"I Believe That We Will Win!" Learning From Youth Activist Pedagogies

• In Event: 31.028 - New Directions in Curriculum Inquiry: Pushing Against/From/With the Margins

Abstract

The demand for relevance in urban schools is at an all-time high, but it is in direct paradox with standardized curriculum and other controls. Education, and education transformation, too often ignore the assets of youth: “Too many schools operate under the false assumption that the quality and character of schools can be shaped by adults alone” (Noguera, 2009, p. 70). In addition, critical youth scholars desire to learn about a specific subset and skillset of youth, the pedagogical strategies of youth organizing groups (Kirshner, 2006; Bishop, 2016).

The national and local context in the fight for Black lives, and other successive oppressions, drove groups of youth activists in this study to demand their pedagogical presence in the schools. This paper draws from a 2-year youth-informed, critical ethnographic study that asked how interracial anti-racist youth groups framed literacies and learning, how they learned, and how literacies and learning were connected to liberation. Research design centered participant needs through the ethics and actions of humanizing and participatory research (Paris & Winn, 2013; Cammarota & Fine, 2008). The study focused on the activities of youth bringing racial justice issues into their schools. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to learn from the youth, who drew from Black feminist ideologies centered in protest spaces, and to ask, what are the pedagogies of youth activists?

I use theories of pedagogy (Britzman, 2012; Freire, 1970; hooks, 2014) to examine its centrality with youth activists in two urban high schools, Eastside and Lakeview, in the upper Midwest. I was a responsive participant observer and a white woman who needed to decenter and interrogate myself and my interactions. Data sources including field notes, transcriptions, and youth-created artifacts in conversation with data analysis with youth. I organized events into thick episodes, using multiple data sources from days preceding, including, and following events. I coded four major events line-by-line (from sit-ins and youth-led teaching) and organized codes into themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Iteratively, I applied themes across the entire data set. As events took place within schools (a domain-of-power), I used Patricia Hill Collins’s (2009) domains-of-power framework for further analysis. I asked, how did youth activist pedagogies rise up as well as resist domains of power? How did youth activism maintain or slip into domains of power and oppression? Findings included an initial understanding of a new concept, youth activist pedagogies. These findings illustrated that interracial youth activists valued and sought to seek, co-construct, and share knowledge through collective youth agency, amidst an ever-present discourse of whiteness.

The significance of this work is two-fold. One, educators will have the opportunity to apply these findings to classroom pedagogy and practice. Two, educators and teacher educators can stretch and apply Hill Collins’s framework to examine their own practices, ideologies, interactions, and structures, to interrogate the pedagogies they enact in school. In order to transform urban schools to be spaces of radical possibilities (Anyon, 2014), we learn from the critical pedagogies of youth who are already working to create change.

Author

• Abigail Rombalski, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities