From Praxis to All Power to the People: Youth Action Research in a Fifth-Grade Urban Classroom

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies Across Subject Areas: Comparative Perspectives From Urban Science, Elementary, and Out-of-School Educational Settings

Abstract

The paper examines the tensions between theory and practice through the reflective study of my ten years of experience as an upper elementary school teacher in Watts, Los Angeles, where I primarily worked with Latino/a and African American youth. Historically, urban/inner city schools have taught regimented basic skills, which, of late, have been reinforced through mandated curriculum (Means & Knapp, 1991; Oakes & Lipton, 2001). In this context, learning too often becomes de-contextualized and disconnected for students who are asked to regurgitate state standards without connecting them to their life situations. Situated in dialogue with theories of social reproduction, resistance, and critical transformative pedagogy (Darder, 1998; Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1988; MacLeod, 1987; McLaren, 2003) this paper dialectically explores theories of critical pedagogy with respect to the development of my students as transformative community agents.

This paper highlights a yearlong critical media literacy, media production, youth participatory action research project in a 5th grade classroom. The curriculum was developed over 10 successive years of implementation, and was composed of four units: I. Developing Knowledge of Self, II. Understanding the Peoples Struggle, III. Developing their Sense of Belonging [within that legacy of struggle], and IV. Creating Transformative Agents of Change [students' roles and duty to act]. Project-based learning drove each unit, including: student research on issues that impact their neighborhoods, action projects based on their research, critical media productions (public service announcements), and public writing (poetry and essays).

Through critical qualitative ethnographic analysis (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1998; Merriam, 1998) of classroom teaching and learning and student work, this study provides classroom practice based examples of the ways in which students develop critical thinking and literacy skills to become active agents of change in their school and community. As a teacher researcher, I collected evidence in the form of student reflections, product samples, observations, interviews, and student data (test scores and trends). The general outcomes from one year are also compared to general trends from the previous years (a span of 10 school years), and reveal a consistency of results over time.

The data demonstrate that students were not only highly engaged academically, but engaged as community participants and change agents. Furthermore, critical youth research extended the scope beyond the classroom, bleeding out into the community, and persisting in the school years after completion of the class. The formation of a grassroots organization, the Watts Youth Collective (WYC), by former students, is an example of one long-term result.

Author

• Laurence A. Tan, WattsYouthCollective/122nd Street School/UCLA IDEA