Rethinking Campus Borders and Community Impact: Lead the Change Interview with Dr. Paul Garton and Dr. Larry Baranowski
In October’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. Paul Garton and Dr. Larry Baranowski explore how universities extend their influence beyond their beyond physical boundaries and how improvement initiatives could contribute to community empowerment. Dr. Garton is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at East Tennessee State University, where he researches higher education and economic development. Dr. Baranowski also works at East Tennessee State University, where he researches science education, curriculum theory, and the alignment of K-12 science curricula with current scientific research. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2027 AERA theme, “Transcending Borders and Boundaries in Education Research: Toward a Beloved Global Community,” calls on education researchers to examine and move beyond boundaries that can divide disciplines, institutions, communities, ways of knowing, and people. It asks us to build more relational, equitable, and ethically connected approaches to education research while remaining attentive to power and collective responsibility. How are you, or how do you plan to contribute to this vision?
Paul Garton and Larry Baranowski (PG & LB): We consider our work to be an application of geography theory to the study of higher education. When thinking about borders in geography, and the act of stretching beyond borders, we can consider three frameworks in ascending order of complexity. The first, and simplest, is as mutually agreed upon demarcations of sovereignty or property rights. This is the approach of lawyers and the courts. Second, rather than thinking of nation-states or property owners as neutral actors who just happen to have a defensible stake over a space, we can think of borders as political tools used to exert control over a territory and the people within (Sack, 1986). The third and most complex framework is borders as performative sites, used to legitimate the very concept of the nation-state (Jones, 2009) or, in the case of our writing, the university campus. If the point of the border is not legal but performative, then the legal demarcation line is less important than the line at which people believe the border to be (Jones, 2012). The nation-state, or university, can then influence movement and a sense of belonging in ways that go beyond lines on a map.
Think of a brick-and-mortar university you are familiar with. Do you know where the land that is owned by the university ends? In other words, do you know what makes up the campus? Now ask yourself, how do you know where the campus ends? For many readers, you will have a clear idea of the boundaries of campus, though that idea did not come from looking at a survey map. Your idea of the border is likely defined by performative markers like signage, the architectural style of the buildings, landscaping, or categories of amenities. These markers serve to establish a presence in the public imaginary of a space, sending messages about who is welcome and who is not.
Universities are competing for a shrinking pool of students while also trying to attract new faculty who are often participating in a global labor marketplace. Part of these recruitment efforts involves the perceived quality of the campus space within the legal boundary, but the perceived quality of neighborhoods near the campus also plays into decision-making, both from the prospective student/faculty perspective as well as the university trying to recruit them. We argue that, in these cases, universities often take steps to extend beyond their legal boundaries to shift the character of the neighborhood, sometimes with strategies that economically and culturally displace current residents. Universities adjust performative markers, occasionally in ways that co-opt a space into the public imaginary of the campus like new academic buildings or student housing with university branding, occasionally in ways that keep the neighborhood distinct from the campus imaginary but caters to students and new faculty, like with public-private partnerships to build mixed-use buildings or innovation districts. Our objective with this line of research is to consider the role of higher education in the spatial organization of towns and cities, moving beyond the first level framework of campus borders towards more complex and more critical theories.
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars in the field of Educational Change might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
PG & LB: One of the key takeaways from our work is that educational institutions need to think more critically about the consequences of the changes they pursue, particularly when those changes extend beyond the physical boundaries of the institution (Garton & Baranowski, 2026). Universities see themselves as geographic anchors and important partners in community development. That role can create tremendous opportunities to contribute resources, expertise, and infrastructure to communities, but it also gives institutions significant power to shape those communities.
Our findings suggest that we cannot evaluate educational change solely by asking whether an initiative produces the outcomes an institution intended. We also need to ask: Who defined the problem? Who benefits from the initiative? Who pays the costs? And whose voices were included at the table when decisions were made? In our study, neighborhoods that were more vulnerable to gentrification were more likely to be targeted by university-led development initiatives. This raises important questions about how institutional perceptions of need, blight, and improvement can reflect broader racial and socioeconomic assumptions.
For practitioners, this means that community engagement should not just include consulting after major decisions have been made. Communities should have meaningful influence over the goals, design, implementation, and evaluation of initiatives that affect them. Institutions should also establish measures of success that extend beyond typical institutional metrics (enrollment, recruitment, property values, or economic growth) to include community stability, well-being, and equitable distribution of benefits.
For scholars, the broader lesson is that educational change should be studied as part of the larger social and political systems in which educational institutions operate. Schools and universities do not simply exist within their environments; they are powerful actors capable of reshaping them. Understanding this reciprocal relationship can help identify unintended consequences before they become permanent.
“Schools and universities do not simply exist within their environments; they are powerful actors capable of reshaping them.“
Fostering a better educational system requires us to expand our definition of improvement. Change is not necessarily progress simply because an institution grows or an initiative produces measurable outcomes. Educational change is most meaningful when it expands opportunity without shifting costs onto the communities with the least power to absorb them.
LtC: Where do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for its future?
PG & LB: To answer this question specific to the geographies of university campuses, we think there are a few somewhat countervailing trends. First, demand for online education and the concentration of enrollments within large, public universities are reducing the spatial footprint of some universities, while drastically increasing the footprint at others. News stories of universities closing sit alongside stories of universities that need more residence halls to accommodate student housing needs. Some campuses sit vacant while others grow every year. University roles in local development are highly context dependent, based on local history, municipal governance, and institutional factors like enrollment trends and finances.
Second, the role of universities as real estate developers is in a state of flux relative to the first 20 years of the 21st century. Real estate that serves an academic purpose, including things like residence halls and administrative support, is tax exempt, but if the building does not serve an academic purpose, like if it is leased to a private company, then the university pays property taxes. Non-academic buildings are generally part of a university’s endowment investments and meant to diversify holdings, along with the aforementioned goals of neighborhood change for purposes of recruitment. Real estate investments were profitable for universities while interest rates steadily dropped since the 1970s, but post-COVID, many holdings have become liabilities (Gillers, 2025), especially when paired with the taxes that are unique to the non-academic buildings. Simultaneously, several major universities experienced public relations disasters related to campus expansions or real estate holdings. Johns Hopkins faced steep opposition after displacing several hundred families for a development in Baltimore, Columbia opened a new campus in Manhattanville that still riles locals, and Harvard infuriated Boston after buying huge swathes of land in Allston using a shell company. With market volatility and struggles with public trust, university decisionmakers might not think real estate development is worth the effort in many situations.
Finally, while universities might be looking at real estate development, many are explicitly adopting identities as local or regional anchor institutions. We see this as a source of careful hope. We are critical of development work that is imposed upon communities and could result in displacement, but we celebrate work that builds wealth equitably, improves health outcomes, and increases educational attainment. In 2012, Rita Axelroth Hodges and Steve Dubb called for postsecondary institutions to adopt an “anchor mission,” to leverage their existing resources and functions purposefully for local and regional development. We see compelling evidence every day that universities are taking up the charge. The work we see for ourselves as educational researchers is to ensure such anchor initiatives are conducted in concert with communities and through a lens of empowerment, not imposition to meet the goals of the university.
References
Garton, P. M., & Baranowski, L. B. (2026). University Anchor Initiatives and Gentrification Vulnerability: Predictors of Neighborhoods Targeted by Place-Based Development Initiatives. AERA Open, 12. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584261459702
Gillers, H. (2025, Sep 02). Private-Equity Strategy of Yale Is Harder to Copy. Wall Street Journal https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/private-equity-strategy-yale-is-harder-copy/docview/3245524181/se-2
Hodges, R. A., & Dubb, S. (2012). The road half traveled: University engagement at a crossroads. Michigan State University Press.
Jones, R. (2009). Categories, borders and boundaries. Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 174-189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508089828
Jones, R. (2012). Border walls: Security and the war on terror in the United States, India, and Israel. Zed Books.
Sack, R. D. (1986). Human territoriality: its theory and history (R. D. Sack, Ed.; Vol. 7). Cambridge University Press.
Broadening the Approach to Assessing Educational Change: Lead the Change Interview with Dr. Jose Eos Trinidad
In September’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. Jose Eos Trinidad argues that understanding educational change requires a broader understanding of how learning, development, and transformation occur across broader spaces. Dr. Trinidad is an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkely, where he researches the interaction between schools and “outside” research, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Jose Eos Trinidad (JET): In undergrad, I remember learning about the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who wrote Memory, History, Forgetting. One of the most profound lessons I learned from his book is the importance of narrative to our remembering and the equal importance of forgetting—of a happy forgetting in the same way that we talk about a happy memory.
I think of Paul Ricoeur now as we consider what to remember, what to forget, and what to unforget in order to construct new vision for educational research. So let me try to answer the question in this way of thinking.
First, what should we remember? I think one of the things we should remember is that education has always been a state of tension. It has involved a history of expansion and exclusion, a history of moving forward and moving back, a history of individuals fighting for causes and the resistance that emerges from such fights. In my own work, I talk about the many forces outside schools that influence education: researchers, philanthropic managers, social justice warriors, teachers’ unions, nonprofit staff, and community-based organizations. I think it is key that we remember how forces both within and outside schools work alongside one another (and at times, in tension with one another) to construct this vision.
Second, any act of remembering entails forgetting. There is this moment in the movie Inside Out when jelly bean-shaped workers decide which memories are no longer relevant, like old phone numbers, and they get thrown into the abyss of oblivion. Remember the fate of Bing Bong? In a way, we need to forget in order to have space for new memories. What, then, do we need to forget? One of the things I have found striking in academia is that we can get hung up on small differences, and we can be very critical of each other’s views—even ones that are almost identical to our own. This can bubble up resentment and antipathy toward one another. Perhaps this is a space where forgetting can happen: that we look forward toward a future where people work alongside one another rather than in conflict with one another. I’m not saying that we must sweep differences under the rug. Rather, we must think about how to productively and constructively be in tension with one another.
“I’m not saying that we must sweep differences under the rug. Rather, we must think about how to productively and constructively be in tension with one another.”
Third, what must we not forget? I think we should never forget the struggles of those at the peripheries and the hope that things can get better. As news of wars and disasters, as well as existential questions, pepper our daily existence, I think we should not forget the experiences of students and families in the thick of these situations. Growing up in the Philippines, I remember that floods, typhoons, and electric blackouts were common occurrences for me—disrupting not just education but also life itself. Elsewhere in the country, I know of friends whose schooling was routinely disrupted by violence and war— whether because of the “drug war” of the former administration or the conflicts in the southern and rural parts of the country. In the world today, these experiences are all too common. Yet I also think that, especially during these times, we should hold steadfast to the hope that things can get better, with us working collectively with one another.
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
JET: My research has typically focused on actors and forces outside schools that affect what happens within schools. These research, philanthropic, nonprofit, and community-based organizations can have profound consequences not just for student outcomes but also for educational change. In many developed countries, research-practice partnerships and school reform organizations can provide added support to schools. In many developing countries, nongovernmental organizations can also be a source of much-needed resources and talent. But these organizations can also carry risks, as they may push their own agendas without consulting or even thinking about students, families, and their communities.
My work, particularly my new book Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education (Oxford University Press, 2025), aims to expand the aperture through which we think about our educational systems. It aims to show what strategies various actors use to influence education, which ones are most consequential, what organizational dynamics underlie particular decisions, and which populations benefit or suffer from these decisions. I think education leaders can take on some of these lessons by understanding the ecosystem of forces that influence what happens in schools.
Another area where I’ve been working is the use of organizational theories to understand schools and support school leaders. In my next book with MIT Press titled Thinking Organizationally: Seven Perspectives on How Organizations Work, I detail seven organizational perspectives that can help frame how we think about schools in particular, and organizations in general. I suggest the acronym SCRIPTS to help organize these perspectives: Structure, Culture, Relations, Institutions, Professions, Transformation, and Social Conflict. By providing practitioners and scholars with an easy mnemonic to remember all these perspectives, I hope they can figure out which aspects to focus on or change. For example, school leaders can interrogate whether their main problem is one dealing with the organization’s structures or routines, or one concerning its culture and identity. By understanding the symptoms and accurately diagnosing the problem, the solutions can become clearer.
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
JET: I see the field of educational change moving toward a more expansive definition of “education.” I do not think we should limit our understanding of change to what happens inside PreK–12 systems or higher education institutions alone. Education is happening in many different spaces: in families, community organizations, social movements, nonprofit organizations, digital environments, religious institutions, workplaces, and civic networks. If we want to understand educational change seriously, then we need to document and theorize how learning, development, and transformation occur across these broader spaces. Change does not begin and end with schools, even if schools remain central institutions in people’s lives.
Relatedly, I hope we continue to decenter the most dominant sites and voices in the production of knowledge about educational change. Some of the most important lessons about adaptation, resilience, and transformation are emerging from communities that are too often treated as peripheral to the field: underrepresented minorities, developing countries, indigenous communities, migrants, and families living through conflict, displacement, or environmental instability. These communities are not simply sites of suffering or implementation; they are also sites of knowledge, invention, and strategy. We should learn from how these communities navigate uncertainty, sustain hope, and create meaningful forms of education under difficult conditions. In many ways, they may have much more to teach us about change than the systems we usually place at the center of our theories.
Where do I find hope? I find hope in the fact that, despite all the setbacks and crises that surround education, people continue to organize, imagine, and build. I find hope in teachers who continue to care deeply for students amid enormous constraints, in families and communities who create supports where formal systems fall short, and in young people who insist on more just and humane futures. I also find hope in the possibility that the field itself can become more historically grounded, more globally attentive, and more open to voices that it has too often overlooked. If we can broaden our understanding of where educational change happens, who drives it, and what counts as knowledge about it, then I think the field has much to contribute—not only to improving schools, but to imagining better futures more broadly.
Confronting Structural Inequities in Educational Reform: Lead the Change Interview with Dr. Soobin Choi
In February’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, co-editor Dr. Soobin Choi argues that meaningful educational change requires confronting the structural inequities, while continually recommitting to inclusive, participatory reform. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuringfor education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Dr. Soobin Choi (SC): To heed the call of unforgetting histories, we must begin with a seemingly cynical truth: if the same question had been posed thirty years ago—or if it is posed thirty years from now—the “imagined futures” offered by scholars would likely be hard to distinguish. Educational reform is rarely about inventing entirely new futures. The purposes of public education remain stable; the grammar of schooling reasserts itself; and reform rhetoric cycles far faster than our classrooms ever change (Payne, 2008; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Across decades, our bright futures rhyme: broaden opportunity, improve learning, and prepare young people for civic and economic life. That was true then, is true now, and will be true later.
Many of our thorniest issues persist not because we lack the technical expertise to solve them, but because we quietly, yet deliberately, choose not to decide on them. In this light, “unforgetting histories” is a process of cyclical tinkering with not only what we decide to do, but also what we decide to leave undecided. We frequently opt for a nondecision, limiting the scope of our inquiry to “safe” or “bipartisan” issues, effectively keeping controversial structural challenges off the research and policy agenda (Fowler, 2012). Both unforgetting and forgetting are elaborately intentional; today’s “unforgetting” often collides with yesterday’s institutionalized forgetting.
The school is a particularly apt site for this intentional forgetting. We treat persistent “base” problems as fixed, natural laws rather than political choices. Through a Marxist lens, the Base represents the economic organization of society—productive forces and relations of production—while the Superstructure includes the law, politics, and, crucially, schooling (Althusser, 1971). Historically, reforms repeatedly ask the school (the superstructure) to fix problems rooted deeply in the base—inequality in wealth, housing, and health—while our governance routines keep the hardest structural issues off the actionable agenda (Labaree, 2012).
Our system becomes increasingly bifurcated, characterized by extreme wealth concentration and precarious labor (OECD, 2024). The system makes a persistent nondecision to leave funding structures, property-tax-based inequities, and competitive sorting mechanisms untouched. This recurring forgetting—the refusal to acknowledge how structural realities bound what schools can achieve—is a form of institutional amnesia in which we should refuse to participate (Pollitt, 2010). The result is a cycle where we task the school with the impossible job of “fixing” a society whose base we refuse to reform.
While this may sound unsparingly candid about the past we have made and the present we inhabit, I am more than willing to embrace this cyclical tinkering as a pleasant journey. To truly “unforget” history is to recognize that a bright future in education is not a static destination, but a perpetual challenge and response cycle (Toynbee, 1987). Borrowing from Arnold Toynbee, we must understand that civilization—and by extension, futuring for education and education research—“is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour (Toynbee, 1948, p. 55).” Our collective, consistent effort to tinker is the very essence of this voyage. The sameness of our aspirations across generations is not a sign of failure; it is our most profound way of unforgetting. It is the continuous re-commitment to a bright future that may never be reached in its totality, but is nonetheless worthy of walking toward.
This is where we must transition from the tragic endurance of Sisyphus to the affirmative creative will of the Übermensch. Nietzsche’s Übermensch does not merely endure the “eternal recurrence” of the struggle; they will it (Nietzsche, 1974). We find value not in the arrival at a harbor, but in the power of the voyage itself. As a researcher, educator, and citizen, I plan to heed the AERA call by adopting this posture of active affirmation. I choose to view the repetitive nature of our work not as redundant labor, but as a sacred act of “unforgetting.” My work aims to re-affirm human dignity and possibility against a mechanical system. We tinker not because we are naive enough to believe in a final utopia, but because the act of tinkering is itself a refusal to let the spirit of education decay into static inertia. We walk toward the bright future not because we expect to arrive, but because the walk itself is the only way to remain truly awake to our history and our potential.
“We tinker not because we are naive enough to believe in a final utopia, but because the act of tinkering is itself a refusal to let the spirit of education decay into static inertia.”
LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
SC: To build a better educational system for all students, we must, above all, establish systems and provide leadership and policy support that empower every student and their family to participate in the school improvement process. Listening to their diverse opinions and experiences and reflecting them in school reform and change is indispensable for creating a school that truly serves everyone (Choi, 2023). As with all human relationships, if we do not listen, we cannot know what is desired or what is lacking; solutions proposed without listening are inevitably prone to prejudice and misunderstanding. Furthermore, when students and families feel that no one is interested in their perspectives, or when they lack a channel to express them, they cannot help but feel alienated and marginalized. It is when someone genuinely listens to our stories that we feel respected and recognized as true members of community.
Although communication with the school through teachers, principals, or counselors is crucial for student development, this access is unfortunately closer to a privilege for certain groups rather than a universal benefit enjoyed by all. In many countries—not just the United States—student diversity is rapidly increasing, yet the teaching workforce remains highly homogeneous, largely mirroring the dominant groups in society. While approaching a teacher to strike up a conversation or share a concern is easy for some students, it is a source of endless hesitation for others. Similarly, asking about a child’s school life comes naturally to some parents, but for others, it is virtually impossible—whether due to the social and psychological distance from educators or simply a lack of time owing to the relentless demands of making a living.
To truly listen and guarantee the opportunity to speak, we must narrow the gap between schools, students, and homes. Most of my research contributes to bridging this distance between educators and the students they serve. Through professional development, teachers can come to recognize that students’ racial/ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity are tremendous assets for learning and development (Choi & Lee, 2020; Choi & Mao, 2021). By integrating this diversity into the classroom, educators can ensure that individual students feel valued, expand their own worlds through their differences, and gain opportunities to understand those unlike themselves (Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995). To foster this growth of teachers, principals can exercise leadership that actively supports the classroom environment and creates collaborative spaces for teachers (Choi, 2023; Choi et al., in press). Furthermore, students themselves can become agents of change in building a culturally inclusive school climate, ensuring that marginalized groups feel a genuine sense of belonging (Choi et al., 2025b). Just as it is vital for schools to embrace diverse opinions and values, my research contributes to ensuring that diverse voices, perspectives, and learning opportunities are included in how we evaluate schools and their leadership (Choi, 2025; Choi et al., 2025a; Choi & Bowers, 2026; Lee et al., 2025).
LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
SC: To understand where the field of Educational Change is heading, we must confront the resistance it currently faces. Unfortunately, we live in a world where acknowledging and promoting the value of diversity is not always embraced, and is sometimes even actively threatened. The field is heading toward a necessary, defining confrontation with a skeptical question: Is carefully listening to individuals truly tantamount to turning our backs on the majority?
This is precisely where I find my greatest hope for the future. Contrary to the logic of exclusion, the evidence shows us a brighter reality. My research demonstrates that when educators actively leverage the value of individual students’ diversity, the learning climate of the entire school actually improves (Choi & Lee, 2020). I find hope in the empirical truth that equity is not a zero-sum game, but a rising tide. As William Blake (1863) wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower”—I would argue that our hope for the future lies right here. The very first step toward creating a school for all students is acknowledging the profound value of each and every difference.
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