The Politics of Talk About Schools: Power Relations in Qualitative Research With Children

• In Event: Democratizing Qualitative Methods: Insights From Critical Childhood Studies

Abstract

Over the course of three years, an interdisciplinary research team embarked on a qualitative and action research project with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students from five urban middle schools. Taking children seriously as knowledge-producers, we sought to democratize education research by collaborating with youth on issues of urban school reform. To do so, students created films that documented their perspectives, insights, and knoweldges of their schools. Students, after all, “possess unique knowledge and perspectives about their schools that adults cannot fully replicate” (Mitra, 2009, p. 313).

Drawing from the new sociology of childhood (Munoz, 2006; Mayall 2002; Christensen and James 2008; Matthews, 2007; Waksler’s, 1996; Lee, 2001; De Lissovoy 2008) and critical studies of student voice (Arnot and Reay, 2007; Bragg, 2007; James, 2007), we recognized that our assumptions about what urban youth can know, adult-youth power relations, issues of race and racism, and the constraints imposed by the school structure complicated our collaborations. Although we began this research project by positioning urban youth as collaborators in urban school reform, we sometimes slipped into familiar adult roles that silenced, dismissed, misinterpreted, or marginalized students and their knowledges. Struggling with these issues meant that we had to address developmental theories about young people, the social construction of authority in the schools where we worked, our own racism, and the pressure to “produce” findings in accordance with the research grants we received. These complications crafted the “structures in our minds” that often discourage adults from eliciting and attending to student voice; these “structures in our minds” shaped how we listened to and, thus, interpreted students’ accounts (Cook-Sather, 2002, p. 4).

Given these complications, this paper asks: What does it mean to consult with children in a qualitative action research project? What do adult researchers have to negotiate in order to work with young people? How does power constrain collaborations with urban youth? In answering these questions, this paper documents the strategies researchers employed to account for the complications working with young people raised. Drawing from our research experiences with children, this paper examines the work adult researchers must do to consult with middle school youth, including challenging our own assumptions about what urban youth can know, being reflexive about our own behavior in relation to people who occupied less authoritative and less racially privileged positions than we did, acknowledging the power dynamics that were occurring by making them a public part of our meetings with students, offering students a chance to comment on these power relations, and providing the space for students to correct our interpretations of their experiences.

Qualitative methods that address students’ perspectives of urban schools contribute to placing their understandings and insight into the public realm. This presentation contributes to mapping the political and methodological strategies used to account for power relations in action research projects with children. In doing so, this project works to democratize educational research, dismantle hegemonic methods, and disrupt dominant ways of understanding and interpreting the voices and experiences of urban youth.

Author

• Nicole Nguyen, University of Illinois at Chicago