Reimagining Futures With Court-Involved Youth Through Everyday Acts of Citizenship

• In Event: 64.089 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 64.089-10 - Writing Co-Production: Thinking, Feeling, and Knowing Together

Abstract

Objective:
In this paper, we examine youths’ everyday citizenship practices and detail the ways that our research methods and pedagogies stretched and evolved to nurture these practices in solidarity with youth and the staff at Journeys, an alternative to incarceration program. We recognize that youth practices are imbued with the pursuit of belonging, membership, and connection across the social institutions, communities, and digital landscapes they traverse (Ito et al., 2010; Leurs, De Haan, & Leander, 2016). Taken together, these attributes offer a view of citizenship as both already existing and as fertile ground in which to cultivate increased access to educational, economic, and aesthetic trajectories that are significant for the transition from adolescence to adulthood. For youth who become involved with the juvenile justice system, the future can take on an improbable, and at times paralyzing, quality.

Perspectives and Modes of Inquiry
Our collaborative ethnographic work with Journeys is framed by a view of multimodality as embodied (Bezemer, Cope, Kress, & Kneebone, 2014) and participatory, such that we oriented ourselves toward young people with a wide palette of tools for noticing, observing, communicating, collaborating, representing, and engaging with their practices. This meant that throughout our pedagogically infused participant observation (Author et al.; Clark, 2011), we co-produced myriad pedagogical spaces, shared experiences, multimodal artifacts, relationships, and texts. Thus, multimodality was engaged as an orientation toward research that framed the nature of our participation with the youth and adults at Journeys. We facilitated weekly workshops with adolescent participants, coordinated special projects that reflected the mission of the organization, conducted ethnographic observation and artifactual interviews, wove in the use of digital media in our activities to support broader organizational goals. Our outcomes were also collaboratively identified, collectively shaped, and communicated through means and modes intended for multiple audiences.

Insights and Significance:
The everyday acts of citizenship that we witnessed and supported as part our ongoing partnership with Journeys catalyzed the coproduction of curriculum, pedagogy, and research with youth and adult participants. We generated artifacts and experiences that were both fleeting (hallway interactions, conversational maps) and more sustained (a project blog, multimedia curriculum guide). In this vein, we observed changes in everyday citizenship practices to range from the institutional (i.e., co-creating materials that inform judges’ decision about young people’s fate) to the academic (i.e., collaborative academic conference presentations and co-authored publications) to the mundane (i.e., youth taking opportunities to ask questions). Thus, to an already robust literature on varied conceptualizations of citizenship (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Maira & Soep, 2005), we contribute two interwoven conclusions: 1) to reimagine future educational, economic, and aesthetic trajectories is to coproduce immediate spaces and practices of everyday citizenship with youth; 2) realigned future narratives are vital for sustaining practices of citizenship in current contexts of educational practice. Everyday citizenship, thus, was coproduced through the artifacts, texts, curriculum and pedagogies that resulted from our research-practice partnership.

Authors

• Lalitha Vasudevan, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Kristine Rodriguez Kerr

• Ahram Park

• Katherine Newhouse, Teachers College, Columbia University