Creating Systemic Change After School in a Youth Participatory Action Research Club

• In Event: 29.030 - Advancing Educational Opportunities Through Inclusive Education: Community-Based Research in Special Education

Abstract

Objective
This paper shares findings from a study of an after-school youth participatory action research (YPAR) program at a middle school in the U.S. Southwest. As schools engage in the slow work of systemic change toward becoming more inclusive, this study looks to the role an after-school spaces that can quickly provide historically marginalized students with access to assets-based reorganize learning ecologies. This study investigated how YPAR served as an inclusive learning space for 7th and 8th grade students of color, students identified with learning disabilities (LD) and/or described as struggling academically, and students identified as English learners (ELs).
Theoretical Framework
This study draws from an interdisciplinary framework using YPAR to engage youth as co-researchers and producers of knowledge in a reorganized learning ecology (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez et al., 1999) and using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT; Engeström, 2008) to make participation visible.
Methods
Data were collected in the Spring of 2015 in after school YPAR club open to 7th and 8th graders in a predominantly Latina/o K-8 school located in the urban fringes of a Southwestern school. Although participation was open to all 7th and 8th graders in the school the authors purposefully included students classified as ELs, students receiving LD services, and students described as struggling academically. This study used YPAR methods that involved students, with adult guidance, learning and engaging in research in order to create social and/or institutional change (Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez, & Scorza, 2015; Irizarry, 2011).
Data Sources and Analysis
The study used video-informed ethnographic data collection methods in order to understand the processes and practices unfolding within YPAR (Erickson, 2006). Data sources included session video recordings, ethnographic field notes, student artifacts, and interviews with students and school adults. We used ethnographic and inductive approaches to analyze the data (Strauss & Corbin, 1994), in addition to combining bottom-up and top-down approaches (Erickson, 1986).
Results
The study results are presented in the context of a school that was in the midst trying to become more student-centered through the used of project-based learning. The authors will present three major findings that vividly show the critical nature of YPAR as an inclusive after-school space where youth transformed school-based literacy, in the form of research, into an agentive tool for thinking, exploring self, and taking action. The authors will present how research took new shape for thinking and how students began knowing themselves and being known in new ways at school. While the YPAR group did not achieve their goal of addressing the bullying issues in their schools to the capacity that they were hoping for, through the research process they began to see their agentive capacities connected to research.
Significance:
The work to create inclusive school systems largely focused on special education placement into general education settings and less so on addressing and disrupting social hierarchies of unequal resource distribution. On such resource is immediate access to inclusive spaces where historically marginalized youth can engage in robust literacies that are useful to their lives.

Authors

• Taucia Gonzalez, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Melanie Bertrand, Arizona State University