Latina Teenagers Forging Community Counternarratives Through Multimodal Photovoice Youth Participatory Action Research

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

Abstract

Young Latinas in the United States face interrelated challenges in the areas of education (Gándara & Contreras, 2009; Dolan, 2009), health (Ridley-Kerr & Wilf, 2012; Office of Women’s Health, 2013), and civic engagement (National Conference on Citizenship, 2015).

Community advocacy organizations highlight the urgent need to include members of the Latina community in conversations about the root causes and possible solutions to the challenges they are facing in order to honor their lived experiences and ensure that they have leadership roles in community outreach (National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, 2012; NWLC & MALDEF, 2009).

This study highlights YPAR as a means of cultivating critical consciousness and youth leadership by exploring how 12 Latina teenagers living in a high-poverty neighborhood in Los Angeles utilize a combination of multimodal literacies to express their experiences of physical and mental health, education, and civic engagement in the context of a community enrichment program.

The research questions explored include: 1. How do Latina teenagers express their understanding of and experiences with physical and mental health, education, and civic engagement through engaging in YPAR? 2. To what extent and how does the pedagogy and practice of multimodal literacy/photovoice benefit Latina teens across these three domains?

YPAR, the theoretical framework for this study, humanizes young people as experts of their experiences and as critical research-activists who can work towards community empowerment (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). YPAR positions urban youth as “transformative intellectuals” (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008).

The study uses photovoice methodology that encourages members of marginalized groups to take and discuss photographs in order to reclaim their voices, foster empowerment, and spark dialogue and action about issues of public concern (Wang 1999). Photovoice draws heavily Freirian (1970) pedagogical praxis and from feminist theory in seeking to highlight the subjective experiences of women and expose societal assumptions about who has the authority to define a community or create knowledge about it (Hesse-Biber & Yaiser, 2004).

Data collection took place from February to June 2016 and involved: fieldwork observations of an extracurricular photovoice YPAR program geared toward young Latinas (7 site visits, 3 hours each visit), two semi-structured interviews with program coordinators, two hour-long focus groups with youth participants, and analysis and discussion of photographs. Ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1974), visual sociology (Kress, 2010) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) guided data analysis.

This study found that multimodal YPAR tools offer unique opportunities and challenges in amplifying student voices and situating them as community leaders with solutions to offer about society’s most pressing problems. Findings indicate that the young women in the program utilized complex linguistic repertoires that simultaneously reflected and challenged dominant discourses about their communities and made conscious choices in their multimodal literacy practices to highlight aspects of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to audiences including both community insiders and outsiders. YPAR provided a purpose for multimodal literacy production and enabled students to translate leadership and empowerment rhetoric into concrete community actions.

Author

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University