Courageous Conversations: Un-silencing as Transformative Resistance through Arts-based YPAR

Abstract

We examine findings from an ongoing, arts-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project that aims to make space for diverse high school students to express their experiences within structures of injustice, as played out through schooling practices. Over the past two years, our collective has gathered and collaboratively analyzed artifacts created at annual, day-long critical arts inquiry retreats and at biweekly research meetings. We examine themes that emerged from youth participants’ creative writing artifacts, which document experiences and harmful effects of silencing practices in schools. Using excerpts of students’ writing, this article offers insights into students’ experiences with these practices as well as their calls for resistance through ‘un-silencing’ practices. We demonstrate how arts-based YPAR pedagogy can contribute to ‘un-silencing’ by creating space for courageous conversations and acts of resistance toward structures of injustice that both concern and constrict today’s students. Ultimately, our goal is to theorize how a critical arts approach informed by culturally relevant pedagogy and a praxis of care can facilitate critical reflection and dialogue, shift the trajectory of students’ experiences, and effect meaningful institutional and social change.