate professor in educational leadership.
