Exploring the Role of Interest Convergence in Youth Participatory Action Research Within Traditional Institutions

• In Event: 63.063 - Critical Examination of Emerging Tensions in Youth Participatory Action Research and Building Liberatory Praxes

Abstract

Utilizing storytelling as methodology, the author shares a real-life account as a graduate student researcher conducting a yearlong YPAR project alongside minoritized youth within a school district-university partnership (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). Although the YPAR literature offers empirical studies focused on research projects with community-based organizations, organizing groups, and out-of-school contexts (Cammarota & Fine, 2010; Guishard, 2009; Kirshner, 2010; Kirshner & Pozzoboni, 2011; Tuck, 2012), this presentation builds on a segment of the literature that focuses on YPAR actualized within traditional institutions such as schools, school districts, and universities (Author, 2018; Oakes, Rogers, & Lipton, 2006; Wright, 2010). The author offers that there are unique tensions and challenges that warrant a closer examination, such as contending with authoritative power, that surface for groups engaged in YPAR within traditional institutions. The author details the tensions that surface when adults within this partnership decide to control the direction of this youth-led research project. Youth researchers originally sought to study the racialized discipline gap within the district, aiming to interview Black and Latinx students about their lived experiences with behavior policies. However, partnership officials rejected the youth’s proposed research out of fears around what the research findings could surface, perhaps shedding light on detrimental disciplinary practices in the school district, thus producing negative attention to a highly publicized and prominent partnership in the community. Instead, student researchers were permitted to study educators in their schools who worked effectively with Black and Latinx students—a more palatable research topic for adults in the project to support.
The author declares that working within university-school district partnerships or inside schools might require some negotiation and compromise on the part of YPAR participants leading, at times, to a form of interest convergence when actualizing YPAR in deeply contested spaces (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000). Stemming from a key principle of Critical Race Theory, interest convergence refers to the idea that the interests of racially marginalized groups “will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites” (Bell, 1980, pg. 523). Within this university-school district partnership, an interest convergence occurred between the adults in the partnership and youth researchers: adults permitted students to engage in YPAR under strict conditions so adults could market the partnership to the larger community as a tool to address racial disparities. For youth in the YPAR project, even though they were denied their initial research project, they recognized the professional benefit engaging in research studying effective educators within their schools.
This presentation aims to explore whether the interests of YPAR participants should/could/have to align at times with the interests of adults holding power within traditional institutions. The author examines the following research questions in her presentation: What does interest convergence look like in the context of a YPAR project within a school district-university partnership? What are the limitations of interest convergence when operating within the confines of the exact institutions that perpetuate and uphold the inequities that YPAR participants aim to dismantle and disrupt through critical research?

Authors

• Van T Lac, The University of Texas - San Antonio

• Lisa Mendoza Knecht, The University of Texas - San Antonio