Participatory action research in schools: unpacking the lived inequities of high stakes testing (original) (raw)
Related papers
Public schools are microcosms of the larger social order, so one need only to spend time in almost any urban public school in the United States to bear witness to the unresolved paradoxes of our time: the promise and possibility in schools as well as the pervasive and persistent inequities. Public education as we know it is at a crossroads. Black and brown communities have endured a legacy of institutional neglect and they will soon become the majority population in certain states across the country. Many young people of color now attend racially segregated schools and inequities in school funding abound (Orfield and Lee 2005). As black and brown youth walk the hallways of public schools in the urban context, much of their experiences are colored by marginalization and inequity (Orfield et al. 2004). From a very young age many students are forced into an education that lacks cultural relevancy and where they must navigate a system of domination under which white, middle-class values set the standards for success. It can be argued that consciously and subconsciously, students are aware of the ways in which the experience of schooling pushes them from a positive sense of cultural and linguistic identity toward an active denial of self. In the age of standardized testing and the ensuing teach
Motivated by the addition of a curriculum standard for active citizenship into New Jersey's social studies standards a group of educators and researchers set out to integrate an action research curriculum, based on a youth participatory action research (YPAR) model, into social studies classrooms. Adapting YPAR, with its promising blend of critical thinking, civic engagement, and democratization, for use as in the classroom is appealing to those seeking to use education as a means of social change. But activism does not always translate neatly to the classroom; melding multiple purposes into one approach, particularly amidst the current push for standardization and accountability measures, is complex. This analysis considers three challenges to navigate when reshaping YPAR into a curriculum for classroom use - preserving authenticity, conflicting aims, and tensions around authority. Drawing upon qualitative data from the social studies classrooms of two public high schools, this article engages directly with the difficulties inherent in adapting a methodology premised on action, authenticity, and youth empowerment to the adult driven, extrinsically oriented, skills and content-focused world of the classroom. Understanding this shift, and the epistemological tensions underlying it, is essential for those wishing to integrate action research with youth into social studies classrooms.
Curriculum Inquiry, 2012
A significant body of research articulates concerns about the current emphasis on high-stakes testing as the primary lever of education reform in the United States. However, relatively little research has focused on how children make sense of the assessment policies in which they are centrally located. In this article, we share analyses of interview data from 33 third graders in an urban elementary school collected as part of a larger qualitative study of children’s experiences in literacy in high-poverty classroom. Our analysis of assessment-focused interviews focused on two research questions related to children’s perspectives on high-stakes testing: What patterns arise in children’s talk about high-stakes testing? What does chil- dren’s talk about high-stakes testing reveal about their perceptions of the role of testing in their school experiences and how they are positioned within the system of accountability they encounter in school? Drawing on tools associated with inductive approaches to learning from qualitative data as well as critical discourse analysis, we discuss three issues that arose in children’s responses: language related to the adults invested in their achievement; their sense of the stakes involved in testing; and links between their feelings about test taking, perceptions of scores, and assumptions of competence. We argue that children’s perspectives on their experiences with high- stakes testing provide crucial insights into how children construct relationships to schooling, relationships that have consequences for their continued engagement in school.
2018
In this article, we write as a collaborative team who employed the framework of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to center the insights and concerns of youth in urban communities and schools. The purpose of this article is to highlight the collaborative process that took place within a school-university-community partnership to support the work of the youth-led YPAR projects. Our collaborative school-university-community partnership acts as a powerful source to resist the oppressive ways in which urban youth are positioned, and the YPAR projects are a mechanism for the youth to give voice to the issues of injustice that are greatly impacting their community. We share several examples of what this looks like and conclude with the challenges and implications of using YPAR work in a collaborative process.
Collaborative inquiry: Youth, social action, and critical qualitative research
Action Research, 2018
Youth participatory action research is part of a revolutionary effort in educational research to take inquiry-based knowledge production out of the sole purview of academic institutions and include those who most directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand. Seeking to extend the robust legacy of participatory action research in schools and communities, in this article, we focus on the pedagogical contributions of youth participatory action research collaborations for the teaching of critical qualitative research. We discuss strategies developed and implemented in an after-school youth participatory action research seminar in order to highlight how collaborative educational spaces can contribute to teaching and engaging in critical qualitative research. We also reflect, in our role as educators and researchers, on the possibilities and limitations of teaching qualitative research critically and reflexively , particularly at the intersection of qualitative action research, critical literacies, and youth social action. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of collaborative inquiry for the teaching of qualitative research in education and beyond.