Performing Literateness in the Spaces in Between: A Case for Participatory, Community-Based Research

• In Event: Participatory Research Methodologies in Equity-Oriented Research: Action Through Literacy

Abstract

Background and Theoretical Perspectives: Youth who experienced long-term juvenile incarceration were 39% less likely than their non-incarcerated peers to graduate from high school (Aizer & Doyle, 2013). Failure to graduate correlates strongly with rates of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and increased mental health challenges (Leone & Weinberg, 2012). Education, along with these other indicators of life outcomes, can foster well-being and successful transitions into adulthood. And opportunities for literacy engagement and play are vital to meaningful educational experiences. However, studies that reinforce existing causal relationships between staid outcomes measures (like reading levels and test performance) and sociocultural factors miss the wealth of activity, insight, and growth that is unfolding in the spaces in between and outside of pre-determined variables and correlations.
 
This is the broader context in which our partnership (as a university-based researcher with a research team and a community-based practitioner with a staff of youth workers at an alternative to incarceration (ATI) program) is situated and has evolved over the past thirteen years. Two main goals have continued to guide our endeavors: 1) to enact research in a reciprocal and participatory manner such that the benefits are not only imagined in the distant future, but that participants and staff experience benefits in the short-term, as well; and 2) that research is pursued with an emphasis on producing new knowledge about justice, education, incarceration, and adolescents by asking different questions, pursuing new forms of inquiry, and disseminating research artifacts that are not limited to scholarly articles, but that keep multiple audiences and stakeholders in mind.
 
Methods and Data Sources: Our collaborative and participatory research team is comprised of youth researchers, graduate students, university faculty, and community-based practitioners. We have been engaged in inquiry together around a variety of issues, including the literate lives of adolescents who become involved with juvenile court. Thus, we have collected and produced traditional ethnographic data, such as field notes and interviews, and have also produced creative artifacts like podcasts, photo essays, videos, and blogs. For this session, we will design an exhibition that will allow participants to engage with the artifacts as well as several of the designers that include adult and youth participants from the ATI program and graduate students and university researchers.
 
Findings and Significance: At a time when big data trends are influencing social policies, long-term, situated, and inquiry-based participatory research stands to provide the most substantial counter-valence to causal explanations of social phenomena. Participatory research establishes and builds upon relationships as sites of knowledge making, toward the co-production of knowledge (Pahl, 2015-16), for example about how court-involved youth are navigating the justice system, or the varied contours of their family lives and their commitments to their communities, or the youths’ educational aspirations and contributions. It brings necessary nuance and texture to understandings of social life, including how literacy is lived and embodied (Enriquez, et al., 2016), and creates opportunities for social change and impact during the research as well as beyond the scope of any single study.

Author

• Lalitha M. Vasudevan, Teachers College, Columbia University