Provoking Struggle and Insight: Facilitating Youth Participatory Action Research as a Teacher Education Practice for Social Justice

• 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 study investigates the relationship between teacher candidates’ experiences facilitating youth participatory action research (YPAR) and their developing understandings of youth civic identity, the schools and communities they served, and the practice of teaching. We also sought to make good on YPAR’s aim of elevate the voices of young people and promote democratic education in schools and communities in which self-determination has been circumscribed. Finally, the study investigated the developing partnerships between a teacher education program at a large, public university, and five public elementary, middle and high schools, some of which have hosted afterschool YPAR programs for the past decade.

Theoretical Framework
Many young people living in racially minoritized, economically disinvested communities have engaged in critical inquiry and action to spark change in their neighborhoods and schools (e.g., Akom, Shah, Nakai, & Cruz, 2016; Cahill, 2010; Cammarota & Fine, 2010; Abu El-Haj, 2009). Such projects cast young researchers as intellectual authorities and drivers of inquiry, answering critical educational scholars’ calls to flatten traditional hierarchies between student and teacher, bridge divides between school and community, and engage in the practice of asserting agency at the grassroots (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Freire, 1993, 2018; Ginwright & James, 2002; Author 2, 2015). This work also considers how educators might further their understandings of democratic practice and critical civic inquiry in school spaces (Author 5, 2007, 2012; Levinson, 2007; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004).

Methods and Data
Teacher candidates at the teacher education program engaged in youth participatory action research with student groups at five public elementary, middle and high schools. Our team conducted field observations, interviews and focus groups with teacher candidates, cooperating school faculty and administrators and collected data from the seminar in which teacher candidates engaged in academic readings, discussion of and writing about the YPAR process. All data were analyzed thematically.


Results
Preliminary analysis revealed how leading youth participatory action research within a traditional school setting provoked a tension, marked by both struggle and insight, between teacher candidate identity and the more critical, youth empowerment aims of YPAR. Teacher candidates struggled to balance the authoritative and pragmatic demands of being a teacher with the desire to empower student voice and control in an authentic YPAR program, an ongoing struggle to turn the theoretical language of critical pedagogy they endorsed in their coursework and reflections into action when facilitating youth clubs.

Significance
The struggles of teacher candidates as they facilitated Youth in Action clubs indicates that learning to teach for social justice is a challenging process requiring persistence and reflection rather than a discrete and easily transferable skill. YPAR, in many ways philosophically at odds with the dominant institutional logic of state-run public schools, provides an opening for teacher candidates to begin this journey. The study also highlights how YPAR aims might be co-opted by other school agendas or, conversely, how the power of the university-school relationship can be harnessed to amplify the voices of the families and communities both institutions ostensibly serve.

Authors

• Jerald Isseks, Rutgers University

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education

• Ana Paulina Morron, Rutgers University

• Beth C. Rubin, Rutgers University