Interview with Ahmmad Brown: How Reviewing Tools for Adult Education Ties to DEI
In conversation with Diane Knoepke
I had the pleasure to interview my colleague, Ahmmad Brown, PhD, about his recent experience as a reviewer for the Future Finder Challenge, a “$1 million U.S. Department of Education challenge to reimagine career navigation for adult learners.” In the edited transcript of our interview below, Ahmmad talks about the challenge, his role and experience with the initiative, and how adult education relates to how he conceives diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work. He also shared connections between the challenge and what we do in partnership with our graduate students in Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy.
Ahmmad, please share a bit about the Future Finder Challenge. What is it?
It’s a new initiative in 2022, from the U.S. Department of Education, to invest in tools of all kinds that support upskilling and capacity building for adults. The challenge puts particular emphasis on adult learning, career navigation, and access and exposure to career opportunities. The challenge’s focus is on supporting people who do not have tertiary education, i.e., they may or may not have a high school diploma or GED and they do not have any formal post-secondary education. The goal is to find tools that advance mutual benefit: adult learners have gainful employment, employers have access to talent, and both groups in turn contribute positively to our economic infrastructure.
In the broadest sense, the challenge participants are entrepreneurs across different stages of design and development. These teams or individuals are putting a design thinking approach to putting tools in the world. They center the needs of prospective users, design to meet those needs, and evaluate their assumptions and success at meeting those needs along the way.
How did you get involved with the challenge?
I served as one of about a dozen reviewers. I was invited to join the reviewer panel through connections in my professional network. The challenge’s interest in me as a reviewer centered on the various ways I approach credentialing and solution design. I have a formal educational background and experience in education, I have a practitioner focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I have exposure to design thinking methods and practice.
How does the focus of the challenge—adult education—relate to how you conceive DEI work?
How we think about DEI work in our graduate and executive education programs in learning and organizational change at Northwestern acknowledges how DEI is unique as an academic and professional discipline. Specifically, it’s unique in how progress requires engagement at intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels. Generally, organizational leaders take a management orientation and tend to go to the interpersonal work, focusing on trainings and compliance. More advanced leaders may invest energy in intrapersonal work – how their identities show up at work. What’s critical, however, is to do that interpersonal and intrapersonal work, in addition to and in concert with the organizational and societal work.
This challenge gets that and focuses on the societal level as the unit of analysis. We have fundamental inequality in terms of access to education, which informs who has access to jobs, which in turn informs who is able to access the material resources they need to provide for themselves and their families. Because organizations and workplaces often treat education as the primary filter for who is able to access employment and material resources, this is a fundamental DEI issue at the organizational and societal levels.
Certainly, we have to have boundaries for who is and who is not able to have access in organizations or the organization doesn’t exist. But along what dimensions are those boundaries built? How are they erected and maintained? How malleable are they? When we ask those questions, education is a big focus for me. We know from empirical research that formal education can be used as an unnecessary barrier to an individual’s access to gainful employment.
If we don’t think about what education means in our recruitment processes, then we’re not going to get to the D in DEI. The challenge supports tools that can help debunk this idea that we have a pipeline problem, as in fact one of the barriers is education as credential. The challenge is kind of radical to the extent that on the back end it aims for workplaces to begin to look at alternative forms of education and experience rather than filtering by whether or not the candidate has a diploma.
What are you taking away from this experience, especially in how you think about access?
It’s a reality that organizations, by definition, have boundaries. So, when we are planning and doing DEI work, what are the dimensions or areas by which our organization is saying you can be a part, or you cannot or should not be a part?
In a hiring process, what do we really need? Do we actually need a certain educational credential as a job requirement? It’s hard work to get clear and honest about what we need. It all filters down to the design of the organization. What is the status quo? If we have required this position to have a master’s degree, why is that? And what inequalities are we reproducing by protecting that status quo?
In our classrooms, we think and talk about these things a lot. These challenges can be overwhelming. A harsh reality of DEI work is that, by definition, you can’t do it all. The work and responsibility as a leader is to be very clear about what you can do and should be doing. From a recruitment perspective, imagine the gains if we stop excluding people who could be very qualified for our work, instead of never seeing them because we’re requiring a college degree when nothing in the job description suggests you need a college degree to do the job well.
How do you reconcile, if you feel you need to, how many degrees you have with this viewpoint that many credentials are unnecessary?
Yes, I appreciate the question. There is so much I can draw from each of my educational experiences that I wouldn’t trade for anything. But we don’t know the counterfactual. During the five years I spent getting a PhD, what did I pass up? This is the path I chose after my parents instilled in me that life is not fair. As a Black man growing up in a low-income household and raised by disabled parents, there was a rugged individual viewpoint that was instilled in me—to achieve through determination and grit. As I’ve gotten older and advanced in my career, I also started thinking practically: if I wanted to teach at a research university, a PhD would help, if not be required. I was laser-focused on my “why” in pursuing educational credentials. If you share that orientation, get as many degrees as you want. But if that is not your orientation, I encourage you to interrogate whether traditional credentials are needed for you to get where you want to be. And more importantly, I encourage organizational leaders to interrogate their assumptions about the credentials they require.
How do these concepts show up in our graduate and executive education programs that explicitly focus on DEI change?
If you’re in these academic spaces, you have a certain amount of privilege. That’s descriptive, not a judgment. We are trying to empower people who have the privilege and access to influence leaders, and/or be leaders themselves, to think through all their assumptions and choices. Students who are, will be, or have proximity to leaders, must prompt both the identity and culture conversations as well as the strategic and design conversations:
- How are we designing our organization?
- Who are we excluding, and why?
- Who are we including, and why?
- How do we think about these hard choices?
- With what we know about history and how inequality has consistently reproduced itself, how do we disrupt that status quo?