"I Want to Know About Everything That's Happening in the World": Enhancing Critical Awareness Through a Youth Participatory Action Research Project With Latinx Youth

• In Event: Innovations in Urban Education: Insider Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives and Purpose
This study examines the potential of youth participatory action research (YPAR) as an illustration of critical pedagogy (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008) for Latinx youth to support their development of critical awareness. Findings advance the development of grounded theory in critical pedagogy and illustrate key outcomes of such practices.

Perspective
Exploration of how critical pedagogy has encouraged teachers and students to work together toward liberation, how a humanizing critical pedagogy generates critical awareness among the youth, and how YPAR has been used as a tool to empower students.

Methods
Critical ethnography informed our research design’s use of prolonged participation in the field (nine and half months), a critical theory-based framework (critical pedagogy/YPAR), and a focus on culture (specifically school and classroom culture/climate). Critical ethnography centered our inquiry on how the classroom space was constructed, shared, and navigated by the students and ourselves, as well as aligned with our emphasis on youth engagement for social change and justice (Carspecken, 1996; Madison, 2005).

Data Sources
Data for this article was drawn from the broader critical ethnography study that was conducted for nine and half months (one academic school year). We collected data via participant observations, individual student interviews, student focus groups, and students’ photographs, written narratives, and reflections. This paper centers on the 30-minute individual semi-structured interviews with students conducted by the research assistants for the project during the seventh month of the course, with other data used as supplementary for context and triangulation.

Results
Data analysis revealed three major themes for how students gained critical awareness: attention to current events, ethics of care, and challenging traditional curriculum. Although the participants discussed a rise in their critical awareness associated with the YPAR class, a gap remained around how to enact change. In the ELA course, the influence of YPAR was evident in the ways in which students began to challenge deficit perspectives placed upon them. A key theme to come out of the interviews was that students perceived higher levels of awareness, both within their communities and nationally. This awareness was often used to examine systems of oppression and to reframe for students how current events or challenges in their schools were part of a much larger cultural context.

Scholarly Significance
This study illustrates how the ELA class stands as an example of successful “education,” a class that employed critical pedagogy and YPAR as a way of reframing the very purpose and process of educating Latinx youth. YPAR offers a pedagogy of relevance, one that humanizes and empowers and include consideration of the sociocultural–historical context in which it occurs as well as the related power dynamics (Ladson-Billings, 1995).

Authors

• Daniel Morales, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Genia Bettencourt, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Chrystal George Mwangi, University of Massachusetts - Amherst