Articulating an Equity Praxis: A Content Analysis of the Language of Access in Developmental Education Scholarship

Educational reformers' claims of developmental education as facilitating or preventing postsecondary access illustrate the need for developmental educators to clearly articulate our own understandings of access beyond implicit assumptions within the field of access as somehow related to our broader goals of educational equity and student success. This article presents a content analysis examining developmental education scholarly articles containing 2,130 mentionings of access throughout a corpus of 476 articles in six developmental education journals. Our analysis illuminates how authors do not operationally define access or articulate a clear path for increasing student access, as well as arguing the need for reformers to engage additional stakeholders in student access discussions. We call upon developmental educators and reformers alike to draw upon our knowledge of developmental education as a comprehensive system of services to promote student success and graduation specifically for marginalized populations.