Youth Participatory Action Research Project Research Articles

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.

“Why Don’t They Just Move Closer?”: Adolescent Critical Consciousness Development in YPAR About Food Security

The aim of this paper is to explore high school students’ critical consciousness development in the context of youth participatory action research (YPAR) focused on food security at an alternative school in Alabama. The YPAR project took place in an elective agriscience class with 10 students (Seven Black, two white, one Latino) who were in the 10th to 12th grades. Utilizing data from researcher notes, classroom observations, and archival classroom documents, we present students’ YPAR project outcomes to share their research-driven solutions to food insecurity in their community. Vignettes of classroom dialogue are also constructed to illustrate moments of reflection in the YPAR context about food security. We present three “critical moments,” or instances of social analysis, to illustrate how students’ individual-level attributions occurred alongside teacher dialogue and student-led investigation of structural inequities in the community. Findings illustrate how students’ nonlinear critical consciousness development consisted of reliance on individual-level attributions in classroom dialogue co-occurring with systems-thinking activities and other YPAR project outcomes. This paper has implications for research on the imperfect and wavering nature of adolescent critical consciousness development in YPAR.

Helping Homeless Youth: Epistemological Implications of Power in a YPAR Project


 
 
 Text from Nasma: 'I’ve started moving my things out of the house. I’m putting it in your office for now.' Thus began the story of how one of the youth I had worked with for four years on various YPAR projects became homeless and turned to me for help. Entering this crisis with Nasma took time and an emotional toll, and it affected the power dynamics of our relationship when finishing our YPAR project. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) works to rebalance power in inequitable relationships based on roles, age, race, gender, etc. Providing care to Nasma as she confronted the traumatic situation of homelessness affected our collaborative relationship as she became dependent on me for basic economic resources. Through this process, the inequities in age and material resources between Nasma and me were centred, displacing the more equitable interactions that we had constructed through YPAR projects. This article employs critical autoethnography to examine the epistemological ‘risks of care’ and argues that the calls for ‘care-full’ scholarship still need to contend with the pitfalls of differential power dynamics in YPAR.
 
 

“Because we have lived it”: Chicanx/Latinx Youth Multimodal Literacies in Youth Participatory Action Research

AbstractThis article highlights how Chicanx/Latinx youth draw on their lived realities as lenses to guide their inquiry and share their findings in a Youth Participatory Action Research project. In this project, youth collected testimonios from residents and staff within their migrant housing community to better understand histories of migration and community building. Drawing on a critical multimodal analysis framework which centers Chicanx/Latinx youth literacies and epistemologies, this article focuses on how youth drew on their community cultural knowledge and lived experiences in multimodal creation to bring attention to sociopolitical issues they cared about and impacted their community.

Disciplinary Literacy in Action: High School Students Doing Research for Change

AbstractThis article describes how disciplinary literacy practices were enacted among youth within the context of Youth Built Change, a science based program incorporating principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). Highlighting two YPAR projects, one conducted in a predominantly Black and Latino/a suburban school and one conducted in a predominantly White rural school, specific examples of the disciplinary literacy practices of Believing, Knowing, Doing, and Communicating are illustrated.

Employing YPAR to Reflect on the Past, Present, and Future Promotes Black Girls to Learn about STEM Fields and Research.

The existent research seeking to explain why Black girls are less likely to participate in specialized pathways towards STEM fields suggests individual and systemic factors are the cause (Buck et al., 2009; Catsambis; 1994; Hanson, 2004; O'Brien, 2015; Perna, 2009). This study of six Black girls' participation in a 12-week Youth Participatory Action Research Project (YPAR) sought to extend this inquiry by prompting Black girls to examine the underlying causes for the low number of Black girls who participate in STEM courses at their school. The study also aimed to examine their knowledge of the growing concern related to the inequitable educational pathways to STEM fields. Qualitative data, including focus groups, field notes, documents, and observations, revealed that the girls knew that technology dominated society, but they were deeply concerned about young people being exposed to danger when using technology. We discovered their views were perpetuated by learned experiences in their households and by the media they consumed. The participants also recognized how their school environment influenced their perception of and ability to navigate their educational pathways. After participating in weekly workshops, the girls developed an interest in STEM activities and wrote an action plan to increase girls' engagement in school and STEM activities. The study findings also reveal how YPAR can promote girls to conduct a critical analysis of educational experiences, transform their perception of STEM education, and engage them in research.

Activating Joy and Hope in Critical Literacies Instruction: Responding Pedagogically to Youth Skepticism in a YPAR Project

In the face of persistent racial injustice, critical literacy approaches to instruction frequently involve investigating and altering unjust racialized power structures through critical action. However, what happens when youth have become understandably skeptical of action for change? This analysis uses healing frameworks to explore the critical literacies of Black and Latinx youth in a youth participatory action research project that took place in the early days of the Trump administration, as well as the pedagogies employed. The salience and persistence of racial injustice in national politics and the local school district operated against youth’s reserves of hope and belief in change work, introducing tension into a project focused on transformation. As a pedagogical response, the project’s two White coteachers facilitated new pathways for critical literacies that involved joy, care, and new audiences. This response focused on joy in critical work and prompted some, though notably not all, youth to reengage with critical action and articulate hope for justice in their local worlds.

How to Be an Antiracist: Youth of Color’s Critical Perspectives on Antiracism in a Youth Participatory Action Research Context

This study is part of a larger Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project engaging youth of color (YOC; aged 16–24 years) in a planning a multilevel health promotion campaign for a large safety net hospital. Analyses focus on youths’ conceptualizations of antiracism, and their recommendations on how to facilitate an intentionally antiracist YPAR. We answer the following questions: (a) How do YOC engaged in a YPAR project conceptualize and define antiracism? and (b) How do youth and adult allies conceptualize an antiracist YPAR project and what strategies do they use and/or recommend to this end? We employed instrumental case study methods and thematic analyses to code project data sources. Findings indicate that youths’ definitions of antiracism include elevating marginalized voices, actively resisting racism, incorporating an intersectional approach, and examining privilege, power, and positionality. YPAR members recommended strategies for creating an antiracist YPAR including prioritizing people of color in YPAR processes, creating space to acknowledge and process positionality and racialized dynamics, and engaging in ongoing education and dialogue. Moreover, both youth members and adult allies recognized that antiracist YPAR projects require time and resources to remain consistently antiracist, and such a goal can only be accomplished through a reiterative and reflexive process.

Reading School: Critical Literacies of the Youth Equity Agents

AbstractIn this article, I focus on the critical literacies of Black and Latinx youth participating in a youth participatory action research project, as well as the pedagogies that engaged those literacies. Critical ethnographic study of the Youth Equity Agents’ literacy practices revealed that they enacted a practice of reading school, wherein they investigated and acted on racial injustices in their local school worlds. Although youth had clearly been investigating injustice as a part of their daily navigations of urban schooling, this practice was engaged and extended in the youth participatory action research project. A pedagogical approach that positioned youth as knowledge producers and centered their social interests facilitated this, as did specific teaching practices such as engaging social theory and exploring the material environments of school. Youth applied this learning to produce digital photo counternarratives with the potential to transform inequity in schooling.

“Maybe You Should Try It This Way Instead”: Youth Activism Amid Managerialist Subterfuge

The authors theorize what we call managerialist subterfuge, drawing on distinct ethnographic studies to examine how adult “partners” leverage the language and strategies of corporate managerialism to undermine youths’ radical visions of change. Critical analysis of patterns in interview and participant observation data across two youth participatory action research projects revealed the ways in which adult interventions functioned to co-opt youths’ activist agendas; following the rationale that youth who are presumed to be in need of adult management are “out of their depth” when it comes to civic matters. The authors assert that managerialist subterfuge functions as a mechanism to further bureaucratize youth activism and absolve state actors of accountability for harm that Black youth and youth of color experience.

We Have Something to Say: Youth Participatory Action Research as a Promising Practice to Address Problems of Practice in Rural Schools

The purpose of this article is to highlight a critical approach for practice, youth participatory action research, that can be used to invite rural youth to collaborate with school administrators, educators, and community leaders to identify and examine challenges, while building upon the strengths of a school and community to address challenges. Our youth participatory action research project was a collaboration between adult researchers and five students from a rural high school to examine and address postsecondary education access challenges. The adult and student researchers developed and implemented two evidence-based products: (a) a conference and (b) a resource corner in the school library. Student co-researchers demonstrated an increased commitment to the project, development of postsecondary education knowledge, and development as leaders during the project. Our project demonstrates evidence of youth participatory action research being an effective approach to address problems of practice in rural education.

Virtual Photovoice: Methodological Lessons and Cautions

Photovoice is a type of participatory inquiry, which is a methodological and onto-epistemological stance that seeks to emancipate marginalized individuals, confront inequity, and work for social transformation. Photovoice incorporates Paulo Freire’s problem-posing education, documentary photography techniques, and feminist thought as an approach for community members to identify shared concerns and construct collective knowledge. It also seeks to challenge unequal power relations by disrupting hegemonic structures in the production of knowledge and policy, as photographs and accompanying descriptions can communicate powerfully about community needs and demands for change. University-based researchers or practitioners facilitate this communication by bringing community perspectives to the attention of government officials and others in positions of power. In this paper, we describe how we adapted this approach for virtual use during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We offer examples of two projects that engaged photovoice in virtual spaces: Courageous Conversations, a youth participatory action research project which Meagan conducts with youth in the United States, and Melissa’s dissertation, conducted with Syrian students who are refugees enrolled in higher education in Turkey. Through these examples we draw out methodological lessons learned as well as challenges of conducting photovoice in virtual spaces. We conclude that whether researchers and practitioners use photovoice as a method in virtual or face-to-face settings, we must remember the emancipatory goals of participatory inquiry, always relying upon and anchoring our methodological decisions in the ontologies and epistemologies of genuine participation that undergird photovoice.

Tapping Teen Power: (Re)Positioning Students for Civic Action

AbstractConducting Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is more than a methodology; it is an epistemology—a way of positioning adolescents as agents for critical civic praxis. Educators attempting to use YPAR in traditional spaces often must navigate tensions between this type of critical pedagogy and systems that limit the definition of citizenship to civic engagement and position adolescents as passive consumers. The author examines how engaging adolescents in an action research project is subsequently reflected in their civic praxis. The author conducted a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2015) to observe patterns of agency, civic praxis, and social discourse among ten high school freshmen from a rural school district in the Midwestern United States. This article describes the second phase of the qualitative study in which the adolescents completed a youth participatory action research project exploring the problem of bullying at their high school.

Unloved, Unwanted, and Unsure: The Counternarratives of Incarcerated Youth

Background Black youth are five times more likely, Latinx twice as likely, and Native American youth three times as likely to be incarcerated as their White peers. One of the dire consequences of the prison-industrial complex is that countless youth of color have been disenfranchised and cast out of society. Purpose The purpose of this study is to document the features of a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project conducted by Leaders Organizing 2 Unite & Decriminalize (LOUD) youth members, which is made up of allies, formerly incarcerated youth, and youth on probation, to provide a model that could be adaptable in similar other contexts. Setting This study takes place in the American Southwest in a state where marijuana is only medically legalized. Participants I worked primarily with five Latina women and three Latino men, one African American man, and one Diné woman. The ages of the LOUD members ranged from 15 to 20 years old and from a high school freshman to a first-year college student. Research Design As a co-facilitator for LOUD, I investigated how this YPAR project provided youth with the opportunity to shape and challenge current juvenile justice policies that detrimentally impacted youth for three years. YPAR endorses a collective process between the researcher and youth, allowing both parties to contribute meaningfully to all areas of research. Data Collection and Analysis Data were analyzed from three sets of semistructured interviews and 40 field notes taken over three years. I used a conventional content analysis approach to analyze both individual interview and weekly meeting transcriptions. Line-by-line coding was conducted through the use of Dedoose qualitative software. Results Through their YPAR investigation of the juvenile justice system, LOUD members were able to identify several key issues that affected system-involved youth such as being dehumanized, the mental, emotional, and spiritual toll, access to their lawyers, and unfair burdens placed on their families. LOUD members found their voice, became empowered to recommend changes in juvenile justice policies, and became social justice advocates for incarcerated youth through this process. Conclusions This project demonstrates how vulnerable marginalized youth became empowered by conducting and analyzing research, developing important recommendations, and being able to share their stories to change the juvenile justice system. We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place. (Alexander, 2010, p. 206)

P146 California Youth Participatory Action Research Projects Illustrates the Need for Nutrition Staff Professional Development

<h3>Background</h3> Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is an innovative approach to engage youth (ages 12-18) in projects that address issues in their community. When implemented as part of a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) program, YPAR aims to empower youth to achieve policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes related to community health and nutrition. SNAP-Ed programming has traditionally focused on direct nutrition education, which may require substantially different professional skills than needed to implement YPAR projects. <h3>Objective</h3> This qualitative research project aimed to assess the impact of professional development and learning to support the shift from traditional nutrition education delivery to an approach that engages youth in creating PSE changes. <h3>Study Design, Setting, Participants</h3> Pre- and post-project interviews were conducted with 6 SNAP-Ed staff members who implemented or attempted to implement YPAR projects in 4 California counties during the 2018-2019 school year. Questions assessed the impact of current technical assistance, professional learning opportunities and needs, and suggestions for improving future support. <h3>Analysis</h3> Members of the research team each individually analyzed a subset of the interview responses and reported emerging themes. The team consolidated reports and identified key findings for 3 outcome measures related to 1) Staff capacities for YPAR work aimed at PSE changes; 2) key topics; and 3) key processes/structures for additional professional learning support. <h3>Results</h3> The following themes emerged related to the outcome measures: 1) the importance of comprehensive knowledge and skills related to youth engagement and positive relationship skills to build support for YPAR: 2) the need for information on the history of YPAR; training around PSE change work, evaluation and reporting; and curricula for younger youth; and 3) the need for regular support from supervisors. <h3>Conclusions</h3> Staff articulated the capacities they gained, key learning topics and support received, and additional professional development support needed to conduct a YPAR project. Key themes were identified that can help inform practitioners interested in conducting YPAR projects, especially under the SNAP-Ed framework. <h3>Funding</h3> Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - Education.