The Unknown but Soon to Be: Framing the Conversation

• In Event: Reimagining Literacy Education & Research within the Context of Youth Epistemologies
  In Working Group Roundtable: Reimagining Literacy Education and Research Within the Context of Youth Epistemologies

Abstract

Authors in the first paper frame the subsequent dialogue among participants in the working group by providing a conceptual overview, in conversation with the question: Why an emphasis on youth and youth epistemologies now? Specifically, this presentation will overview and build on critical youth studies (Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2014), which critiques dominant, developmentalist discourses of youth, argues for more inclusion of youth as participants in practices and policies that target them, and explores youth cultural practices and activism. From this theoretical grounding, this paper highlights both several scholarly lines of inquiry (e.g., youth participatory action research, transnational and immigrant youth’s repertoires of language and literacy) and worldwide sociopolitical movements (e.g., March for our Lives youth-led demonstration on Washington) that illuminate the possibilities a youth epistemological frame affords for (literacy) educational research and practice. Particular emphasis will be given to the meaningfulness of intersectional identities, including how youth relates to race, place, gender, citizenship status, etc.

Meant as a primer for the ensuing discussion, this conceptual paper will raise a series of questions designed to both challenge taken for granted assumptions related to youth within education and push participants and audience members to imagine into the future to wonder where the field of literacy and language education might be heading. Furthermore, this opening paper is meant to illuminate some of the challenges and contradictions inherent in this work, including the adult-centricism characterizing nearly all academic scholarship focused on youth; the possibilities and challenges of youth as inquirers and authors in educational research; and implications of such (re)framing of organizational and educational collaborators for research, teacher education, and teaching. Fundamentally, this paper asks participants and audience members how a youth framework might teach the educational academic community about what constitutes language and literacy, and how schooling -- and the work of teachers, teacher educators and researchers -- may adapt to and learn from and with the “already present” literacy and learning practices of youth (Author, 2018).

Authors

• Vaughn W.M. Watson, Michigan State University

• Robert Petrone, University of Missouri - Columbia