A Narrative Depiction of Navigating Civic Outcomes and Race Consciousness in Youth Participatory Action Research

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

Abstract

The author conducted a self-study of organizational youth participatory action practices to unpack the meaning making happening for students as they reflect on their shifts in civic and racial consciousness. The author utilizes a critical whiteness alongside a critical race pedagogical lens to reflect upon the tensions of supporting students of color to acknowledge, witness and remove the veil of their racialization amidst outside pressures for students to perform civically. The author further depicts the tensions that arise as a woman of color leading an organization that engages youth of color.
Critical whiteness studies names and prevents whiteness from being invisibilized. In order to name and interrogate whiteness is must be unveiled. Critical whiteness studies interrogates the savior approach along with the essentialization of the narratives of students of color. Youth participatory action research from a critical race lens suggests racial identity as an integral component of youth navigating participatory action. Watts & Flannagan (2007) and Ginwright & Cammarota’s (2002) models on youth sociopolitical development within a participatory context suggests identity as one of necessary initial steps toward social justice youth development and action. These models validate and acknowledge the need for the infusion of critical race pedagogy as a part of youth participatory action. Critical race pedagogy “…offers insights, perspectives, methods, and pedagogies that guide our efforts to identify, analyze, and transform the structural and cultural aspects of education that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom” (Solórzano, Ceja & Yosso, 2001, p. 63). Critical race perspectives and valuing within participatory action research pushes against the whiteness that permeates the assumed methods, civic tactics, and outcomes imposed upon community organizations and most importantly upon minoritized youth.
In order to better understand the ecology of the organization’s lens on navigating the tension of youth participatory action research a few methods were utilized. First, in order to unpack the ways in which students navigated the organization’s pedagogy and curriculum, the author uses critical hermeneutics of midterm evaluations as a method to reflect the inner-subjectivities of student’s experiences with race centered. Critical hermeneutics takes into account the “[r]ecognition of the influence of prejudice, conditioned by historical circumstances on interpretive stances, foregrounds the necessity of critical analysis of such prejudices” (Kinsella, 2006, p. 6). Critical hermeneutics methodology is necessary to disrupt positivist ideologies in political science. Second, the author reflected on organizational artifacts created to depict the tensions of navigating white norms through language and action. Lastly, the author center’s her counter-story as an Executive Director of color to push against whiteness that can permeate organizational culture and to foreground minoritized narratives in youth participatory action research. Centering her counter-story humanizes the tensions youth being socialized into whiteness and the work needed to remove the veil of whiteness to find one’s humanity within their Brown and Black bodies.

Author

• Janiece Zalina Mackey, Young Aspiring Americans for Social and Political Activism (YAASPA)