Active Learning

Social Justice Education and Participatory Action Research

Dana E. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317588245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

While many educators acknowledge the challenges of a curriculum shaped by test preparation, implementing meaningful new teaching strategies can be difficult. Active Learning presents an examination of innovative, interactive teaching strategies that were successful in engaging urban students who struggled with classroom learning. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the book proposes participatory action research as a viable approach to teaching and learning that supports the development of multiple literacies in writing, reading, research and oral communication. As Wright argues, in connecting learning to authentic purposes and real world consequences, participatory action research can serve as a model for meaningful urban school reform.

After an introduction to the history and demographics of the working-class West Coast neighborhood in which the described PAR project took place, the book discusses the "pedagogy of praxis" method and the project's successful development of student voice, sociopolitical analysis capacities, leadership skills, empowerment and agency. Topics addressed include an analysis and discussion of the youth-driven PAR process, the reactions of student researchers, and the challenges for adults in maintaining youth and adult partnerships. A thought-provoking response to current educational challenges, Active Learning offers both timely implications for educational reform and recommendations to improve school policies and practices.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315743141-1

The current climate of high-stakes testing—and the resulting narrowed curriculum aimed primarily at preparing students for federally and state-mandated tests—has disengaged many students and frustrated countless teachers. Current federal and state education reform policies and their accompanying accountability discourses mandate top-down, market-based, standardized testing programs that define learning in terms of compartmentalized information recalled on tests. As a result, teachers are often held accountable when their students’ performance on these high-stakes tests does not meet expectations. In light of these mandates, many teachers reported in a nationwide survey that they feel pressured to resort to teaching in ways that contradict their own views of sound teaching practices, even neglecting important but untested curriculum areas, in order to teach the content and format that will be on the tests (Abrams, Pedulla & Madaus, 2003). Such transmission models (Freire, 1970/2000) have reduced the incorporation of student voice and diminished the strategy of building upon students’ prior knowledge and experiences in the classroom curriculum (Carter & Welner, 2013). The result has been fewer opportunities for students to learn in engaging contexts, the compromising of academic skills such as critical thinking and high levels of student disengagement.

Yet in the midst of this trying policy environment, concerned teachers, researchers and school leaders are seeking teaching approaches that spark students’ interests and promote a range of critical thinking skills. Many teachers and innovative school leaders are beginning to consider the successful teaching and learning practices not only in those pockets of equity and excellence inside schools, but also outside of school walls. Countless observers acknowledge that the same students who struggle to maintain interest and engagement in school are often able to learn new academic skills in non-school settings. Therefore, it is critical to understand the complex dynamics that yield student success outside of formal educational contexts. Particularly in underperforming schools in low-income neighborhoods and large urban districts that face mandates to increase student performance on standardized tests, an increasingly narrowed curriculum focusing on test preparation often differs from topics students are interested in learning about. While many underfunded and underperforming schools have struggled even harder to engage students, nearly all schools face high levels of student disengagement with learning. Indeed, across urban, suburban and rural U.S. schools districts, schools and teachers face difficulties engaging over two-thirds of high school students in classroom learning (Cothran & Ennis, 2000; Klem & Connell, 2004).

Troubling patterns of student disengagement in classroom learning have begun to challenge more traditional notions of teaching in which teachers select the topics for study and then design curriculum units without considering their relevance to students’ interests and concerns. Since higher levels of engagement in learning correspond to higher levels of academic success regardless of socioeconomic status (Klem & Connell, 2004), student engagement is a fundamental concern in the pursuit of academic success for all students. While schools struggle to engage students, research finds that student engagement is responsive to teacher’s actions (Cothran & Ennis, 2000). Teaching approaches and curricula that generate student interest and investment incorporate student concerns and perspectives, consider student explanations, build student ownership of content and offer tools to engage students as active interpreters of knowledge and their own experiences to construct meanings (Newman & Schwager, 1992). Student engagement is contingent upon student–teacher relationships, the teaching strategies and curriculum executed by the instructor, and the relevance of the learning content to the students (Bundick, Quaglia, Corso & Haywood, 2014). Therefore, in order to engage students it is important to examine the learning content and curriculum that students find to be responsive to their interests as well as to examine effective teaching strategies and methods to build strong student–teacher relationships.

In addition to low student engagement rates, the nationwide graduation rates are noticeably lower for economically disadvantaged students and Black, Latino and Native American students (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). Scholars have reframed the notion of school dropouts by terming them “push-outs” to bring attention to explicit and implicit push-out practices in which public schools, under pressure from federal and state mandates, push out students who would not perform well on state-mandated high school exit exams (Fine & Jaffe-Walter, 2007; Tuck, 2012). Noguera (2014) asserts that “education policy has focused on raising academic standards and increasing accountability but largely ignored the social and economic conditions that impact school environments and learning opportunities for students” (p. 115). In contrast, recent scholarship on the achievement gap—disparities in school achievement between incomes and racial groups—has shifted the focus from the outcomes of unequal educational practices to the inequities in educational inputs and resources between high- and low-income neighborhoods and schools (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Noguera & Wing, 2006; Rothstein, 2004). Deindustrialization and the flight of capital from racially segregated urban neighborhoods with a high concentration of poverty (Noguera, 2014) have resulted in a marked structural disinvestment in these neighborhoods and their schools. The structural disinvestment in these neighborhoods and schools has led to a range of disparities between high- and low-income neighborhoods and the schools nested within them. Some scholars have termed the achievement gap “the opportunity gap” to illuminate the accumulated disparities in access to educational resources to support learning: high-quality curriculum, personalized attention, quality teachers and educational materials (Carter & Welner, 2013; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Fine, Torre, Burns & Payne, 2007; Milner, 2010).

Despite the attention that has been paid to the reform of education, these reform strategies have not effectively addressed the public education crisis or improved public schools in low-income communities. The consistent failure of public schools in low-income communities is both a civil rights issue and a social justice issue that demands that communities build power to participate in democratic efforts to work towards educational justice and shape their futures (Warren & Mapp, 2011). Demonstrating the growing, emergent field of alliances between public schools and community-based organizations, Warren (2005) finds that successful urban school reform must be linked to community revitalization, political strategies that address the structures of poverty, and urban social change. Warren and Mapp (2011) find that low-income communities across the country composed of educators, young people and parents are establishing new models for collaborative work that addresses inequities in education, work towards educational and social justice, and improve the quality of the education in their communities. Along these lines, Darling-Hammond (2010) asserts that the struggle for equality in education has The participatory action research (PAR) curriculum and teaching approaches outlined in this book offer a viable, democratic approach to building powerful youth–adult partnerships to participate in community change efforts for an empowering quality education, educational equity and social justice.

concerned not only access to schooling but access to an empowering form of quality education—one that can enable people to think critically and powerfully, to take control of the course of their own learning, and to determine their own fate—rather than merely to follow dictates prescribed by others.

(p. 28)

Overview of the Central Youth United Participatory Action Research Project

Responding to contemporary educational challenges, this book discusses components of the innovative curriculum and teaching model that successfully engaged students to develop their academic skills through a collaborative inquiry project. Facilitated with students of color in a community-based setting within their working-class, urban neighborhood, this curriculum was designed to impact their surrounding environment concerning topics that students identified as relevant to their lives. The teaching strategy situated learning within a participatory action research (PAR) project with youth, in which young people research a pressing issue and then develop a community action project to address it.

For example, in the case examined in this work, secondary school students created a research question, “What do young people really need in our neighborhood?” Then, with the support of their two instructors, they designed a research project to collect and analyze data to find the answer to this question and present it to community decision-makers. The students found that their neighborhood needed a youth center to house youth development programming, homework clubs and a computer lab. The youth team presented their findings at a community forum attended by over 60 youth advocates and community organizers and organized a Youth Task Force to commit to following up on their recommendations to build a youth center within three to five years.

One factor behind the success of the curriculum is that the curriculum goals—to actively work collectively towards community improvement—aligned with young people’s values and visions to help their community and they were enthusiastic about being involved. For example, Victor, one of the members of the PAR team, understood the main purpose of the PAR project: to gather data to illuminate community needs and to use that data as a tool to guide their actions in working towards community change. Victor was motivated to participate because he wanted to gather information to help the youth team change things to improve his neighborhood community. He explained further that he returned to the project every week because he liked helping other young people and helping to improve his neighborhood by collecting and using data for community change. This collaborative inquiry project involved young people in planning as well as receiving and responding to expert feedback. The curriculum further demanded that students expand their strategic thinking capacities to attain goals within authentic contexts that posed complex challenges of a kind that youth typically do not have the support to engage in school settings. The book argues that the key to engagement, particularly for working-class youth, immigrant youth and youth of color, is a process that extends their structural analysis of asymmetrical power relations and the social and economic inequalities in the larger society that are reflected in its institutions, while also meeting young people’s needs to contribute to improving their communities.

Researcher Location and Research Commitments

I was drawn to the research site in this study because Youth Voices was the only nonprofit organization nationally that engaged in youth-led PAR projects using a social justice pedagogy and curriculum that provided training, technical assistance and capacity-building support in PAR methods to schools, networks, community organizing groups, alliances, school districts and coalitions. My interests in curriculum theory and design, pedagogy, student engagement, urban education and the contexts of schooling were first sparked during my work as an English Language Arts teacher in two Bronx and Brooklyn public middle schools. As a public school teacher, I thought deeply about ways to design engaging curriculum and assignments that took into account the contexts of schooling that influence both opportunities for engaged learning and pedagogical approaches, which propelled me to enter graduate school to join a community of scholars seeking to improve the field of education. While pursuing my doctorate in education with a concentration in teaching and learning, I pursued questions of how teaching, learning environments and schools could be transformed to better support students. My interest in PAR grew out of my experiences working with the Nia Project, a positive youth development and community-building organization for Black high school and college students in Boston. As I am an African American woman and former public middle school teacher of largely Black and Latino students from working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, my research and professional commitments are to improve the learning opportunities and supports to build the knowledge, participation and agency within all students, with a particular focus on students of color, working-class students and students in urban environments. These commitments propelled me into the role of Executive Director for the Nia Project, where I collaborated with adult and youth staff to develop curriculum and youth leadership development programming and co-directed a teen center in Boston’s Lower Roxbury/South End. I noticed that most of the young people who did not do well in high school were able to thrive in an asset-based youth development program focused on developing social analysis skills and community change work. Many of the students who had been labeled as “struggling” in schools successfully took on increasing leadership roles and responsibilities both within the organization and through participation in the public sphere, aiming to improve their institutions and environments.

Because I was simultaneously pursuing a doctorate in teaching and learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, these experiences and observations as a youth worker sparked my thinking about the curriculum and pedagogy of non-school learning settings that are successful with students who are disengaged in school. I examined asset-based pedagogies and pedagogical approaches, and identified participatory action research with youth as a viable and innovative approach to building critical analysis skills, agency and participation in community change initiatives.

Later in my trajectory as a researcher, these interests led me to search nationally for a youth-led PAR program that was known for its high-quality curriculum and pedagogy as well as its focus on social justice issues, and that operated at the higher tiers of Hart’s (1992; 1997) ladder of youth participation (see Table 2.1 in Chapter 2,p. 25). I identified Youth Voices as organization that fit these criteria. Youth Voices explicitly used a social justice framework, used a popular education teaching approach and had almost 15 years of organizational experience operating at the highest tier of the youth participation continuum. I worked for nearly three years as a curriculum developer and trainer in youth-led PAR methods and supported community-based organizations, youth development programs and school districts in conducting PAR projects with young people.

When Youth Voices was contracted to provide curriculum development and instruction in PAR methods for the Central Youth United (CYU) project, I was drawn to select the CYU project for this study. The CYU project was appealing because the PAR project was affiliated with two youth development organizations, a community development center and a community organizing nonprofit organization, and took place in a neighborhood with a well-known history of activism and organizing for social justice. My role in this project was strictly as a researcher and observer of the process and the organizations affiliated with the study. The four organizations affiliated with the study, as well as the student researchers and two project instructors and coordinators, agreed to participate in my study of Central Youth United and its curriculum and pedagogy.

As an active scholar in pursuit of questions about successful curriculum and pedagogy in non-school settings for many years, I was eventually led to the questions guiding this study: What are the features of successful teaching approaches in community-based learning settings that are effective with students who struggle to succeed in schools? What are the benefits and drawbacks of employing PAR projects as an asset-based, participatory approach to teaching and learning? What are the tensions and possibilities that emerge in youth—adult partnerships designed to take collaborative action on social justice imperatives? What are the implications for secondary schools and classroom learning?

Research Methods and the Study Context

This book draws upon ethnographic data that was collected during the seven-month duration of the youth-led PAR project. Data for this study was collected through interviews with student researchers, interviews with adult instructors and other adults affiliated with the PAR project, focus groups, ethnographic observations, and archival data. All interviews were transcribed verbatim.

This book provides a reconceptualization of teaching approaches by considering active learning projects that engage students in working towards creating more just and equitable communities. It examines a participatory action research project with youth that was housed in the Central Community Development Center (CCDC), a community-based nonprofit organization located in Central, an urban, working-class neighborhood in a large West Coast city. Central’s residents are predominately African American, Latino and Asian, and many families had recently migrated from the Philippines, Mexico and El Salvador. The goal of the CCDC’s PAR project was first to assess the specific needs for community improvement and then to design an action plan to address these needs based on their recommendations. The CCDC formed a coalition with three other community-based nonprofit organizations with the goal of helping to implement the recommendations of the PAR project. One primary instructor facilitated the team of secondary school students through this collaborative inquiry-based project. In addition, the CCDC also hired a secondary instructor, a PAR trainer and consultant who provided training and technical assistance on the youth-led PAR method. Note that several terms are used in the literature to describe participatory action research (PAR) with young people, including youth participatory action research (YPAR) or “youth-driven” or “youth-led” participatory action research (PAR). This book uses these terms interchangeably.

The hands-on curriculum required the student researchers to share...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Participatory Action Research (PAR) with Youth as Pedagogy
• 3 The Context of Central Youth United and Participant Profiles
• 4 A Pedagogy of Praxis
• 5 Situated Learning
• 6 Promoting Sociopolitical Analysis Skills
• 7 Empowering Youth as Experts and Knowledge Producers
• 8 Tensions and Dilemmas in Sustaining Collaborative Work
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index