“This is for us, not them”: Troubling adultism through a pedagogy of solidarity in youth organizing and activism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social studies education research lauds the importance of schools as spaces to practice democratic values while also largely ignoring the agency youth exercise to shape their lives in the present. This article explores how young people organize and enact democratic practices within youth-mediated contexts in schools by examining the pedagogy of solidarity that adults must enact to support youths’ visions of democratic life. This qualitative study examines youth organizers’ response to the murder of a Black man in their community and how adults acted in solidarity or against their civic action. The findings elucidate how youth organizing and action can be re-framed as democratic actions and what it takes for adults to make this epistemic and ontological maneuver. The article concludes with a discussion about implications for social studies research when centering youth agency, as well as an analysis of social education beyond the classroom and adult-centered understandings of democratic education.