Youth Activism and Learning: Horizontal Forms of Learning Through Participation in an Environmental Restoration Project

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Youth Voice and Learning

Abstract

While low youth participation in the public sphere is a concern for researchers and policy makers, youth are engaging in nontraditional forms of activism to address social issues. At the same time, youth activist groups are considered learning environments. Using a combination of collaborative ethnographic methods and a multi-site ethnographic approach, I pursue to illustrate the ways in which young activists engage in learning opportunities that emerge through their participation in a local environmental restoration project. Drawing from Gutiérrez’s (2008) construct learning as movement, the paper focuses on the horizontal forms of learning that might emerge in youth’s activist work to broaden the research of learning processes within and through youth activism by building in learning as movement.

Author

• Marcos D. González Flores, Michigan State University