Building Urban Scholars: The Black Male Youth Academy

• In Event: Reclaiming Education: Youth Counternarratives in the Neoliberal Reform Era

Abstract

Purpose

Educational inequities have created disproportionate underachievement among African American male youth, when compared to their white male counterparts (Ladson-Billings, 1997), and bear long-term consequences on students’ educational future, employment and family stability (Davis, 2003). Using youth participatory action research (YPAR), I present an in-school intervention program and curriculum focused on critical literacy development that targeted high need African American male youth in a Los Angeles County urban high school. Critical literacy and critical research methodologies can empower teachers and youth to engage in transformative resistance, leading to significant change within the urban schooling environment.

Theoretical framework

Few educational spaces that incorporate critical literacy and YPAR as part of classroom and educational strategy exist. Freire and Macedo (1987) argue, “Literacy becomes a meaningful construct to the degree that it is viewed as a set of functions to either empower or disempower people” (p. 141). Easton (1989) argues the relationship between literacy and knowledge production is one of control. Critical literacy challenges the ‘who’ in knowledge production and offers marginalized peoples the skills needed to fight oppression (Graham, 2005; Freire, 1993). The use of critical literacy builds one’s ability to deconstruct notions of power (Collins, 1995), dynamics of control and efforts to enforce dominant social principles. YPAR, as a critical research methodology, centers the voice of youth as the experts in their own educational experiences and empowers them with tools to create change (Camarrota & Fine 2008; Morrell, 2006). Therefore, the introduction of critical literacy and the effective use YPAR is one strategy to confront educational inequity.

Methods and Data

This study incorporates qualitative research methods and data including observations, class reflections (individual/group), audio/video transcriptions and students’ written artifacts to understand multiple expressions of critical literacy. By asking the following questions, I analyzed the impact of the curriculum intervention while coding for “expressions” of critical literacy in students’ writing, participation and speech.
• How do students speak or respond when they acquire critical literacy?
• How do participants’ worldviews shift when they engage in research?
• How does the program model adapt in order to best meet the needs of the students?

Results

This study found that students’ acquisition of critical literacy occurred during their participation in the program and allowed them to develop conceptual understandings of critical concepts in order to engage in transformative resistance (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). It also found that students might be resistant to change the way they interact with their peers because of cultural and social norms. Furthermore, students master critical literacy across academic disciplines as they come into spaces that reinforce their critical consciousness.

Significance

Teaching critical literacy and using YPAR in schools can help educators address the educational opportunity gap for African American male and urban youth of color. Further, providing proof of successful intervention efforts can lead to the adoption of specialized curricula, the use of critical pedagogy and YPAR as practices for libratory education. Finally, the field will have new ways to apply critical educational research to learning and teaching spaces.

Author

• D'Artagnan Scorza, University of California - Los Angeles