Care-Based Research in Liminal Spaces: How Hallway Conversations With Youth of Color Create New Ways of Knowing

• In Event: 28.091 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Two - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 28.091-5 - Caring and Being There: Complicating Qualitative Research With Youth of Color in School Settings

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the ways in which inhabiting liminal spaces within a school created opportunities to connect and collaborate with youth of color that ultimately led me to reimagine the nature of researcher-youth participant relationships. I offer illustrations of how being curious, caring, and consistent facilitated connections with youth that catalyzed the creation of three youth-led spaces as well as long-lasting relationships that persisted beyond the scope and time boundaries of my research. By being there, or wherever I was needed, I was able to support young people and learn about their lives through being in conversation with them.

While caring and connecting to youth seems a rather simple premise, feeling cared for or valued often remains elusive for young people of color in schools (Fine, 1991). When students do feel like they are cared for both academically and personally, they flourish (Gay, 2010; Valenzuela, 2010). This can be facilitated by cultivating dialogic relationships that are grounded in a love for people and the world, and suggest that both parties, in this case student and teacher have much to offer (Freire, 1970). I build on these notions of care and dialogic pedagogical relationships and bring them into conversation with humanizing research (Paris & Winn, 2014) that attends to the unspoken challenges in social justice-oriented qualitative research on youth’s lives. This framework bring into focus the research and relationship-building work that emerged from my own ethnographic project.

This paper emerges from a two-year multimodal ethnography during which I documented the practices and experiences of students in a new urban public high school across academic, informal, and out-of-school contexts. I traced students’ identities, literacies, and media practices in three interest-driven and youth-led spaces. The students in my study were mostly Black and Latinx girls and boys who were high school freshmen when the study began. I collected ethnographic field notes, short films, audio recordings, photographs, and interviews. Data analysis included thematic coding (Charmaz, 2014) and integrative memos (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011).

My analyses revealed that inhabiting informal spaces like the lunch room and liminal spaces, like squatting next to a students’ desk in class to help them with an assignment, created opportunities for me to connect with students about things that mattered to them like favorite authors or dreams beyond high school. Students and I cultivated relationships that were not about grades, discipline, or assignments. Instead, we were focused on the moments that we were in. Wissman (2007) in her work with young women writers alluded to Audre Lorde’s notion that we should be “here” or in the present, so that students could be “visible, acknowledged, and heard” (p. 348). As we developed relationships, some students, began to ask for my help in creating youth-led groups but also asked for support in and out of school. My research reveals how traditional power dynamics between adults and students can be usurped through caring and connecting and therefore shift traditional research-participant relationships and create new ways of knowing about youth’s lives.

Author

• Veena Vasudevan, American Museum of Natural History