Into Their Hoods: Where Youth Participatory Action Research and Critical Performance Pedagogy Birth Resistance

• In Event: Challenging Neoliberal Reforms Through Collaborative, Community-Engaged Research

Abstract

Study Purpose: It is our role as critical educators to find ways that disrupt the reproductive systems in schools that perpetuate the over-deterministic pathways to failure. In contrast to high-stakes testing, traditional texts, and rote activities, the practice of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) emphasizes the “acquisition of knowledge on injustice as well as skills for speaking back and organizing for change” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). Similar to education, the stage can also be a tool to reproduce cultural hegemony or can be a forum where actors--both performers and audience members--can imagine, voice, and transform a better world (Boal, 1979). Like YPAR, critical performance pedagogy utilizes the stage as a place to expose the problems that students face “in their hoods” and build students’ agency to advocate for social justice within their communities. In this paper, we provide an extended case study of how teachers in Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP) combine YPAR with critical performance pedagogy to engage youth in an education that is responsive to their lives.

Methods: Through participant observation and interviews with students and teachers, we examine the development and impact of YPAR and critical performance pedagogy in PEP over the last five years. We will focus on the impact of how PEP has planned, taught, and organized the following elements of their curriculum:
1. Critical performance pedagogy in the classroom.
2. YPAR with elementary, middle, high school, and college students.
3. PEP Community Show: At the end of every school year, PEP has produced a community show where students share their YPAR results in a creative way.

Theoretical Framework: PEP’s curriculum develops what Solorzano and Bernal (2001) name as transformational resistance. PEP undermines the neoliberal tendencies of teacher education programs that foster an individualistic training that promotes standards compliance and technocratic skills, which are often valued over responsive teaching. Through the intensive study of critical pedagogy including the work of scholars such as: Antonia Darder, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Jeffery Duncan-Andrade, and Gloria Ladson-Billings, as PEP teachers we are tasked to constantly and critically question, reflect, and become active participants in changing our world for the better. We examine how different hierarchies based on race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. are used to oppress people in our society. Our goal in the classroom is to build each other’s critical consciousness through dialogue with one another in a way where everyone’s knowledge and contributions are valued. As opposed to neoliberal notions of wealth and capital and a market-driven education, in PEP we use Yosso’s (2006) concept of resistant capital and cultural wealth to challenge the hegemony of monetary capital and to provide an education that humanizes and values marginalized knowledge, especially that of our students and their communities.

Results and Conclusion: Through YPAR and critical performance pedagogy, students-- from traditionally marginalized communities--gain the opportunities to challenge inequities that they witness and experience on a regular basis thereby allowing them to see their own power to transform the material conditions of “their hoods.”

Authors

• Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, San Francisco State University

• Arlene Sudaria Daus-Magbual, University of San Francisco

• Maharaj Desai, University of Hawaii - Manoa