Youth Participatory Action Research Project Research Articles

Power, Privilege, and Precarity: Attempts to Conduct Ethical Youth Participatory Action Research as Early Career Researchers.

Though community-based participatory research (CBPR) boasts a robust history, challenges to conducting such work ethically and equitably remain. Common difficulties, such as addressing power dynamics and navigating mutuality, are heightened when doing participatory research with young people, specifically youth participatory action research (YPAR). Additional obstacles also emerge when engaging in such research as junior scholars, who lack tenure and occupy more precarious positions within academia. To elucidate these hurdles and illuminate the labor required to traverse them, we draw upon our experiences as early career academics facilitating YPAR projects with young people who have been historically marginalized. Employing an autoethnographic approach, we utilize qualitative data sources including field notes and reflective memos, from which three themes emerged after iterative rounds of reflection and review. Through descriptive vignettes, we unpack how we attended to positionality and power, interrogated shared benefit and mutuality, and engaged with the unique complexities of working with young people-as informed by our specific identities. In examining our experiences and their alignment with prior research, we aim to expand upon existing literature that has explored best practices within CBPR, but with a specific focus on youth-adult partnerships and consideration of the realities of junior scholars. It is our hope that this discussion will support early career researchers who wish to conduct YPAR but are unsure how to do so given their particular positionalities, by making visible the often-invisible work involved.

Youth sociopolitical development: A conceptual framework by racial and gender minoritized youth organizers.

Youth sociopolitical development (SPD) is a powerful protective and promotive factor for marginalized adolescents'social, emotional, physical, and academic well-being. Despite having unique insight and experiential knowledge about SPD processes, youth have been excluded from conceptual framework and model development. As part of a Youth Participatory Action Research project, 11 adolescents (ages 14-19) and one adult ask "How do adolescent community organizers with varying social and political experiences conceptualize youth SPD?"We used a multiple case study design, with a grounded theory analytic approach. The YPAR collective identified four interrelated, experiential domains of youth SPD: thinking, feeling, doing and relating. Within each domain, we identified and defined key constructs and practices. The YPAR collective's qualitative inquiry resulted in more nuance for existing frameworks of critical consciousness and critical action, and the collective pushes the SPD field to better integrate social and emotional aspects of SPD practice. They offer a conceptual framework that is rooted in their experiential, sensory, learned, and social knowledge, from a multiple-marginalized positionality. These insights enrich the fields of SPD research and practice.

Using Youth Participatory Action Research to Support BIPOC, Working Class, and Working Poor Elementary School Students' Conscientización

This talk draws together two decades of research designed to center BIPOC children as they discuss and continue to develop what a productive school culture means to them. All studies are presented to address a framework to better understand the process of change/conscientización as a theoretical guide. I engage two research questions: What are the characteristics of liked school places, and how do they differ from disliked places? and How does the developmental process of conscientización unfold (prospectively)? The first reserch question, based on a long-term collaboration at one elementary school, sets the stage for another long-term youth participatory action research project at another elementary school. The second research question is addressed through a series of studies where children decide how they want to make decisions as a group, how they discern a problem to focus on, and how this affects their relational empowerment in the school. Children’s critical consciousness and actions are highlighted across these studies.

Elevating Student Voices and Addressing Their Needs: Using Youth Participatory Action Research to Improve School Climate During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and shifts to virtual learning drastically altered school environments, often leaving students without a say in the many changes happening in their lives. To understand how diverse adolescents experienced their school’s climate during the COVID-19 pandemic and elevate youth voice in school decisions, we conducted a youth-participatory action research project in collaboration with a Title 1 middle school in California. Fourteen students participated in this YPAR study—mostly students of color. This mixed-methods study utilized both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative sources included meeting transcripts and chat logs, field-notes, and responses to open-ended survey questions, all of which were coded inductively. Quantitative data sources included pre- and post-surveys on students’ feelings of belonging, mattering, empowerment, and perceptions of school climate, which were compared via paired sample t-tests. Students sought to improve one of the few-shared experiences of school during the pandemic, the school lunch, and showed increased feelings of empowerment and mattering over the course of the project. These findings provide insight into students’ experiences of school climate during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as offer implications for both practitioners and researchers on the importance of including youth voice in the issues that impact their lives.

Process and experience of youth researchers within a Health Promoting Schools study in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is an approach to research that engages youth across the research process. The peer researcher method is a technique used in YPAR where youth are trained in research and ethics to interview their peers. The purpose of this study was to: (i) describe the process of engaging youth as peer researchers in a Health Promoting Schools (HPS) and student engagement project and (ii) understand the peer researchers' perspectives of their experience throughout the project. Youth from across Nova Scotia, Canada in grades 7-10 (ages 12-16) were recruited as peer researchers in the Summer, 2022. The project included three stages: (i) peer researcher training, (ii) practicing, recruiting and conducting interviews and (iii) data interpretation workshop. To understand the peer researcher's experience, quantitative data were collected from an evaluation questionnaire. Outputs were produced using descriptive statistics. Qualitative data were collected through a focus group and interviews and analyzed using inductive content analysis. A total of 11 youth were recruited and completed peer researcher training. Most youth provided positive feedback on the training with a satisfaction score of 8.7/10. Qualitative analysis indicated benefits to the peer researchers including opportunities to build interview and social skills and learn about other's perspectives. This study provides a detailed overview of how to use a peer researcher method in a YPAR project to involve youth in research related to HPS and student engagement. The research also highlights the benefits of engaging youth in YPAR. Future research will report on the findings from the peer interviews.

The experience of youth-participatory action research in a social innovation lab: A methodological and organizational approach

Based on the theory and quality criteria of Youth-Participatory Action Research (Y-PAR), youth and adult co-researchers at a social innovation lab in Ontario, Canada, have undertaken various knowledge generation and action activities for the purpose of supporting youth mental health and wellbeing among transitional-age youth (ages 16–25). We describe the methodological and organizational approach employed in this undertaking, including aspects of the social innovation model to support the action components of Y-PAR. We draw on Bradbury-Huang’s (2010) seven choice points for quality in action research to structure this collective reflection. Our experiences illustrate the tensions and opportunities arising from housing a Y-PAR project within a large health services institution. We also note how social innovation lab processes can support the emancipatory aims of participatory research. Implications for using Y-PAR in other areas are included.

Perspectives from diverse stakeholders in a youth community-based participatory research project

IntroductionTEEN HEED (Help Educate to Eliminate Diabetes) is a community-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) study in which prediabetic adolescents from a predominantly low-income, non-white neighborhood in New York City participated in a peer-led diabetes prevention intervention. The aim of the current analysis is to evaluate the TEEN HEED program through examination of multiple stakeholder perspectives to identify strengths and areas for improvement that may inform other YPAR projects. MethodsWe conducted 44 individual in-depth interviews with representatives from six stakeholder groups (study participants, peer leaders, study interns and coordinators, and younger and older community action board members). Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis to identify overarching themes. ResultsDominant themes identified were: 1) YPAR principles and engagement, 2) Youth engagement through peer education, 3) Challenges and motivations for research participation, 4) Study improvements and sustainability, and 5) Professional and personal impacts of the study. ConclusionsEmergent themes from this study provided insights on the value of youth participation in research and informed recommendations for future YPAR studies.

"Roses have thorns for a reason": The promises and perils of critical youth participatory research with system-impacted girls of Color.

Scholarship on girlhood-especially for girls of Color-is often relegated to studying risk and emphasizing individual deficits over humanizing girls and centering their voices. This approach to generating scholarship renders oppressive systems and processes invisible from inquiry and unaddressed by practice, with particularly insidious consequences for youth in the legal system. Critical youth participatory action research (YPAR) is acknowledged as an antidote to these conceptualizations because it resists deficit-oriented narratives circling systems-impacted youth by inviting them to the knowledge-generating table. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of the promises and perils that emerged as we conducted a year-long critical YPAR project alongside five system-impacted girls of Color. Our thematic analysis of process notes (30 meetings, 120 h) documents the stories posited by girls, in a democratized space, about the injustices of interconnected institutions, and unearths a complicated tension for both youth and adult coresearchers around the promises and perils of engaging in YPAR within the academy. These findings underscore the importance of using intersectional, collaborative research to challenge perceptions around how we legitimize knowledge. We describe lessons learned in conducting YPAR in academic settings and highlight recommendations to grow youth-adult partnerships within oppressive systems to share power.

Youth participatory action research: schooling, learning, and entangled lines of flight

ABSTRACT This article focuses on an out-of-school youth participatory action research project to better understand both how schooling emerged and was challenged in a liberatory space. This project explores the entanglement of schooling, learning, and youth in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) setting. There were six youth and one academic researcher involved in the project which spanned two years, 2018–2020. This work was driven by the research questions: if schooling is a non-human agent, how does schooling manifest in an afterschool YPAR space, and how, if at all, was schooling interrupted/challenged? This project utilized ethnographic methods, interviews, cognitive maps, and posthumanist theorizing to explore the entanglements of human, nonhuman, and discursive agents. Findings illustrated that within the afterschool space, the participants were constantly in tension of holding to and pushing against those agents buttressing schooling – hierarchical relationships, adultism, prescriptive entanglements, and internally disciplining and surveilling themselves. When it came to the learning lines of flight that emerged within the YPAR space, participants created community by making and holding space for one another. The group rejected linearity and embraced the unpredictability of learning. By centering democratic collaboration, youth knowledge/experiences, and learning, the collective demonstrated how YPAR can be a tool of resistance to the dominating forces of agential schooling.

The Purple Room: A YPAR-Designed Healing Space Grounded in Community-Engaged School Leadership

This article explores how a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) team and adult co-conspirators in varied school leadership positions became partners, an unusual pairing as urban schools do not often prioritize young people as leaders. The school leveraged the district's community-engaged mission and their collective power to increase youth organizing and mental health in an urban-based community school. Drawing from community engagement and social justice, the authors use the concepts of sharing power and engaging healing to better understand the development of this YPAR project, a youth-designed healing space called "The Purple Room." Findings show that multiple levels of school leadership can set the conditions with youth researchers to build trust and to support the justice-oriented work that students know is needed.

Nepantleras-in-training: Using testimonios to unravel the tensions and transformative moments of YPAR.

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) classrooms can work to shift the dialog and structure of schools to better fit the needs of students and disrupt dominant narratives that have marginalized students of Color. As scholars have shown, this work is not devoid of tensions. This paper examines the tensions that arose during the first 2 years of a high school PAR class. Written from the perspective of the 23 students in Soy Yo, the students use testimonios to narrate their collective experience as they analyze three tensions that could have ended Soy Yo and their YPAR project before it began. As a decolonial method, testimonios allow students to reclaim their stories by shedding light on their struggles, tensions, and transformative moments that adult collaborators might overlook. These testimonios illustrate the potential for YPAR classrooms to becoming a third space that allows for campus change and personal transformation. The paper concludes with lessons learned for future scholars and educators to explore.

An emerging youth-centered model of community resilience in communities impacted by gun violence: Power through Black Community and Unity.

Studies commonly examine resilience as an outcome by way of measuring the degree to which protective factors maintain individuals' well-being despite the presence of significant risk. In this study, we developed a model of community resilience that centered the voices of Black youth. Using data collected as part of a 3-year, youth participatory action research project, we developed a model that focuses on what 11 Black youth perceive and believe contributes to community resilience through their investigation of problems and solutions related to community gun violence. Findings from a constructivist grounded theory analysis of multiple data sources (e.g., field notes, transcribed group discussions, youth photovoice activities) revealed our developing model of community resilience: Power through Black Community and Unity. Specifically, Power through Black Community and Unity was a core category that reflected the importance of care, support, and safety as strengths in the community's current response and resilience to gun violence, and future aspects the community could develop to increase community resilience to gun violence. This core category emerged in three subsequent ways: Collective Care, "Seeing Beyond the Bad," and Supportive Teen Spaces. This study illustrates potential pathways that youth service agencies and community practitioners can consider enhancing in their programming to promote resilience in their communities.

Making the Implicit Explicit: An Illustration of YPAR Implementation and Lessons Learned in Partnership With Young Adults Who Have Experienced Family Member Incarceration

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) involves a youth-adult partnered or youth-led process of inquiry, critical reflection, and action to reduce inequities in areas important to youth with lived experience. YPAR has been linked to multi-level benefits, such as increased school connectedness, enhanced relationships between youth and adults, and policy changes. Most YPAR projects are conducted as electives in schools or afterschool programs, meaning that youth opt in and are likely already interested in social change. Less is known about the YPAR implementation process in more informal community settings with young adults who are not being served by traditional systems (e.g., public schools) and YPAR with specific populations, such as youth who have experienced family member incarceration. To fill this gap, we provided a step-by-step implementation guide of our curriculum, stages of research, and adaptations to YPAR with young adults who experienced family member incarceration, graduated from an alternative school, and worked in the community. We also provided lessons learned from both facilitator and young adult researcher perspectives to aid youth workers, facilitators, and others engaged in community practice with youth in the implementation of YPAR with this unique population and setting.

Photo Collages and Near-Peer Interviewing: Scaffolding Data Collection in Youth Participatory Action Research Projects With Children

In this brief report, we describe photo collages generated by youth researchers as a photo-elicitation technique in youth participatory action research focused on food (in)security. The approach was implemented with 11 high school students over the course of one semester in an agriscience class at a K-12 alternative school. Student researchers used photo collages as data collection scaffolds within near-peer interviews with elementary students to prompt sharing about food experiences and inequality. This report illustrates how youth-led photo collages are a useful approach to engaging youth as co-creators of knowledge by scaffolding research capacity for high school students and engaging elementary students in research.

Australian Identity Politics Playing Tricks for Young South Sudanese Australians

ABSTRACT This article explores the key themes of African diaspora life for young people in Australia and their interplay with identity politics, primarily focusing on young South Sudanese Australians. This is captured through their participation in youth participatory action research (YPAR) facilitated by a small non-profit, Footprints. The notion of ‘identity politics playing tricks’ was derived from observing Footprints YPAR projects as South Sudanese Australian (SSA) Hip Hop artists discern their diaspora identities in the backdrop of a nation that often displays a political agenda about their presence. Alternatively, young people re-frame and assert their identity formation through their Blackness and pride in culture and establish themselves as social agents in the world. Utilising ‘critical race theories’ through the lens of ‘urban youth culture’, this article demonstrates how participants examine their multifaceted experiences whilst navigating cultural codes; how they negotiate and articulate their own identities in challenging circumstances and seeks to understand communities’ views on diaspora, social, national and cultural identities’ in a diverse environment. It addressed the themes of the politics of ‘reclaiming identity’. Findings point to the necessity to further explore racialisation discourses in localised contexts whilst prioritising the self-articulation of identities reviewing how young people enact agency and resilience.

Reimagining Internal Transformational Resistance in High School Ethnic Studies

This article focuses on the ways the authors incorporate a transformational resistance framework in their ninth-grade ethnic studies curriculum. While literature on transformational resistance often highlights external forms of resistance, there is a need to examine the internal transformation youth experience when engaging in resistance. The authors utilize different theoretical tools that emerge from Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit) and Chicana feminist theories to analyze student responses. They also use testimonio and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) pedagogy and methodology to measure the impact their curriculum has on students’ internal resistance. As part of the authors’ curriculum, the academic year culminates with a testimonio (narrative) published book and a YPAR project. By looking at students’ engagement with these two projects, the authors capture the journey towards critical awareness internally by identifying aspects of conocimiento that lead their students to transformational resistance.

Rupture, not injury: reframing repair for Black and Indigenous youth experiencing school pushout

In this article, the authors describe their multi-year youth participatory action research project, Making Sense of Movements (MSOM), with Black and Indigenous high school students in Toronto. Youth co-researchers in MSOM designed a study on school pushout that reveals the pervasiveness of racism in schools and the inadequacy of responses to racist incidents by school personnel. School staff and teachers often treat racist incidents as isolated events that can be easily resolved. However, the authors situate Black and Indigenous students’ experiences of racism in their high schools within the ongoing legacies of settlement and slavery. Learning from Black and Indigenous feminist theories of rupture and refusal – see Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997); Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (2014); and Tuck and Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ (2012) – the authors invite readers to reframe the assumed ease and completeness of repair. They theorize racism and antiblackness as a rupture rather than an injury, which has important implications for school policy and how schools address racism. By moving beyond reparative frameworks, the authors engage rupture as a more meaningful starting place.

Collaborative data analysis: examining youths’ literacy practices in YPAR

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how youth from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds came together to collaboratively analyze data they collected across two research projects in a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative, a less understood aspect of YPAR. Specifically, this study discusses how youth enacted collaborative data analysis to foreground lived experience and experiential knowledge while enacting critical literacy practices and building toward an open and reflective form of relationality.Design/methodology/approachThe examination of youths’ data analysis practices is situated in a larger qualitative research study of the Central City Youth Participatory Action Research initiative, a six-month, community-based, out-of-school program. This study discusses the relational and humanizing practices of youth through collaborative data analysis practices.FindingsThis study focuses on two small-group research teams, examining how youth enacted critical literacy practices and humanizing modes of learning through relational practices as data analysis. This study discusses two themes in the findings: making sense of data through personal experience and negotiating researcher roles as stancetaking in collaborative data analysisOriginality/valueIn analyzing students’ collaborative data analysis practices across the small-group YPAR projects they enacted, this study contributes new understandings about how youth analyzed data to examine aspects of educational equity important to them.

Race, Repair, and Youth Participatory Action Research in one Rural School

This qualitative study examines the progress of a rural New Jersey school in addressing longstanding racial conflict after implementing a Youth Participatory Action Research project two years prior. Here we take up the thread as students continued to develop activities meant to increase awareness of ongoing issues, and as adults used professional development time to model best practices in managing racialized interactions. Eight teachers and staff not originally involved and nine students who had been directly involved were interviewed and a student focus group conducted. All participants agreed that progress had been made though issues around curriculum and discipline remained. Both the adults and the students engaged in considerable self-reflection about their roles. Adults reported the impact of hearing the students’ voices on school practices, and students discussed how their roles as researchers and peer leaders had contributed to their standing as experts.

Rethinking Equity and Justice in Rural Organizations: Implications for Policy and Practice

This qualitative study examines the progress of a rural New Jersey school in addressing longstanding racial conflict after implementing a Youth Participatory Action Research project two years prior. Here we take up the thread as students continued to develop activities meant to increase awareness of ongoing issues, and as adults used professional development time to model best practices in managing racialized interactions. Eight teachers and staff not originally involved and nine students who had been directly involved were interviewed and a student focus group conducted. All participants agreed that progress had been made though issues around curriculum and discipline remained. Both the adults and the students engaged in considerable self-reflection about their roles. Adults reported the impact of hearing the students’ voices on school practices, and students discussed how their roles as researchers and peer leaders had contributed to their standing as experts.