Where facilitation and equity meet

My professional and scholarly work converges on a single question: who gets to belong, and who decides? In my doctoral research on equity-minded recruitment of Latinx students into Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) programs, I studied how institutional websites either invite students into a sense of belonging or quietly communicate that they do not. The same question, whose knowledge counts, whose presence is centered, whose voice shapes what gets built, runs through my facilitation practice, and nowhere more visibly than in my experience facilitating a virtual DACUM process for the development of a new BAS degree program.

DACUM, Developing a Curriculum, is a structured method for building occupational curricula directly from the expertise of practitioners in the field. Done well, it is one of the most democratic tools in applied higher education: industry professionals, not curriculum theorists, define what the program needs to be. Done without care, it reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to disrupt, amplifying the most credentialed and vocal voices while the tacit knowledge of frontline practitioners goes unrecorded and unvalidated.

Facilitating that process, virtually, across multiple stakeholder groups, toward actionable outcomes that would shape a degree program for students much like those I studied in my dissertation, required everything I know about participation design, power-aware facilitation, and what I have come to think of as the architecture of belonging.

Three overlapping processes: sense-making, meaning-making, and the reduction of othering

These are related but distinct processes, and collapsing them does a disservice to both. In a DACUM context, they unfold simultaneously and at different registers. Participants are sense-making about the process itself, what is expected of them, what their cards will become, what the facilitator is doing when she pauses the group, while also meaning-making about the competencies being surfaced. When a practitioner says that a particular skill "isn't really BAS-level," and a community college instructor pushes back, the clash is not primarily about facts. It is about frames: about what applied baccalaureate education is for, who it serves, and what legitimacy looks like in applied contexts. That is meaning-making work. It cannot be rushed.

Underneath both processes runs the third dynamic: othering. In my dissertation research, I found that Latinx students could perceive othering on a college website not through any single element but through an accumulated reading of whose presence was centered and whose was an afterthought. A student in that study captured it precisely, saying that the website "doesn't feel very diverse just by looking at the homepage and the images, it feels weird to say this about a website, but as a Latino, it comes up as a little insincere." The mechanism is the same in a DACUM room. When one sector's norms get treated as "the" standard, when large corporate practice defines what counts as applied leadership, or when academic framing implicitly devalues hands-on knowledge, the room is already producing othering, regardless of the facilitator's intentions.

This finding from my dissertation shaped how I thought about facilitation design. Belonging is not a feeling you can generate through a warm welcome. It is a structural condition, something built into who is in the room, in what role, with what kind of authority to shape outcomes, and whether the process itself treats their knowledge as constitutive rather than merely consultative.

Participation design as equity work

The first facilitation decision, who is invited, in what role, and with what authority, is also the most consequential equity decision. A DACUM panel populated exclusively by senior managers from large employers will produce a curriculum that reflects those employers' assumptions about what the field is, what competence looks like at the baccalaureate level, and whose experience of the work is generalizable. This is not a neutral outcome. It is a reproduction of existing power.

Drawing on Yosso's (2005) community cultural wealth framework, which I applied in my dissertation to understand how Latinx students experience institutional belonging, I approached stakeholder architecture as a deliberate act of epistemic inclusion. Yosso's framework asks us to recognize that students of color, and by extension workers from non-dominant communities, arrive carrying forms of capital, aspirational, familial, navigational, resistance, that institutional systems routinely fail to see. The same is true of practitioners in a DACUM panel. A community-based practitioner who has spent a career navigating systems not designed for her brings navigational capital that a corporate manager rarely possesses. A frontline technician's embodied knowledge of what can go wrong on a job site carries a form of expertise that no credentials can substitute for.

Pre-session norming, the work done before the panel convenes, is where these frames get set. Participants arrive with implicit hierarchies about whose knowledge is authoritative. The facilitator's job is to name and complicate those hierarchies before the substantive work begins, not to wait until they surface as conflict.

Holding ambiguity without collapsing it

The virtual context introduced a particular facilitation challenge: participants are simultaneously making sense of the content and making sense of the platform, the format, and each other across screens. Zoom fatigue is not simply a productivity problem. It is an equity problem. When the cognitive load of a platform disproportionately burdens participants who are less digitally fluent, or when camera-off becomes the default for people managing domestic circumstances that others in the meeting do not share, the platform is already doing othering. Designing breakout rooms so that dominant voices from the large group do not automatically carry over, building in asynchronous contribution windows, and treating lag as a structural feature rather than an individual failure are all facilitation moves, they just happen to live at the intersection of technology and equity.

Within the sessions themselves, the work was to hold the space open for genuine dissonance. Weick's sense-making framework is useful here because it names something facilitators often feel pressure to resolve prematurely: ambiguity is not a failure of the process, it is the process. When participants mapped competencies and encountered sharp disagreement about whether a particular task was associate-level execution or BAS-level analysis and judgment, the temptation is to find consensus quickly and move on. But those disagreements are the most generative material in the room. They surface the underlying frames. Slowing them down, asking "what would it look like in a different sector?" or "who else experiences this differently?", is how sense-making becomes meaning-making.

In my dissertation, I found something structurally similar in how Latinx students described navigating financial aid information on CCB websites. Students were not simply confused by the information, they were making sense of what the institution's choices communicated about its priorities. One student said of a financial aid page buried at the bottom: "It's kind of looking like it's a little bit hard to find, and that doesn't make it feel like it's that important." The absence of legible information was itself a meaning-making cue about institutional values. A DACUM facilitator faces the same dynamic: what gets named, what gets recorded, what gets elevated to a "duty area" and what gets set aside as a footnote, these choices communicate what the institution believes about the field and about the students it aims to serve.

Workforce alignment and the limits of "industry-driven"

The outputs of a DACUM process, a validated duty/task matrix, a competency inventory, a draft curriculum map, carry genuine authority because they are grounded in practitioner expertise. That is the method's strength. It is also the source of its most significant risk. "Industry-driven" curriculum can, without careful facilitation, mean "dominant employer-driven", reflecting the priorities of the largest, most vocal, most credentialed voices in the room while the experiences of community-based, non-traditional, and frontline practitioners remain unrecorded.

john a. powell's concept of targeted universalism offers a corrective lens for the systems translation phase. Rather than asking whether the program aligns with workforce needs in the abstract, targeted universalism asks which populations are currently excluded from BAS pathways, and what does alignment need to look like to serve them? This is not a departure from workforce development logic, it is a more rigorous version of it. A BAS designed only for students who already possess the dominant cultural capital to navigate traditional academic pathways is not a workforce development intervention. It is a credential for people who were likely to get credentialed anyway.

My dissertation found that Latinx students who aspired to CCB programs carried enormous aspirational, familial, and resistance capital, the strength to persist, the drive to contribute to their families and communities, the knowledge of what it costs to navigate systems not built for them. What they often lacked was navigational capital: clear, accessible information about how to enter, how to pay, and what the program would actually lead to. One student described this gap plainly: "No one was coming to the fields to tell us about college, so I am grateful for my friend to bring me to this world." The DACUM process that builds a program for these students needs to have those students' realities in the room, not as a diversity consideration, but as a design requirement.

What I carry forward

Facilitating a virtual DACUM for BAS development taught me that curriculum design and equity work are not separate projects. The question of what counts as baccalaureate-level competency, who gets to decide, and whose knowledge shapes the answer, these are equity questions before they are curriculum questions. The facilitation process is where those questions either get worked through deliberately or get avoided in ways that reproduce existing inequities in the guise of neutrality.

The theoretical frameworks I worked with in my dissertation, Yosso's community cultural wealth, the literature on belonging and navigational capital, the structuring role of institutional artifacts like websites, transfer directly to facilitation practice. Both involve designing spaces where people from historically marginalized communities can make sense of what they are being asked to navigate, revise their frames through genuine dialogue with others, and come to feel that their presence and their knowledge are not just tolerated but constitutive. That is the work of reducing othering. It is structural, not gestural. And it begins in the design of participation itself, long before the first breakout room opens.