White Dominant Culture and Continuous Improvement
I am pleased to share some writing emerging from of an almost 2-year project I embarked on to bring my anti-racist organizing work into conversation with my professional world of improvement science in education. The resulting article identifies ways that white dominant culture can limit the impact of our continuous improvement efforts and harm people in the process. It also shares some possible moves we can make in our practice to resist white dominant culture and develop different ways of working together (as captured in this handy table.)
I am grateful to the many colleagues and thought partners who explored this topic with me through conversation, public presentations, reacting to early drafts, and leading by example. This essay has been shaped by a conference session co-created and co-facilitated with Enikia Ford-Morthel, Jill Hoogendyk, and Eve Arbogast at the 2022 Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education. After spending a few months dialoguing about the intersection of anti-racist leadership and continuous improvement, we were unsure how our thinking would be received by others in our field. Our session, titled “Interrupting White Dominant Culture in Continuous Improvement: Anti-Racist Leadership Lessons,” drew more than 350 attendees, giving us confidence that this topic is alive and important to those trying to use continuous improvement for social change! The energy I felt after that first presentation led to me to continue growing and evolving the material into its present form. Thank you to so many dear colleagues who gave me feedback on various drafts of this paper (14 versions in all, I think?) and the encouragement I needed to put my voice out into the world.
I share this essay as a provocation, a conversation-starter, and an opportunity to connect with others who are grappling with undoing ways of thinking and being that are hurting us and our work. It reflects my obviously limited vantage point and lived experiences as a white person practicing improvement in schools, and there are many Black, Indigenous, and other leaders and improvers of color who have much more to say about how to dismantle white supremacy. However, I hope that by sharing some thinking emerging from the work I am trying to do to change myself and my own practice, I can encourage others in this field to ask themselves how they are willing to change, too.
