Crafting Resistance and Agency Through Youth Participatory Action Research: A Critical Analysis of the Pedagogy of Urban Youth

• In Event: What Makes Pedagogy “Critical,” Anyhow? Translating Social Theory Into Practice in Urban Learning Contexts

Abstract

Young people living in urban areas must deal with countless social toxins on a daily basis (e.g. sub-par learning conditions, poverty, violence, lack of social services, and many more), making it almost impossible for them to survive, let alone academically succeed. But because of a deficit perspective of urban youth, the larger society believes that young people coming from these upbringings either perpetuate their own demise or do not have the abilities to change their realities (Wyn and White 1997; Akom 2003). Although this may seem to be the grim reality of young people in urban areas, we argue that youth residing in urban areas resist and find ways to cope with and transform the inequitable conditions they face, eliciting this concept of agency.

Building on Solorzano and Bernal’s (2001) scholarship on the transformative impact Latino/a youth resistance in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1990s, our research looks at how some forms of transformative resistance can also be pedagogical. When youth empower themselves to utilize the proper tools and are provided with the relevant learning opportunities, they become not only agents of social change but also teachers. In this paper, we focus on data that illustrate the ways that students from two large urban high schools in Los Angeles developed their sense of agency and advocated for themselves and their community by conducting participatory action research, a research methodology that positions young people as critical sociologists and experts of their own experiences (McIntyre 2000; Morrell 2004).

Using a participatory action research methodological design, we followed the scholarly and agentic trajectory of 12 students over the span of a school year. As participants of the Freedom Scholars Program, they utilized the learning opportunities in this college access program to engage in developing Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) projects around issues in their schools and surrounding community. Gramsci (1991), when talking about how individuals strategize against social hegemony, proposed the concepts of war of position and war of maneuver. Using this framework, we argue that in their processes of enacting their agency, these students moved from a place of research (war of position/theory) to a place of teaching (war of maneuver/action)—a concept that we term pedagogy of agency. Through this pedagogy, the students developed the potentials and capabilities as legitimate experts to teach and dialogue with their community, as well as decision-makers, about what’s going on in their lives and what needs to happen to transform their inequitable experiences.

Moreover, the students have successfully spurred change through their pedagogy of agency. Several teachers and school administrators have reported actively seeking to change school-level educational conditions, such as curriculum and pedagogy, in response to the students’ advocacy efforts. In exploring both the processes through which the students enact a pedagogy of agency and the impacts of this, our research indicate that students should be considered legitimate teachers who have the potential to create change.

Authors

• Mark Bautista, The University of Texas - Arlington

• Melanie Bertrand, University of Southern California