Homelessness, Stealing, Animal Rights, Bullying: Youth Participatory Action Research Challenges Assumptions About the Civic Capacities of Children

• In Event: 34.071 - Rethinking Civic Action as Embodied and Child-Driven in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

Engaging elementary school children (as young as second grade) in youth participatory action research (YPAR) expands preservice teachers’ ideas of the civic capacities of young children. Our paper illuminates young children’s capacity for civic inquiry and explores how leading children in such efforts expands the critical understandings and student-centered teaching repertoires of new teachers.
Building upon the emancipatory theory of Paulo Freire (1970/1993), participatory action research aims to empower and liberate through the process of participant-led inquiry. Through YPAR, participants engage in identifying and conducting research on issues that impact them directly, putting youth knowledge at the epistemological center (Torre & Fine, 2011; Delgado Bernal, 2002). Youth action research is particularly useful for promoting the civic empowerment of youth living in low-income and racially minoritized communities (e.g. Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Nygreen, 2013; Schultz, 2008), helping them to develop critical analyses important for sociopolitical development (Ginwright & James, 2002; Kirshner, Strobel & Fernandez, 2003; Watts, Williams & Jagers, 2003). However, both YPAR itself and research on the approach tend to focus on older students.

In concert with a small group of early childhood researchers (Author 1 and colleagues; Author, 2016; Nicholson, Shimpi, & Rabin, 2014; Subramanian, 2015), we understand early childhood classrooms to be public spaces within which children are inherently experiencing civic life, and doing civic action, and we view YPAR as a curriculum that can foster explicit attention to the civic lives of children. For nearly a decade, the co-authors have run a program in which teacher education candidates lead after school YPAR clubs in schools, including elementary, in the semester following their student teaching practicum. This paper analyzes data collected over these years including surveys, focus groups, seminar discussions, and interviews with teacher education students; school based observations, presentations by the children; and materials from a child study assignment conducted by preservice teachers.

Our analysis demonstrates that YPAR changes preservice teachers’ understandings of what young children know and are concerned about in relation to civic life. Preservice teachers were often concerned about children’s capacity to engage in critical civic inquiry and the developmental “appropriateness” of children addressing “grown-up problems.” Alternately, novice teachers saw the children’s concerns as innocent, naive, or simply “cute”.  Learning about the children through YPAR demonstrated that children have deep knowledge and concerns about conditions of inequality and injustice in their schools and their communities of which teachers were often unaware. YPAR provided a context for supporting teachers to rethink normative assumptions about childhood, children’s lives, and children’s capacities.

Examination of this YPAR program provides a roadmap for ways the elementary school curriculum could be developed to more thoroughly and critically engage young children as social actors, and critical civic participants. Moreover, YPAR offers a path for teacher education programs to support preservice teachers to begin from students’ knowledge and perspectives, and taking seriously the notion that children are already civic actors, not just civic actors in training.

Authors

• Thea R. Abu El-Haj, Barnard College, Columbia University

• Beth C. Rubin, Rutgers University