Doing Youth Participatory Action Research

Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students

Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia, Ernest Morrell

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317604594
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Investigación en educación

Doing Youth Participatory Action Research offers an unprecedented, in-depth exploration of the pragmatics and possibilities of youth-driven research. Drawing upon multiple years of experience engaging youth in rigorous, critical inquiry about the conditions impacting their lives, the authors examine how YPAR encourages the educational community to re-imagine the capabilities of young people and the purposes of teaching, learning, and research itself.

Much more than a "how-to" guide for those interested in creating their own YPAR projects, this book draws upon the voices of students and educators, as well as the multiple historical traditions of critical research, to describe how youth inquiry transforms each step of the traditional research process. From identifying research questions to collecting data and disseminating findings, each chapter details how YPAR revolutionizes traditional conceptions of who produces knowledge, how it is produced, and for what purposes. The book weaves together research, policy, and practice to offer YPAR as a practice with the power to challenge entrenched social and educational inequalities, empower critically aware youth, and revolutionize pedagogy in classrooms and communities.

For researchers, educators, community members, and youth who want to connect, question, and transform the world collectively, Doing Youth Participatory Action Research is a rich source of both pragmatic methodological guidance and inspiration.

1
Introduction

Close your eyes and recall the most meaningful and rewarding learning experiences of your life. What were the characteristics that those experiences had in common? They likely built upon your personal interests and connected you to a wider community of fellow learners. They probably broadened your horizons and introduced you to people and ideas that you had not previously encountered. And they hopefully transformed you personally or professionally and propelled you on to joyous lifelong journeys of exploration.

This is the kind of learning that not only alters what individuals know and can do, but who they are. It can (and does) change lives. It is the kind of learning that parents desperately desire for their children and that educators strive to provide to their students.

The three of us wrote this book because we have been privileged enough to experience this kind of learning ourselves. The particular learning experience that we document here involves the work we have done over the past fifteen years with hundreds of young people in Los Angeles through a program that offers literacy enrichment, civic engagement, college access, and so much more through the practice of conducting research. While its moniker has evolved since its beginnings in 1999, the program has come to be known as the UCLA Council of Youth Research—or, as we refer to it, simply the Council.

Even though programs like the Council are grounded in theories and social movements that reach back centuries, they have recently inspired the creation of new terminology in the educational research community. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a term that gained widespread attention through Julio Cammarota and Michelle Fine’s groundbreaking 2008 book Revolutionizing Education, which highlighted the potential of youth research to transform teaching, learning, and academic scholarship. At its most basic level, YPAR refers to the practice of mentoring young people to become social scientists by engaging them in all aspects of the research cycle, from developing research questions and examining relevant literature to collecting and analyzing data and offering findings about social issues that they find meaningful and relevant.

And yet YPAR is about so much more than simply training young people to mimic the behaviors of adult researchers. Throughout this book, we will discuss how this practice has implications for re-imagining the nature of teaching and learning in formal and informal educational spaces, the ways that education policymakers conceptualize the capabilities and aspirations of young people, and the purpose and ethics of the educational research community as a whole.

We feel that this is an important moment for the educational community to consider YPAR, for while it is generating interest and excitement among educators and researchers, much confusion remains about what it is and how it is done. Is YPAR a theory? A methodology? Simply a framework for engaging young people in research? Educators are engaging in YPAR with students of varying ages, backgrounds, and interests around the country, but for the most part these projects remain isolated and disconnected from each other and from mainstream education research, policy, and practice. We share the story of the UCLA Council of Youth Research in these pages in order to begin to develop some common language around the purpose and practice of YPAR and tease out the lessons that YPAR offers for revolutionizing public education so that all young people experience transformative learning that changes their lives and opens doors of personal, academic, and civic opportunity.

Why YPAR Now?

There are thirty-five of us huddled in a corner of the Sheraton in New Orleans, away from the presentation rooms, trying to find a quiet place in the half hour or so we have before we present. The high school students pose for pictures with their peers and their teachers. Dressed up in suits, they look like they’re headed to work or church; instead, these high school students are about to deliver a presentation to the American Educational Research Association articulating the research on civic engagement and urban educational reform that they have been conducting for an entire school year.

I can sense the combination of nervousness and excitement in their voices, in their movements, as they fumble through their note cards, mouths mumbling the words they will pronounce to a crowd of educational scholars soon enough. I too think about what I want to say—but not to the audience. My concern are these twenty-five 15- to 17-year-olds, my graduate students who work with the project, and the teachers who have all made this nearly 2,000-mile trek from sunny Southern California to The Big Easy. What will we draw upon as our motivation?

Ten minutes prior to show time we convene in our usual circle. Stragglers amble out of bathrooms tucking in shirts and checking their hair. The seniors step up for our traditional pep talk and offer their words of advice and encouragement. Their use of the collective pronoun reminds me again of what we are capable of creating as a society if we only had the will, if we only paid attention, and if we only fully believed in the humanity of these students and the neighborhoods and families from which they came. Everybody wants to feel a part of something special; everyone wants to contribute. We are dreamers all, unless, of course, those dreams through time and heartache have been deferred or extinguished altogether.

But something right has happened with this Council of Youth Research. Again, 100% of the seniors are graduating and heading off to postsecondary education. They are poised, righteously indignant. They are confident, prepared—they are a team. And they are ready, once again, to share a powerful message with the world about the fallacy of equitable schooling and about the role of youth in making the world right. As always on these occasions I am overcome, more by anger than pride. I am angry because we have failed to institutionalize excellence and these moments are the exception rather than the rule. We know how to educate. We know what students need. We know what they are capable of, and the greatest tragedy of all is that we fail to do these things and we live daily with the results. As do all of the countless youth in Los Angeles and cities beyond who have no Council of Youth Research.

Ernest’s reflection—his frustration, his anger—vividly illustrates the challenges characterizing today’s social and educational context. We live in a polarized country in which it is becoming more and more difficult to communicate and find common ground across lines of difference created by racial, socioeconomic, and political inequalities. Communities of extreme wealth sit mere miles away from neighborhoods of extreme poverty and the academic and civic trajectories of young people correspond more to the circumstances of their birth than their aspirations and ability.

The Council students traveled to New Orleans with us to stand before educational researchers and policymakers and put a human face to the educational crises those adults studied in theory—those familiar crises of racial and civic achievement gaps, of funding inequalities, of resource shortages. Through YPAR, the students capitalized on the innate curiosity that teenagers possess about the world around them and their place within it to show these adults what they had found through their own inquiry—that some students in their city were provided with high-quality educational resources to which they themselves were not given equal access. They shared their experiences and dreams and findings, and after these adults were dazzled by their brilliance and floored by the rigor and passion of their research, the students asked of the room: don’t we deserve the resources we need to succeed, too? They shook the moral conscience of every adult in attendance.

YPAR is crucial at this moment because it asks—or rather, demands—that we reconsider the why, how, and who of educational practice and research. Let’s begin with the why—the purpose behind the choices we make in public education. Debates about educational standards and new standardized assessments revolve around the idea that the purpose of K–12 schooling is to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies for college and career readiness, while the purpose of K–12 research is to document successes and failures in achieving that readiness among various subgroups of students. These goals, while certainly worthy, ignore the civic purpose of public education and the idea that schools have a role in preparing young people to become citizens and contribute to the creation of an ever more just democratic society.

By asking young people to put academic skills to use in the purpose of researching and addressing real social problems instead of engaging in hypothetical or abstract academic exercises, YPAR offers a different purpose for teaching and learning—one rooted in social change and the realization of students’ capacities in all areas of life, not only those related to their economic success. And as a research paradigm, YPAR reminds adult educational researchers that inquiry about the world has a responsibility to offer that world information that can lead to the betterment of people’s lives, rather than merely the advancement of one’s career.

Next, the how—what qualifies as legitimate methods of educational practice and research? While critical pedagogy and critical literacy have a foothold in some classrooms today, giving some students opportunities to use their literacy skills for authentic purposes and take on identities as experts, much classroom practice remains teacher-centered and focused upon the acquisition of standardized bodies of knowledge that can be assessed through standardized tests. Similarly, the educational policy community continues to value large-scale quantitative studies that attempt to numerically capture and express human experience while minimizing qualitative research aimed at illuminating the factors that contribute to educational outcomes.

YPAR asks, why can’t personal experience be valued as a valid form of data? Or the oral histories passed down through generations in a community? YPAR encourages young people to explode traditional ideas of knowledge production and use forms of creative expression to share what they know. YPAR also debunks the notion that adult researchers cannot create bonds with participants in their research or take personal part in the research process itself. It encourages us to reconsider how we know what we know and what might be the best methods with which to express that knowledge.

Finally, the who—who is permitted to create knowledge in our society? Whose voices possess legitimacy? The educational establishment, with few exceptions, treats young people as objects rather than subjects throughout their academic trajectories. Adults debate among themselves about what students need and then implement the initiatives that they agree are in students’ best interests. Young people rarely have the opportunity to provide their insights into how and for what purposes they want to be educated; and indeed, on the rare occasions their input is solicited, youth don’t always know what to say because they have never been afforded chances to engage in this kind of thought.

The most revolutionary aspect of YPAR is the realization of the full humanity of young people. YPAR demands that we embrace the potential in all students by offering them opportunities to name, explore, and analyze their experiences, and respect them as authors and experts of their own lives. It also demands humility of adult researchers, reminding them of their duty to honor those who entrust them with their stories and to strive to share in the struggle toward social justice.

Our understanding of the power of YPAR has developed over time through our labor of love with the Council, and it is with the benefit of over 15 years of exploration that we now turn back to analyze how the Council began and choose a slice of the work to focus on in this book.

Origins of the UCLA Council of Youth Research

The work of the Council began in 1997, though at that time it was known as the Futures Project and operated at only one Los Angeles area high school. Through a partnership with the Santa Monica–Malibu Unified School District and the Annenberg Foundation, UCLA professors Jeannie Oakes and John Rogers collaborated with Santa Monica High School to address persistent race and class inequalities in academic achievement.

During their discussions, John developed the core idea that would guide what eventually became the Council: that students should be welcomed into the conversations about the academic pathways offered at their school considering their firsthand experience in the classrooms and other learning spaces on campus. John and his team began working with students in a 9th grade college support class to study academic opportunities by having the freshmen interview seniors about their high school experiences—an endeavor that continued into their sophomore year.

At the end of that year, in the summer of 1999, the team sponsored the first summer seminar on the UCLA campus in order to give these Futures students research training so that they could continue to work proactively to address challenges in their school. By this time, Ernest had joined the UCLA team and taken a leadership role in the program. The summer seminar was so powerful for all involved that Ernest began brainstorming ways to open up the opportunity to more students from different schools across Los Angeles with a particular focus on low-income students of color who attended some of the city’s most troubled, high-poverty schools and could benefit dramatically personally and academically from this empowering learning space.

As the Democratic National Convention prepared to descend upon Los Angeles in August 2000, the summer seminar expanded to offer students from across the city the opportunity to contribute their voices and ideas about the directions in which they thought the country should be headed. In the years to follow, the Futures program morphed into the Council of Youth Research and engaged student teams from five schools across the city in developing critical research skills, analyzing the major tenets of critical sociology, and sharing their projects in culminating presentations to adult policymakers, educators, and community leaders.

The topics that Council students explored evolved over the years in response to major current events; for example, students interviewed civil rights leaders and conducted original historical research about diversity and access in Los Angeles in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. They explored the impacts of the budget cuts on Los Angeles schools in 2009 as California reeled from the effects of the national economic recession. In all cases, however, these events provided merely a frame within which students developed and explored research questions that they found meaningful. They worked in teams supported by teachers and UCLA researchers to develop their multimedia projects.

By the time that Nicole and Antero began their studies in the Urban Schooling doctoral program at UCLA in 2008 and learned about the Council from John and Ernest (their advisors), the program had gained enough financial backing to support the hiring of a program coordinator as well as several graduate student researchers. Nicole, Antero, and a team of fellow doctoral students began working with Council students and their guiding teachers year-round as the summer seminar segued into weekly after-school meetings, Saturday seminars, and springtime presentations. The Council had solidified its reputation as a program that offered young people who attended struggling schools in South and East Los Angeles the opportunity to see themselves as knowledge producers and explore the challenges facing their communities through the research process.

Focus of This Book: Case Study of the 2010–2011 School Year

While we could have filled volumes exploring the work of the Council over the past (nearly) two decades, we believe that providing a detailed story of the Council at a particular moment in time offers readers an in-depth portrait that is both specific to one year but also generalizable enough to resonate in a variety of current educational contexts as well. The 2010–2011 school year represented a high point in our ability to actualize our YPAR model to its fullest potential for several reasons.

First, we were enjoying the financial support of multiple foundations, as well as the City of Los Angeles, which enabled us to provide stipends to teachers and graduate students, give summer jobs to our young participants, offer technology and other learning resources to support student research, and travel to research sites and professional conferences to share findings. This represented a level of support that was unusual not only for our group, but for almost all of the YPAR projects with which we are familiar. While it may seem impractical to lay out a vision for this work based on such a rare, highly resourced example, we feel that the impact that the year’s activities had on students and teachers justifies telling the story, showing what is possible, and asking what resources we are willing to commit to creating transformative educational opportunities for all young people.

Second, we had reached a point at which the collective knowledge, experience, and commitment of the educators involved in implementing the program had created a sort of YPAR dream team. Ernest and John had over a decade of experience under their belts from which to draw as they designed the yearly plan; Nicole had hit her stride in coordinating the logistics for the program; and she, Antero, and the rest of the graduate students and teachers had built relationships based on previous work together that set the stage for a powerful and collaborative experience. Again, we focus on this year not only to celebrate the accomplishments of an extraordinary group of individuals, but to document the time and effort needed to build this kind of critical community among adults and young people.

Finally, we decided to focus on the 2010–2011 school year in this book because it was during this year that we dedicated our work to the exploration of issues that continue to resonate in today’s educational context—the educational opportunities to which all young people are entitled and ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Theoretical and Epistemological Foundations of YPAR
• Interlude: Discussing the Council’s Origins
• 3 The Pedagogy of Relationships as the Core of YPAR
• Interlude: Brokering Relationships in the Council
• 4 Asking Research Questions
• Interlude: Reflecting on the Council’s Pedagogy
• 5 Making Methodological Choices
• Interlude: Transforming Practice and Identity in the Council
• 6 Becoming Researchers through Data Collection and Analysis
• Interlude: Changing Young Lives in the Council
• 7 Producing and Sharing Research
• Interlude: Demanding Change through YPAR
• 8 YPAR in the Academy
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix A: In Their Own Words: Students Explain the Council of Youth Research
• Appendix B: 2010 Summer Seminar Reading List
• Appendix C: UCLA/IDEA Council of Youth Research Survey: The State of Education in California
• Appendix D: YPAR Symposium Proposal Submitted to the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association
• Appendix E: Scholarly Publications Authored by Adult Members of the Council about YPAR
• Index