Max Halvorson
Santino Camacho
Jenn Nguyen
Public schools in the United States often fall short of meeting Indigenous students’ needs. Educational leaders, however, may seek to enhance these services and address these opportunity gaps, operating within the constraints of a large, federally- and state-funded system. These systems do not always provide Indigenous communities with ownership and full control over the use of data, yet it is still imperative to apply data sovereignty principles to the research process. By applying principles of community-engaged research, Indigenist research, and a mixed methods approach, progress can be made toward prioritizing Collective Benefit, Responsibility, and Ethics, even when Authority to Control is not fully implemented. Our study applied these principles to a state-funded examination of educational opportunity gaps for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NH/PI) youth in the state of Washington. The study team, led by and comprised primarily of NH/PI researchers, began study development by engaging a Community Advisory Board of educational and community leaders from the Washington NH/PI community. The Community Advisory Board weighed in on our work at regular intervals and helped us to craft our final report and recommendations. A mixed methods approach placed qualitative data on equal footing with quantitative data, allowing NH/PI youth and educators to share their voices and stories directly. In our talk, we will reflect on challenges and lessons learned from our community-engaged research process, share quantitative and qualitative results of our study, and seek guidance from colleagues on continuing to place community needs first in disseminating our study results.