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Research With a (Public) Purpose: Benefits and Challenges of Conducting Inquiry for Equity Through Youth Participatory Action Research

Sat, April 9, 4:05 to 5:35pm, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 102 B

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a research-practice partnership that prompts productive reflection among education faculty members about the nature of knowledge production and the position and purpose of universities in society, especially in a current neoliberal context characterized by growing inequality and the diffusion of market forces throughout public life. University researchers who choose to engage in collaborative research alongside K-12 youth simultaneously negotiate their own positionality as scholars committed to community-based research and university representatives attempting to meet institutional norms to attain tenure and job security.

Our study explores the complex and varied ways in which 26 university faculty members who engage in YPAR conceptualize the multiple purposes of their YPAR programs and theorize the role of the university in this work. Special attention will be paid to the UCLA Council of Youth Research, a YPAR program that has managed these tensions for over 15 years.

Neoliberalism has altered the way universities operate and conceptualize their relationship to the public. This ideology envisions the primary role of universities as preparing a globalized workforce. Universities increasingly follow a model of “academic capitalism” in which they are pressured to partner with the private sector to increase revenue via “ the commodification of knowledge and subjects of higher education” (Torres, 2011, p. 190). In effect, these ideas push universities away from the mission of educating citizens and contributing to the public good (Dewey, 1927).

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) operates according to a radically different paradigm than the neoliberal common sense – one that is focused on the local experiences of marginalized individuals and is committed to educational equity and social justice (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). YPAR’s emergence within higher education represents an effort on the part of many university faculty members to challenge dominant epistemological and methodological understandings of who can conduct research, how, and for what purposes.

To explore this practice, we conducted 30-60 minute semi-structured interviews with 26 university faculty members who engage in YPAR with K-12 youth, representing a range of geographic locations, genders, and racial backgrounds. We recruited participants by reviewing current YPAR scholarship. We organized our data analysis around three categories based on the major elements of YPAR that emerged from our literature review – student learning, social change, and knowledge production. We developed a typology for how participants conceptualize YPAR as simultaneously encouraging participation in and transformation of existing educational structures.

Findings indicate that participants use YPAR to channel their personal and professional commitments to educational justice and collaborative research. They work to balance the multiple goals of their programs, making compromises along the way as they try to help students simultaneously succeed within and transform an educational system structured by the neoliberal common sense. Faculty members indicate that universities largely do not value YPAR as academic scholarship, but they persist in the work in order to reassert the importance of universities in addressing social problems and challenge dominant understandings of who can produce knowledge.

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