Amplifying Voice, Facilitating Agency: Engaging Youth Participatory Action Research in an Urban Public High school (original) (raw)
Related papers
Participatory action research, youth voices, and civic engagement
Language Arts, 2015
In this article, we describe a youth leadership program we designed with a nonprofit organization aimed at revitalizing low-income neighborhoods. The partnership that we describe stresses the value of understanding youth perspectives on a dearth of affordable housing in their neighborhoods, the threat of the loss of vital goods and services through increased tax cuts, and the need to provide safe spaces for kids to be kids. By including kids as researchers, we have faith that they will become leaders in and beyond their neighborhoods and work to protect the interests of all who live in these communities. We argue that programs like the one we discuss provide a logical starting place for reinvesting time and energy in opportunities for relationship building with children. Understanding youth’s perspectives on what it means to flourish is especially important at a time when neighborhood schools are disappearing and policies have eroded public spaces where youth can build relationships and a sustaining sense of community. Without schools as anchors in neighborhoods, it is more essential than ever to understand how to create and maintain vibrant communities that support youths’ sense of identity, agency, and development.
Youth Civic Action Across the United States: Projects, Priorities, and Approaches
Youth & Society, 2019
Youth civic engagement is relatively low in the United States. However, when students are involved in an action civics class (like Generation Citizen), they enthusiastically take action on a wide variety of topics. To systematically assess what issues youth are interested in, we analyzed administrative data from 1,651 action projects conducted by students in Generation Citizen classes across the United States from fall 2012 through fall 2017. We found that the most common issues of interest were related to safety and violence or schooling. Over one quarter of projects tackled issues of trauma, and a similar proportion tackled issues of equity. This exploratory study helps reveal what urban youth in Generation Citizen classes around the county view as of civic interest and important to them. We encourage future researchers and practitioners to further document youth voice regarding civic action as we seek to understand and lift up young people's unique insights.
Critical Youth Participatory Action Research
2017
We are living in a “moment”, so to speak. As young adults, the aggressive nature of gendered, racialized, and capitalist violence and dispossession appears in our everyday interactions, and manifests in our generation’s increased disenfranchisement from political leadership, state, and institutional infrastructure. The general sentiment is that our social world may worsen in relation to our struggle against this violence and dispossession before it “gets better”.
Tapping Teen Power: (Re)Positioning Students for Civic Action
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2021
Conducting Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is more than a methodology; it is an epistemology—a way of positioning adolescents as agents for critical civic praxis. Educators attempting to use YPAR in traditional spaces often must navigate tensions between this type of critical pedagogy and systems that limit the definition of citizenship to civic engagement and position adolescents as passive consumers. The author examines how engaging adolescents in an action research project is subsequently reflected in their civic praxis. The author conducted a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2015) to observe patterns of agency, civic praxis, and social discourse among ten high school freshmen from a rural school district in the Midwestern United States. This article describes the second phase of the qualitative study in which the adolescents completed a youth participatory action research project exploring the problem of bullying at their high school.
Youth Voice, Civic Engagement and Failure in Participatory Action Research
The Urban Review, 2017
In this article, we tell the story of a changing urban landscape through the eyes of the youth we work with in an ongoing after-school program and community-based research project rooted in Photovoice methodology. In particular, we focus on the work that, over the 6 years of our time with youth, has ''ended up on the cutting room floor'' (Paris and Winn 2014, p. xix). This attention to the work that has fallen through the cracks is a move to engage the central tenets of Humanizing Research, but it's also a call to think critically with and through the failures that emerge in work with youth. We attend specifically to an ongoing failure in our work as a way to think about the kinds of promises that are often made and broken in participatory action research. In doing so, we tease out the implications of our work with youth and the steps community-based researchers can take to navigate the challenges that can impede the goals of fostering meaningful change.
Prior research highlights the mismatch between adolescents' growing capacities for autonomy and the limited opportunities for influence in U.S. secondary schools. Youth-led participatory research (YPAR), an approach in which young people research and advocate for change on problems of concern to them, could increase students' autonomy in secondary schools. This qualitative study of YPAR examined whether and how the intervention meaningfully affected the interactions and roles of students and adults in two distinctive urban high school settings, identifying concepts for further empirical investigation. Results suggested that YPAR enabled processes of student professionalization that led to novel student-adult "collegial" interactions, expansion of domains of student influence, and diversification of students with opportunities to influence policies and practices across these two schools.
From Youth Activism to Youth-Powered Curriculum
Berkeley Review of Education, 2022
How do youth move in an uprising? Members of YoUthROC, a BIPOC-centered, youth-led research group with young people from both the university and the community, reflect on creating a youthpowered curriculum that processes years of activism and inspires young people to use teaching as a way to create change in their communities. To ensure the relevance of their curriculum to the current needs, strengths, and curiosities of young people, the YoUthROC team wrote and collected autoethnographies, cataloged historical artifacts, analyzed social media, and conducted public focus groups and Instagram spotlight interviews during a year of uprising and unrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Results from this research include the following themes: the centrality of collectivism, internal and collective self-determination, and young people's already-existing commitment to analysis and change. Educators, adult activists, and youth need to see that young people are central to social movements and are already contributing profoundly to anti-racist, antioppression work. This reflection and YoUthROC's ongoing work is for young people eager to engage in activism, teachers looking to create authentic student-centered classrooms, and adult researchers ready to learn from and create with youth researchers.
From voice to agency: guiding principles for participatory action research with youth
New directions for youth development, 2009
This article begins by examining current crises facing historically marginalized youth, which necessitate more critical approaches to youth development and empirical investigations into the challenges that young people face. This requires not only listening to their voices, but actively engaging them in investigations of and interventions into social problems that affect their lives. Researching with youth raises particular dilemmas, however. The authors discuss strategies, within three guiding principles, that they found effective in conducting participatory action research with marginalized youth for the purposes of social and educational transformation.
2015
Tracing the nature of critical engagement and agency among youth in a participatory action research (PAR) collective, the study attends to the manner in which critical engagement and agency developed over time for the youth researchers. The focus of the project was to conduct a survey among ninth grade students concerning their early high school experience, using participatory methods in data collection, analysis, and reporting back. Data collection included participant observation and review of footage of project activities, field notes, and the youth researchers’ auto-ethnographic texts and creative products. Access to the ninth grade students was clearly achieved, and they were informed first among many stakeholders about the results of the survey; however, the classroom setting proved challenging in terms of facilitating critical engagement, compromising youth researchers’ sense of agency. The university setting served as a site conducive to inquiry and agency for the youth.
Opportunities for youth participatory action research to inform school district decisions
Evidence & Policy, 2019
BackgroundYouth participatory action research (YPAR) is an equity-focused approach intended to generate local knowledge and democratise the production of research evidence. Aims/objectivesWe explore the promise and challenges of YPAR to inform education policy decision making. We focus on California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) initiative, which requires districts to engage with diverse stakeholders to make decisions. We provide a case example of California’s Stockton Unified School District. Stockton currently uses the Peer Leaders Uniting Students’s YPAR curriculum to inform their LCAP work. Key conclusionsYPAR offers opportunities for new insights, and can be implemented successfully at scale. While Stockton was doing YPAR before LCFF and LCAP existed, they enabled Stockton to expand its YPAR programming, with the goal of using YPAR evidence to provide useful information for educational decision making, policies, and progra...