Activating student voice through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR): policy-making that strengthens urban education reform

Abstract

CC Vision – an urban education reform effort launched to strengthen the cradle-to-career education pipeline in Central City – provides the impetus for our use of youth participatory action research (YPAR) to gather and activate student voice in the fight for education justice. Student voice can significantly enhance the quality of policy designed to expand access to education opportunity for poor and/or youth of color attending urban schools. Fifteen youth from seven different high schools in the Central City metropolitan area spent 18 weeks participating in the Central City Youth Co-Researcher Project as co-researchers. We aim to demonstrate the tensions of facilitating YPAR projects with diverse youth, and the benefits of YPAR as a student voice initiative intended to bolster justice-oriented education research. The influence of their scholarship vis-à-vis YPAR on wide-scale education policy-making, and education reform, in Central City is discussed.