Reclaiming the Classroom: Engaging Youth Participatory Action Research in School to Create a Third Space

• In Event: 58.055 - Praxis of Participatory Action Research: Generating Equitable Educational Experiences With Youth and Communities

Abstract

Representations of urban youth of Color and their home and community contexts continue to be problematically defined in schools. While merging their social worlds within the educational context provide opportunities for increased academic engagement, these students’ homes and communities are often perceived as uninvolved and deficient (Cushman, 2005; Steele, 2010). Urban youth of Color constantly navigate tensions between rhetoric of school equity and the educational practices marginalizing them and their families (Conchas, 2006). Thus, these students can be powerful influences in shaping solutions and changing disenfranchising school climates. Unfortunately, challenges of under-resourced schools, pressures of high-stakes testing, and top-down educational practices create barriers to developing spaces within schools that engage students in these issues.

Our study engages a counter approach by working with students in schools to engage issues of student achievement, school climate, and home-school dissonance as well as develop solutions. We use third space and hybridity as frameworks to focus on the construction of this space within a high school. Third space theory emphasizes the integration of the first space of home/local community with the second space of more formalized institutions (classroom/school) (Bhabha, 1994; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López & Tejeda, 1999). We use youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a tool for building bridges and engaging in the development of third/hybrid space.

Methods
The research site is Hillside Tech (pseudonym), a predominantly Puerto Rican vocational high school. Eighty-five percent of students in this district come from low-income backgrounds, 80% identify as Hispanic/Latino, and 48% report English is not their first language. The project was embedded in an 11th grade English language arts course comprised of 15 students called “Our Literate Lives Matter: Education Narratives of ‘Hillside’ Youth.” The class engaged YPAR within a school setting. We used a critical ethnographic approach to collect and analyze data from and with students in the course taught every other day for 90 minutes over one academic year. Critical ethnography centered our inquiry on how the classroom space was constructed, shared, and navigated by the students and aligned with our emphasis on youth engagement for social change (Carspecken, 1996; Madison, 2009). Data was drawn from student interviews, participant observation conducted during class sessions, video recordings of class sessions, and students’ writings, photographs, and reflections. We analyzed the data deductively using the theoretical framework and inductively by identifying patterns emerging from students’ narratives (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998).

Findings/Significance
Data analysis revealed a storyline of how students perceived the school environment and how the Our Literate Lives classroom space existed as part of as well as separate from their high school and home life. Findings focus on the process of creating this space within a school, the challenges in doing so, and how students envision such spaces within their schools. We consider how urban youth of Color engage the educational context as a basis for (re)imagining their history, culture, and themselves in order to construct counter-narratives away from the framing as deficient or being depicted in “damage-centered” ways (Tuck, 2009).

Authors

• Chrystal George Mwangi, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Genia Bettencourt, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Daniel Morales, University of Massachusetts - Amherst