Youth Participatory Action Research Research Articles

Gaining New Perspectives, Accepting Diversity, and Embracing Collective Thought: Revolutionizing Education with a Participatory Agenda

Gaining New Perspectives, Accepting Diversity, and Embracing Collective Thought: Revolutionizing Education with a Participatory Agenda Philip Ray Jones, Ph.D. Abstract This essay is a critical analysis of Julio Cammarota and Michelle Fine‟s text entitled Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. The essay illuminates the idea of how the most innovative, creative, and transformative levels of research among students, educators, as well as all education professionals across the broad education field ultimately materialize as a result of “collaborative” inquiry among “all” participants within a research group. Moreover, this essay highlights Cammarota and Fine‟s call to all educators to acknowledge the transformative power of the “we” rather than the “me” in regard to research in the field, classroom instruction, and student learning on multifaceted levels across the broad educational spectrum. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v6n2a1

"I'm Empowered by a Better Connection": Youth Participatory Action Research and Critical Literacy

"I'm Empowered by a Better Connection": Youth Participatory Action Research and Critical Literacy

“Project awareness:” Fostering social justice youth development to counter youth experiences of housing instability, trauma and injustice

Housing instability poses a challenge for the positive developmental trajectories of youth. Nevertheless, youth possess the knowledge, fortitude and resiliency to meet the needs and challenges of navigating housing instability. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) methods coupled with Social Justice Youth Development (SJYD) were utilized with 6 youth experiencing housing instability accessing educational, life skill, and developmental services from a drop-in center. Participants were active members of youth-centered research workshops. Findings reveal the need for increased funding that secures community-based, positive youth development services; an open, fluid workshop structure to offer consistency, yet flexibility for highly mobile youth; and safe spaces in which youth can explore and analyze the socio-political contexts shaping their experiences to inform their approaches in navigating various social systems and structures.

‘The Trouble with Normal’: (re)imagining sexuality education with young people

What do young people believe sexuality education ought to be about? It is within the absence of a sustained and critical consideration of the possibilities and politics of engaging in research with rather than for young people in the reimagining of sexuality education that this paper is positioned. Data were generated as part of an 18-month Youth Participatory Action Research study in one co-educational secondary school with 43 student co-researchers (15–17 years). The findings presented are not intended to provide conclusive statements about future directions for sexuality education, but rather provide a platform on which to discuss how young people’s ideas align with or diverge from current practice and debates surrounding what sexuality education should, could or ought to be about.

The difference biocultural “place” makes to community efforts towards sustainable development: Youth participatory action research in a marine protected area of Colombia

The Latin American concept of “(collective) biocultural heritage” arose from Indigenous knowledge and practices with respect to local natural resources and environment, including the food being hunted, the crops being grown, and the landscapes being created. The term is now used more widely to describe community practices, goals and priorities that are determined, maintained and managed by diverse cultural relationships with “place”. The study presented in this article investigated biocultural place relationships in connection with well-being and sustainability. In the context of learning and action for sustainability in Isla Grande, an island in a marine protected area of Colombia, this study targeted the significance of place to the everyday lives of Afro-Colombian youth – from their perspective. Beyond aiming to merely observe and collect data, the methodology included a research design which actively involved local youth and incorporated the aspect of place. The authors describe and reflect on the processes, learning and action that emerged throughout the research, as well as the study’s limitations. They discuss broad implications in terms of how place relationships influence research, and how research influences place relationships. Local implications include supporting the voice of youth in community efforts to re-imagine and transform place relationships in response to critical place issues such as climate change, top-down resource management, privatisation, commodification and growing environmental injustice.

Student action research: Preventing bullying in secondary school—Inkla project

This article presents Inkla, a youth participatory action research project initiated by secondary school students and supported by university researchers and students. The main goal was to help secondary school students explore intragroup relations in school classes and problems students may encounter as bullying or peer group exclusion. It was also intended to design practical methods to stop bullying and create supportive peer groups. A group of secondary school students became student researchers and conducted interviews in their school classes which resulted in including their peers and teachers in well planned and research-based collective action to prevent bullying and improve school life. Outcomes demonstrate that the student voice can support or change a school’s antibullying policy if the responsibility for bullying prevention is shared with students who are treated as agents of change. This article also describes the complex process of building participative relationships in youth participatory action research.

“I Want to Know About Everything That’s Happening in the World”: Enhancing Critical Awareness Through a Youth Participatory Action Research Project With Latinx Youths

Through a yearlong, qualitative ethnographic study that incorporated a youth participatory action research project, this research identifies and documents the learning outcomes achieved when core principles of critical pedagogy are brought into practice with urban Latinx youths to develop critical awareness. Analysis reveals three themes around how critical awareness was raised: attention to current events, an ethic of care, and challenging traditional curricula.

Building Bridges

The exploration of social networking sites (SNS) offers great potential for understanding novel forms of youth civic engagement within the 21st century. SNS can foster a young person’s social capital by connecting them to others with different backgrounds, thereby exposing them to alternative perspectives and lived experiences within a growingly polarized political environment. This study provides an innovative framework for examining the communication trends and perceived sociopolitical benefits for adolescents engaging diverse groups in a youth-led social-justice-oriented SNS. The author linked three school-based youth participatory action research projects involving 54 high school students through an SNS. Employing a mixed-method approach (i.e., social network analysis, key student interviews), results indicate an increase in communication between students in different schools and an increase in levels of civic participation. In addition, interviewees reported perceived gains in communication, perspective taking, and sociopolitical awareness. Implications for practitioners, as well as future research, are discussed.

Insiders doing PAR with youth in their schools: negotiating professional boundaries and healing justice

In this essay, I explore my experiences as a practitioner researcher collaborating with my students on a participatory action research project aimed at institutional change. I take up two areas: blurring the boundaries of professionalism in working toward authentic collaborations with students, and secondly, incorporating perspectives of ‘healing justice’ into school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR). I first provide a framework by delineating the emancipatory aims of YPAR and how these may be at odds with much of the research teachers/practitioners currently conduct in their school sites. While ultimately acknowledging the risks in taking up emancipatory change efforts as insiders, I make the case that there are also clear benefits to the process.

“We're Trying to Take Action”: Transformative Agency, Role Re-mediation, and the Complexities of Youth Participatory Action Research

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to illuminate the complexity of youth participatory action research (YPAR) through the use of two concepts: (1) transformative agency, a collective initiative to address conflicts and contradictions in activity systems, and (2) role re-mediation, the disruption of power relations. We demonstrate that these concepts, in comparison to the concept of civic participation, allow for an expanded consideration of the cross-contextual processes that are involved in collective mobilization to enact justice. To explore this area, we examine an afterschool YPAR program involving the adult authors and youth of color with intersectional identities—including emergent bilinguals and youth perceived as struggling academically. We illustrate three avenues of transformative agency and role re-mediation within the YPAR program: (1) engagement with critical fiction and non-fiction texts that expose power relations; (2) interactions between individuals within and beyond the YPAR space; and (3) production and dissemination of knowledge. Through this exploration, we illustrate how the lenses of transformative agency and role re-mediation can provide new understandings of change-oriented action in YPAR.

Pedagogies of Black Eldership: Exploring the Impact of Intergenerational Contact on Youth Research

This article examines the interactions between a collective of self-described “African American,” “multiracial,” and “African immigrant” high school youth researchers, and two African American community elders. Drawing from a year-long critical ethnographic study of the youth research collective, the author documents how pedagogies of Black eldership overlapped with youth participatory action research to open new possibilities for preparing youth as researchers. The study highlights how an out-of-school educational space afforded alternative pedagogical opportunities by specifically examining how pedagogies of Black eldership helped youth researchers historicize and politicize their research, pushing them to move from embodied knowledge to self-knowledge. Drawing from African-centered and critical theory, the study explicates aspects of the pedagogies of Black eldership. Without bounding these pedagogies, the author uses two narratives of teaching and learning to illustrate how intergenerational contact impacted the trajectory of the youth researchers. They transformed their research after meeting with the elders to be more introspective and examine how their worldviews were being constructed and influenced. The findings in this study serve as an impetus for further research examining the educational context of Black eldership and youth research.

From Theorizing in the Ivory Tower to Creating Change with the People

This article provides an overview of activist research and how it is used in various field including anthropology, social movements, and education. It discusses the impetus for incorporating activism into theoretical frameworks and research methodologies and the distinct aspects of activist research. Youth participatory action research is examined to identify how activist research can be situated into the methods and outcomes.

Permission to be confused: Toward a second wave of critical Whiteness pedagogy

ABSTRACTThis article considers second wave critical Whiteness pedagogy by examining the author's teacher-researcher implementation of teaching project about Whiteness in a large, suburban high school near a major city in the Midwest. The author relies on narrative scholarship in order to both tell and interpret stories about a yearlong project that used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and playbuilding to guide a group of mostly white 9th-12th graders through a consideration of Whiteness. This article especially focuses on the way one white student described her participation in the project.

Authenticity, aims and authority: Navigating youth participatory action research in the classroom

ABSTRACTMotivated by the addition of a curriculum standard for active citizenship into New Jersey's social studies standards a group of educators and researchers set out to integrate an action research curriculum, based on a youth participatory action research (YPAR) model, into social studies classrooms. Adapting YPAR, with its promising blend of critical thinking, civic engagement, and democratization, for use as in the classroom is appealing to those seeking to use education as a means of social change. But activism does not always translate neatly to the classroom; melding multiple purposes into one approach, particularly amidst the current push for standardization and accountability measures, is complex. This analysis considers three challenges to navigate when reshaping YPAR into a curriculum for classroom use - preserving authenticity, conflicting aims, and tensions around authority. Drawing upon qualitative data from the social studies classrooms of two public high schools, this article engages directly with the difficulties inherent in adapting a methodology premised on action, authenticity, and youth empowerment to the adult driven, extrinsically oriented, skills and content-focused world of the classroom. Understanding this shift, and the epistemological tensions underlying it, is essential for those wishing to integrate action research with youth into social studies classrooms.

Group Work That Examines Systems of Power With Young People: Youth Participatory Action Research

Youth-led group work shifts power dynamics and repositions youth as leaders in driving the learning they envision for themselves. This shift calls into question how group facilitators measure outcomes of youth empowerment groups. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) has expanded the field of knowledge production by creating shared spaces where youth participants co-create research agendas and processes that are guided by their lived experiences and expertise, and generate data-driven action to address social problems. We propose applications of YPAR as both an emancipatory epistemology and methodology to inform group work research.

Civic Participation Reimagined: Youth Interrogation and Innovation in the Multimodal Public Sphere

This chapter challenges dominant narratives about the civic disengagement of youth from marginalized communities by reconceptualizing what counts as civic participation in public life and how youth are positioned as civic agents. We examine ideologies that undergird traditional forms of civic education and engagement in the United States and offer an alternative vision of civic life grounded in recognition of systemic inequality and struggle for social justice. We consider the ways in which digital media has fundamentally transformed the public sphere and expanded opportunities for youth civic expression and action, as well as the ways that youth participatory action research literature offers a framework for civic education that forefronts youth experience and voice. Our analysis culminates in the development of a new conceptual model for civic learning and engagement that pushes past participation into the realms of interrogation and innovation.

Killing Victoria: improvisational and emergent teaching and learning

ABSTRACTThis manuscript uses narrative practices of autoethnography to consider the potential of improvisational, emergent pedagogy. The author explores this concept by examining the participation of a student in a yearlong, ethnographic teaching project. A group of mostly white high school students voluntarily engaged in practices of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in concert with playbuilding to investigate whiteness. The author positions this pedagogical project in relation to second-wave critical whiteness studies and improvisation. Critical whiteness studies are a theoretical move towards more complicated framings of whiteness. Improvisation creates a particular way to consider the story of the author’s teacher-researcher work with one of his students during this implementation of second-wave whiteness pedagogy. Finally, the author shares general implications about improvisational teaching and learning, especially in terms of whiteness pedagogy.

Ethical dilemmas of youth participatory action research in a democratic setting

ABSTRACTThis article discusses ethical issues involved in facilitating the research of young people on controversial issues. This article considers the potential ethical dilemmas of teachers facilitating a particular form of activism – youth participatory action research (YPAR). We consider how teachers foster school-wide conversations on difficult issues and support students who wish to take a critical stand on issues of race, class and gender. The article also discusses how to scaffold the exploration of topics that require emotional maturity and might lead to shifts in beliefs that run counter to the values of one’s family.

“I Learned That We Matter” - Reflections on Strategies to Engage Formerly Homeless Young Adults in Youth Participatory Action Research

“I Learned That We Matter” - Reflections on Strategies to Engage Formerly Homeless Young Adults in Youth Participatory Action Research

Flipping the Script: The Dangerous Bodies of Girls of Color

Girls of color have been left out of discussions on youth participatory action research (YPAR) as well as gender- and race-based scholarship related to school marginalization. How Black girls and other girls of color experience girlhood is undertheorized. In this particular discussion, high school girls themselves expose the ways in which girls are punished in schools. Using participatory action research (PAR), high school students unveil girls of color experiences in schools as “dangerous bodies.” The author asseverates that Black girls and other girls of color “flip the script” by becoming conscientious and active agents in social change through the research process.