Youth Participatory Action Research Project Research Articles

(Responding to) Youth epistemologies to create a third space: a reclamation of learning in an English language arts classroom

PurposeThis paper aims to focus on the construction of a third space within a high school. Specifically, the authors consider how youth of color engage the educational context of an 11th grade English language arts (ELA) class as a basis for (re)imagining their history, culture and themselves to construct counter-narratives away from framing their lived educational experiences as failures, deficient and depicted in “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) ways. The research engages the process and challenges of creating this type of space within a school setting, as well as examining the ways in which students envision these locations.Design/methodology/approachCritical ethnography centered the emphasis on youth engagement for social change, as well as the inquiry on how the classroom space was constructed, shared and navigated by the students and ourselves (Madison, 2005). In addition, the research design reflects critical ethnography through the use of prolonged participation in the field (nine and half months), a focus on culture (specifically school and classroom culture/climate) and a critical theory-based framework [hybridity, third space and youth participatory action research (YPAR)].FindingsThree major themes emerged from the data that demonstrate how instructors and students collectively engaged in a third space through the YPAR project. These themes include developing an ethic of care with students and among instructors, cultivating an atmosphere of social justice awareness and the contrast of the classroom space with the wider-Hillside Vocational High School environment.Originality/valueThe study engages the use of YPAR within a high school class that became a unique space for students to learn and develop. The ELA class did not just reflect adding the first space and second space together or merging the two. Instead, it seemed to demonstrate the creation of a new type of space or the development of a third space. In this space, students could bring and bridge their out-of-school and in-school experiences to develop new knowledge and ways of seeing the world.

Promoting youth-directed social change: engaging transformational critical practice

ABSTRACT This article examines the influence of social workers’ critical practice on youth-directed social change among hard-to-reach young people in neoliberal new public management contexts. Young people are increasingly acknowledged as essential change agents in ameliorating their experiences of disadvantage or marginalisation. Yet, youth and community organisations supporting projects and strategies to engage with young people’s agency find change from these interventions is small, or non-sustained. In exploring what obstructs and what galvanises youth-directed social change, comparative analysis of three youth participatory action research projects nested in youth-facing agencies in New South Wales, Australia, was undertaken. Particular attention is drawn to the young people’s perspectives in order to provide insight into tackling challenges of youth disengagement and exclusion. The article predominantly draws on Nancy Fraser’s critical theory of social justice as a heuristic to illuminate dynamics of the young people’s projects. At the heart of all projects were transformative measures with potential to impact underlying structures which foster marginalisation, opening up prospects for sustained change. Despite a significant barrier being new management practices reinforcing adult asymmetrical relationships with youth, strategies informed by critical social work practice were able to support young people to progress their social change goals.

Centering community: enacting culturally responsive-sustaining YPAR during COVID-19

PurposeThis paper aims to provide insights for educators seeking to enact culturally responsive-sustaining education and research in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The authors examine what happened when the community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative they engaged with traditionally marginalized high school students was interrupted as a result of physical distancing necessitated by COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachData for this inquiry were taken from a broader on-going ethnography of youth’s participation in the YPAR project and included audio and video recordings from meetings of the YPAR initiative and messages exchanged between and among authors and youth. Authors used components of culturally responsive-sustaining education and theories related to student voice as an analytic frame through which they considered how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced their work.FindingsThree findings are examined in this paper. They consider: how youth participants and the authors stayed connected after they were no longer able to meet in person; how youth chose to center the needs of the subsidized housing community where they lived while continuing their work; and how youth and authors navigated the uncertainties they encountered in looking ahead to future possibilities for their study as the pandemic continued.Originality/valueThis study provides urgently needed insights for educators and researchers grappling with how they may enact culturally responsive-sustaining education and research during the COVID-19 global pandemic and beyond.

Examining youth participatory action research as a context to disrupt implicit bias in African American adolescent girls

ABSTRACT Youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects are powerful developmental contexts for important lessons in identity, power, stereotypes, and bias. African American girls develop in a society that devalues and often stigmatizes their racial and gendered identity. Although studies have shown that African American girls score high on self-esteem measures, they are still vulnerable to internalizing societal biases associated with their race and gender. In this article, we explore how African American girls perceived working in a group together and the components of a YPAR project served as an important context for disrupting bias. Observational and interview data (n = 8) across three semesters were analyzed, to understand participants’ initial perceptions about their team and their perceptions and actions at the end of the project. Our study found that the African American girls in our group held negative biases at the beginning of the project. During their participation in the YPAR project, their perceptions became more positive towards working with others who share their race and gender. Acknowledging competence, recognizing within-group diversity, and exposing girls to counter-narratives, challenged internalized biases and led to a deeper respect as they worked to complete their YPAR project.

Discovering My Agency: Exploring how Youth Participatory Action Research Facilitates the Development of Capital by Underserved Youth in a College Access Program

Background/Context College access programs aim to enhance students’ college-going capital, which includes the “knowledge, skills, or dispositions” that support students’ pathways to and through higher education. While some college access programs aim to remedy students’ “deficiencies” in capital, strengths-based approaches recognize and amplify the cultural assets and capital that marginalized individuals and their communities possess. One such approach is community-based youth participatory action research (YPAR), which empowers young people as co-researchers to investigate topics of importance in their lives. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study explored how participation in a community-based YPAR project facilitated the college aspirations and perceived development of college-going capital among underserved (low-income, first-generation, and racially and ethnically minoritized) youth in a college access program. Setting: The setting for this research was a university-based college access and success program, Achievement Program (pseudonym). Population/Participants/Subjects Ten high school tenth-graders in Achievement Program participated in the YPAR project. All are low-income and first-generation students and eight identify as Students of Color. Intervention/Program/Practice YPAR project participants assisted in designing and executing a qualitative research study on the barriers and opportunities that first-generation and/or low-income college students face. Participants also engaged in related activities such as reflective journaling, a trip to meet with national higher education policy organizations, and community engagement. Research Design: This research utilized an interpretive case study approach. Data Collection and Analysis: Data were drawn from three one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with each participant, photo elicitation, and one focus group with all ten participants. For analysis, the authors collaboratively developed a codebook focused on the impact of YPAR participation on development of college-going capital. Findings/Results Participants showed evidence of beginning to understand that although the college-going barriers they have faced are systemic, they hold power to challenge those barriers and effect positive change. YPAR participation also enabled participants to recognize their connections with and responsibility toward their communities and helped them connect educational pursuits such as research with working to improve college access and success for other low-income and first-generation students. Conclusions/Recommendations This study provides evidence for how incorporating community-based YPAR into college access programs can empower youth from underserved populations as agents of their college-going journeys by connecting them with college-going capital located within their communities. Therefore, we recommend that college access program professionals incorporate YPAR projects into their curricula to better support underserved students’ college-going journeys.

The difficulties of ‘action’ in Youth Participatory Action Research: schoolifying YPAR in two elite settings

ABSTRACT This paper examines the possibilities and problematics of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) within two elite independent schools located in the USA. The data presented were gathered from broader research that sought to identify new educative approaches to supporting social justice in schools. The paper provides an account of two YPAR projects that focused on the contentious topics of (1) micro-aggressions and (2) boy–girl relationships. It draws attention to the difficulties these schools encountered with the ‘action’ component of YPAR. These difficulties were associated with key contextual factors in each school and led to inaction and a schoolification of youth research. In light of such factors, the paper draws attention to the necessity, but tensions, of schoolifying YPAR in order to maximize the generative possibilities of this form of research.

A Qualitative Systematic Review of Youth Participatory Action Research Implementation in U.S. High Schools.

This qualitative systematic review examined the context-specific factors that influence the implementation of youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects in high schools within the United States. Thematic synthesis was conducted to identify and analyze the YPAR implementation factors that were present in 38 peer-reviewed studies. Results indicate the following two analytic themes concerning YPAR implementation in high schools: (a) pedagogical strategies and (b) stakeholder dynamics and needs. The themes provide support for existing ecological frameworks of implementation factors and demonstrate that adult researchers' project-specific decisions are nested within educational power structures. This paper will discuss the implications of these YPAR implementation themes in executing YPAR projects in high schools.

“Hurt People, Hurt People”: The Trauma of Juvenile Incarceration

While approximately one in three youths are identified by juvenile probation officers as needing mental health services, researchers estimate that between 67 and 90% of detained and adjudicated youth meet criteria for at least one mental health diagnosis, and almost 50% for two or more comorbid psychiatric disorders. This staggering prevalence of mental health disorders amongst system-involved youth is more frequent than in the general adolescent population. The juvenile justice system (JJS) has become the default system for incarcerated youth who do not receive the proper mental health care in the community—especially marginalized, working-class youth of color. Given the fact that there are 1.6 million system-involved youth, it is vital for the JJS to begin to address their wellness. The purpose of this paper is to present how trauma affects system-involved youth by creating emotional, mental, spiritual and physical distress by examining data from a Youth Participatory Action Research project with system-involved youth and their allies.

Transforming School Hallways Through Critical Inquiry: Multimodal Literacies for Civic Engagement

AbstractThe authors examined the research and activism of 10th graders (ages 15–16) involved in a youth participatory action research project in a course in qualitative research at their small public school in New York City, New York. The authors, a classroom researcher and a high school teacher, looked closely at how the youth researchers used photography, collage, and videography to transform their school hallways into a space for critical conversations about race and gender. The authors examined how the hallways became a civic space shaped by collective youth resistance, multimodal counterstories, and negotiated civic engagement.

Socially Toxic Environments: A YPAR Project Exposes Issues Affecting Urban Black Girls’ Educational Pathway to STEM Careers and Their Racial Identity Development

In this article, the author reports findings from a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project, aimed to engage a group of Black girls from a low-income urban high school in a social justice project. The YPAR project conducted during the 2015 and 2016 academic year focused on a critical examination of the high school educational pathway to specialized fields, such as STEM careers. Findings from phase one of the project show Black girls know race and class affects their educational experiences. However, they know little about racial and gender disparities along STEM educational pathways. In fact, when given an opportunity to engage in a critical examination of school-based issues, these girls initially reified negative racial stereotypes to explain social and educational injustices. The findings reveal how school and culture intersect and affect urban Black girls’ school experiences, perception of educational and specialized career pathways, and their racial identity development.

Rethinking activist educational research: definitions, methodologies, and ethics

ABSTRACT In this article, I revisit the concept of activist educational research to consider a wider array of methodological approaches that support the documentation and transformation of systems of oppression, from youth participatory action research projects to ‘studying up.’ Although activist researchers often turn to participatory methods, I examine how ‘studying up’ can support grassroots organizing from below. Drawing on my own experiences ‘studying up’ to better understand how emerging national security policies have criminalized Muslim youth, I analyze the methodological considerations, ethical provocations, and accountability processes such projects raise. By (re)broadening what counts as activist educational research using the rubric of transforming existing social arrangements and reaffirming the feminist concept of ‘strong objectivity’ (Harding, 1995), I encourage education scholars across the globe to engage a broader range of methodological approaches to support community struggles for educational justice.

Struggling with/against the unintentional reproduction of power structures in participatory research: Using reconstructive horizon analysis

Shared power and democratic decision making are core epistemological commitments of participatory action research. Scholars who engage in participatory action research with youth seek to share ownership and disrupt adult/child or knower/learner binaries traditional in the Global North, in which adults are the active agents who own and transfer knowledge to children, who remain in a passive role. Yet, we have noticed during several of our projects with youth that, despite our best efforts, these knower/learner binaries can be reproduced with younger coresearchers as we exhibit care in the form of protection and provision of security. In this article, we examine three scenes from our recent youth participatory action research projects using reconstructive horizon analysis to surface and explore backgrounded validity claims that highlight the tensions between our efforts to democratize the research process and our commitment to an ethic of care for those with whom we engage in participatory knowledge production. We suggest that explicit attention to these tensions as part of the inquiry process is important for making participatory research with youth a more equitable endeavor and to build the validity of such work.

Unforgetting Place in Urban Education through Creative Participatory Visual Methods

AbstractIn this article, Eve Tuck and Sefanit Habtom first consider the consequences of the erasure of the importance of place in the field of urban education and then describe a new youth participatory action research project in Toronto called Making Sense of Movements (MSOM). MSOM is a youth participatory visual research project that engages Black and Indigenous youth in thinking about the influence of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More in their relationships to Toronto as a place, and also in their postsecondary planning.

Kids in Action: the protocol of a Youth Participatory Action Research project to promote physical activity and dietary behaviour

IntroductionIn this study, researchers collaborate with children from a low socioeconomic neighbourhood in Amsterdam in developing, implementing and evaluating interventions targeting their health behaviours. This Youth Participatory Action Research project...

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The Quandary of Youth Participatory Action Research in School Settings: A Framework for Reflecting on the Factors That Influence Purpose and Process

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a form of critical participatory action research that provides young people with opportunities to identify injustices in their current social realities, to gather and analyze data about these phenomena, and to determine actions that will begin to rectify their negative outcomes. A growing body of evidence suggests that YPAR projects improve outcomes for individual youth as well as the organizations/settings they act on. Despite this, the extent to which YPAR can and should be used in institutions that reproduce dominant cultural power dynamics remains a subject of debate. Building on recent studies that explore the tensions inherent in school-based YPAR projects, in this theoretical essay Gretchen Brion-Meisels and Zanny Alter put three fundamental tenets of YPAR—participation, purpose, and level of analysis—into conversation with each other. Illustrating their points using examples from an ongoing YPAR project that explores barriers to on-time graduation at an urban high school, they describe the ways in which these tenets are central to YPAR projects and identify several elements of schooling that complicate decision making around these fundamental ideas.

Addressing inequity through youth participatory action research: Toward a critically hopeful approach to more equitable schools

In this paper, we explore how youth participatory action research methods serve as a means of uncovering and addressing hidden curricula in schools. To illuminate, we present an example of one school-based youth participatory action research project in which high school students examined racism and sexism in their school. We discuss both the successes and challenges of youth participatory action research as a methodological approach to address inequity in schools.

Writing Toward Change Across Youth Participatory Action Research Projects

AbstractThe authors examine how youth participants in the Central City Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project (a pseudonym) enacted literacy practices toward social justice. Specifically, the authors examine how youths rendered writing in the context of the Central CityYPARproject to design and enact research about issues of educational opportunity and to share findings of their research with community stakeholders. Taken together, youths’ enactments of writing provide insights into how and why secondary educators may consider incorporatingYPARprojects into their own work with students.

Activating student voice through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR): policy-making that strengthens urban education reform

CC Vision – an urban education reform effort launched to strengthen the cradle-to-career education pipeline in Central City – provides the impetus for our use of youth participatory action research (YPAR) to gather and activate student voice in the fight for education justice. Student voice can significantly enhance the quality of policy designed to expand access to education opportunity for poor and/or youth of color attending urban schools. Fifteen youth from seven different high schools in the Central City metropolitan area spent 18 weeks participating in the Central City Youth Co-Researcher Project as co-researchers. We aim to demonstrate the tensions of facilitating YPAR projects with diverse youth, and the benefits of YPAR as a student voice initiative intended to bolster justice-oriented education research. The influence of their scholarship vis-à-vis YPAR on wide-scale education policy-making, and education reform, in Central City is discussed.

RYSE Youth Center: Youth Participatory Action Research

Since 2000, the RYSE center located in Richmond, CA has centered the voices of youth to combat issues in their local community. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has been one of the key tenets of RYSE’s approach and implementation of radical inquiry. RYSE’s radical inquiry strategy aims to shift what research looks like, sounds like, and feels like with an inquiry process that is humanizing and moves toward liberation. This involves ongoing listening and dynamic responsiveness to the priorities, needs, and interests of young people of color. This commentary documents two recent YPAR projects that developed from youth who were interested in exploring gender-based violence, bullying and coping. The commentary documents findings and youth reflections highlighting the liberatory and collaborative nature of YPAR.