More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, many individuals and communities are not yet full participants in the institutions that define social and economic citizenship.   The dynamics preventing full participation are multi-dimensional and embedded in systems.  Building full participation requires operating both deeply within particular contexts (to get at the micro-level and cumulative interactions) and broadly across contexts (to enable the reworking of the environmental conditions and incentives that shape internal practices). Multi-dimensional problems require multi-dimensional solutions.  Targeted programs aimed at advancing full participation of specific populations must be sustained over time and built into core institutional decisions and practices. This requires a sustained multi-level systems change strategy that connects and continues to support the multi-level interventions needed to change culture and day-to-day practice.

In a 2006 paper entitled "The Architecture of Inclusion," Center Director Susan Sturm developed a multi-level systems approach for developing and sustaining efforts to address structural inequality and advance full participation within institutions. It is intended as a framework that is useful to those engaged in the work of understanding and promoting institutional change that advances full participation. The Architecture of Inclusion framework integrates theories that combine the “what” (pragmatic vision), the “how” (mechanisms and strategies) and the “who” (change agents).

Key Elements

Key elements of the Architecture of Inclusion framework include:

• The goal of institutional citizenship as a frame which enables change leaders to advance concrete goals and affirmative visions of inclusive institutions while identifying and reducing the structural barriers to full participation
• A multi-level systems approach to mapping and understanding the dynamics of inequality and potential for positive change
• An identification of action arenas to focus inquiry and action, which are defined by a shared, ongoing project involving a set of “repeat players” who interact over time in relation to a common problem or goals.
• A focus on cultivating transformative leaders—called “organizational catalysts”—located at strategic leverage points to link knowledge, people, and systems in order to advance institutional change
• A strategy for effectively sustaining and “scaling up” innovation through the involvement of boundary-spanning intermediaries-- pivotally located organizations with the capacity to mobilize multilevel sustainable change.

The architectural metaphor places multi-dimensionality at the center of analysis in several important respects. First, architecture projects an image of multiple levels that are linked and interdependent.  The micro level of interaction within a particular group situated within an institution (such as the classroom or the search committee) is affected by the institutional structure (such as the committee formation and leadership selection process), which is in turn affected by social systems and the larger environment.  Architecture entails mapping the components or elements in a system, which explicitly constructs the relationships among those components.  Each level is designed to take account of its location in a larger system, even as it operates as a self-contained space. Remedying the problem of structural inequality requires an approach that operates simultaneously on multiple levels of institutional and social practice.

Second, architecture connotes structure, and thus underscores the centrality of structured experience in understanding and responding to problems of exclusion and marginalization. Institutional structure reflects human involvement in shaping experience.  Structure regularizes human interaction, establishes value hierarchies, steers information flows, frames perception, and channels movement and status within social systems.  It creates the social context influencing how people understand themselves, what they perceive, and what they value. It determines whether the norms we espouse will match the decisions we make. As such, structure profoundly affects patterns of inclusion and exclusion.

Third, architecture suggests explicit attention to institutional and systems design.  An architectural approach is essential for constructing the conditions and practices enabling institutional mindfulness--careful attention to decisions that accumulate to determine whether women and men of all races, identities, and backgrounds will have the opportunity to succeed and advance.  The design process contemplated in "The Architecture of Inclusion" is one of co-creation. It is self-conscious but constructed from multiple locations that, in turn, shape each other's design. There are participatory designers not only of institutions, but also of initiatives, practice communities, networks, and systems.

Finally, the architectural metaphor evokes the idea of space, including third spaces, experimental spaces, and intermediary spaces that are created through active intervention and that open up possibilities to reconfigure relationships, ideas, and information.  Space plays a role in its physical manifestation, such as by providing central and symbolic locations for convening people from different parts of the institution to meet, plan, and collaborate.  It also has symbolic, conceptual, and interactive dimensions, representing the creation of leverage points for gathering information, institutional arrangements for making decisions, and focal points for accountability.  This is figurative flexible space--bringing ideas, decisions, and resources into new configurations.

The Architecture of Inclusion offers an approach to developing and sustaining this architectural focus on structure, interaction, design, and space.  This approach includes a concept to guide its design, roles to construct it and revitalize its critical potential, and institutional intermediaries located at key leverage and pivot points to connect and sustain it.