‘If You Really Knew Me’ … I am empowered through action

Abstract

In this paper, we argue for the importance of creating a context that allows students to explore their sense of ‘self’ and their embodied identities, specifically within a physical education context. We specifically explore how students’ mediated and embodied identities are ‘translated’, particularly as they engaged in activist research by become co-meaning makers and co-interpreters throughout the research process. The purpose of this study was to engage high school girls in collaborative activist research to explore how they made meaning of their mediated identities, how they translated these identities to their embodied sense of self and how that influenced their schooling experiences. Participants were three ninth grade girls from a coeducational class in a suburban high school located in the Midwest region of the USA. During the first phase of the study, data were collected from focus group interviews, media consumption logs and descriptive field notes from observations. In the second phase, participants created their own activist-based project. The transcriptions and field notes were coded using content analysis and the constant comparative method. Participants shed light on their media consumption and how this consumption influenced their interactions with others and their own embodied identities. Their media consumption led the girls to take action by developing a survey that was based on the television show entitled, If You Really Knew Me, to explore the challenges and issues the student body encountered that influence their mediated and embodied identities. Through this experience, the girls indicated that they felt a sense of empowerment by taking social action. Results offer insight into the girls’ lived experiences in physical education and high school, the girls’ experience and process in developing their projects, the outcomes of this school-wide action research project and how they translated their embodied identities.