Complicating Action Verbs of a “Common Core” Curriculum: Tracing Echoes Across a Social-Participatory Youth Coresearcher Methodology

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Everyday discourses across contested discussions on teacher evaluation and a core curriculum position youth as deficits to communities, thereby reifying linear notions of learning, regulating youth identities, and reigning in and ruling out youth’s imaginaries. I developed and use a Social-Participatory Youth Co-Researcher Methodology (Marciano & Watson, 2011) to explore in an in-depth qualitative, interpretive study (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) how 12 Black and Latina/o youth in producing meaning across creative and artistic artifacts and practices bound to their lived experiences with hip-hop remix everyday notions of youth and schooling. I build upon Giroux’s (1986) construction of a “discourse of production,” which he notes:
represents an important starting point for […] evaluat[ing] the relationship between schools and wider structural forces in light of a politics of human dignity – […] realized in public spheres […] for work, dialogue, and self- and social-realization. (p. 61) In undertaking an analysis of narratives of youth’s discourses of production, I construct an action-oriented theoretical/conceptual framework built upon sociocultural theories of learning and conceptual understandings of the remix (Dyson, 2003) across domains I call “chords for remixing.” Musically, playing two or more notes simultaneously creates a chord (Harte et al., 2005) while chords played differently make up new remixes. Across these chords – (re)imagining identities; constructing/uncovering knowledge(s); and learning literacies – the interplay of (re)imagining identities and constructing/uncovering new knowledges involves contextualizing what I call “civic imaginaries,” a highlighting of ways in which “discourses not only represent the world as it is (or rather as seen to be), they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world” (Fairclough 2003, p. 124). For instance, considering civic imaginaries at the juncture of identities and knowledges
involves examining how youth learn on their own terms without acquiescing hip-hop identities (Duncan, 2010).
This poster examines in detail a subset of findings with implications for practice, research, and policy that I call “tracing echoes.” “Tracing echoes” considers exchanges emerging as I invited youth to enact a Social-Participatory Youth Co-researcher Methodology by commenting-upon and editing the interview protocol, posing a question to which the next co-researcher/participant responded. In tracing echoes I reflect upon how a researcher may tussle with “relational responsibilities” across research engagements, notably notions of “temporality,” “sociality,” and “place” (Clandinin & Huber, 2010) emerging when one youth co-researcher asks a question answered by another youth across spaces which I think of as echoes. Thus, “tracing echoes” considers what happens when as researchers we consider co-researcher/participants talk across, for starters, inviting echoes, affirming echoes, extending echoes, and absenting echoes.

Author

• Vaughn W.M. Watson, Michigan State University