While recognition of the value of participatory approaches in educational research continues to widen, there are few resources documenting how to design engagements to position community stakeholders as agents in conceptualizing problems or developing research questions. There has been even less attention to the question of how to support stakeholders in systems thinking with the goal of broad systems change. In this article, we make a case for the use of “panarchy,” a theory from the field of environmental sustainability that explains the structure and dynamics of complex systems (Gunderson & Holling, 2002), as a promising framework to support stakeholders’ cross-sector thinking. To illustrate these ideas, we draw from our work with a stakeholder coalition committed to reducing racial and ethnic disparities in out-of-school suspensions in their community. The framework of panarchy provided a lens for participants to see and consider interdependencies among micro-, meso-, and macrolevel systems, and to trouble and revise their narratives about factors that contribute to disciplinary disparities.
(Publisher abstract provided.)