Youth Participatory Action Research in a School-Based Setting: Expanding the Curriculum and Literacies With Students in an Era of Standards, Testing, and Accountability

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Deconstructing Power: Expanding the Role of Young People as Researchers

Abstract

Building on ideological approaches to literacy represented in research on adolescent literacies, this dissertation study offers Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in a school-based setting as a potentially ideological and activist approach to curriculum and literacy and that can serve as a counterscript to the autonomous approaches that are so prevalent in schools today. Set in a progressive, urban, public high school, this hybrid of qualitative critical ethnographic case study and participatory action research explored a “Social Activism” course in which three student research teams engaged in YPAR on the topics of environmental issues, urban violence, and women’s issues. Major findings pertain to how YPAR and schools are mutually constituted and how youth engaged in a variety of literacies.

Author

• Jennifer M. King, SUNY - College at Geneseo