Youth Participatory Action Research in Teacher Education: Developing Critical and Capacity-Oriented Understandings of Children and Youth

• In Event: 81.020 - Centering Youth Knowledge in Teacher Education: Youth Participatory Action Research's Promise and Complexity for New Teacher Development

Abstract

Objectives
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for employing YPAR as a context and tool for teacher learning. We argue that YPAR can support the development of capacity-oriented understandings of children and youth, fostering a social justice orientation for preservice teachers’ work in schools serving young people from racially minoritized, and economically oppressed communities.

Theoretical Frame
Research on preparing teachers for urban schools suggests a need to design programs addressing the specific conditions of teaching and learning in urban contexts in which the majority of schools serve students whose lives bear the brunt of unjust economic and political policies that marginalize people from low income, and racially/ethnically minoritized communities (Carter Andrews, 2009; Schulz, Jones-Walker, & Chikkatur, 2008). A number of innovative approaches (see for e.g. Author 1 & Author 2, 2009; Matsko & Hammerness, 2014) highlight teaching new teachers to understand structural constraints on achievement; recognize the knowledge and strengths that children and their families bring to the table; and learn to teach in ways that can be characterized as student-centered, constructivist, and justice-focused.

Methods/Data Sources
This paper draws on nine years of collaborative research and practice in an urban teacher education program. In this program, teacher candidates facilitate after school youth participatory action research clubs in elementary, middle and high schools serving diverse and historically educationally marginalized populations of students. Over the course of nine years, over 100 student teachers have led approximately 45 of these clubs. During this time, the authors collected data by interviewing and surveying student teachers, collecting their written reflections, and taking field notes in the seminar they attended weekly to support their work. These materials were coded and analyzed thematically.

Results
We argue that, as a student directed curriculum, YPAR provides a transformative context for teacher learning in three critical arenas. First, novice teachers learn about the passions, knowledge, interests, capabilities, and standards that their students have—capacities often masked when these same students are engaged in normative classroom curricula. Second, novice teachers must learn to reconsider their roles, and move into more egalitarian, democratic roles with their students. Finally, novice teachers are asked to confront the structural constraints that frame the lives of their students. We show that these possibilities live alongside challenges, recognizing that YPAR offers a tool, but not a panacea for disrupting deeply entrenched deficit views of children, youth, and their communities.

Significance
This paper speaks to the possibilities and continuing struggles of developing robust pre-service teacher education through which novice teaches are challenged to confront deficit views of children, youth, families, and their communities. In the current political and historical moment, is is essential to create spaces for teachers learning in which new educators can begin to reframe their relationships with their young charges and grapple with the ways that both they and their students are situated amid racial and economic structures. Cultivating humanizing and liberating approaches is essential for new teachers to learn to fight against these structures, alongside their students, and their families, and communities.

Authors

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

• Beth C. Rubin, Rutgers University