Structural and Relational Entanglements in Teacher Education and Participatory Inquiry and Action Involving Youth

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

Abstract

Purpose
The paper examines efforts in participatory inquiry and action with early adolescents, high school students, and teacher candidates. The context was an after-school program in a K-8 public school identified by the district as “underperforming.” The school serves a majority of African American students from economically stressed neighborhoods within an increasingly privatized Midwestern urban district landscape. In the spirit of collective reflexivity, we consider the ways in which the project neared goals of transformation or cathartic validity and the ways in which it reproduced social and material relations (Chiu, 2006; Drame & Irby, 2016; Nichols, 2009).

Theoretical Framework
We situate the project within a context of educational structural violence where the power over resources is not equally distributed, public protections are violated (Farmer, 1996; Galtung, 1969), and circuits of dispossession cut across systems of health, employment, incarceration, and education (Fine & Ruglis, 2009). We theorize participatory inquiry and action with youth as potentially transformative and yet often unable to freely disentangle itself from the social replication of inequities within schools.

Methods and Data Sources
Employing a case study research approach, we used thematic analysis to examine five years of a spring semester social foundations course during which field experience involved undergraduates in an after-school program at a K-8 public school. Analysis involved the study of each year as a single case to allow within case and across case analyses. Data sources included teacher candidate journals, video footage, student creative products, instructor field notes, course materials and evaluations, and focus group data.

Findings
As the teacher candidates studied the history of educational policy and current issues in education, they worked alongside high school mentors to support the early adolescents and their collective inquiry. The use of creative arts drew teacher candidates and youth into relations of meaning with story telling, poetry, and film as methods of collecting and analyzing data. The instructors used texts on the local history of racial segregation and inequitable school funding to frame the on-the-ground observations of disinvestment teacher candidates wrote about and discussed in their course assignments. In some cases this allowed for a more complex analysis. The role of individual agency complicated the inquiry as youth and teacher candidates drew from their stories of struggle and strength in ways that offered hope, humanity, and new understandings of their brilliance. Individual analyses also had the potential to occlude power relations across race, social class, gender identity and expression, and other constructions of difference. We found evidence of strong relational connections, the inclusion of youth experiential knowledge, new understandings through the creative arts, and critical engagement with history and educational policy. At the same time, we note the ways in which equity may be chipped away as participatory inquiry and action becomes entangled in less transformative practices.

Significance
Study findings inform teacher educators of ways in which teacher candidates and children or youth might experience reconfiguring of relationships, reframing of inquiry, and reconstruction of knowledge through participatory inquiry and action in after school programs.

Authors

• Vanessa Michelle Jones, Artivist Ink, Ltd.

• Auburn Sandstrom

• Carmine Stewart

• Anne M. Galletta, Cleveland State University