Engaging as Worthy Witnesses: The Echoes and Ripples of a Transformative Activist Research Stance

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Qualitative Inquiry: Learning and Pedagogy

Abstract

This study highlights the methodological possibilities that emerge when adopting a transformative activist stance (Stensenko, 2017; 2014) in the context of research-practice partnerships (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) committed to enacting culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014).
The focus of the original analysis examined the multi-faceted nature of embodiment in two adolescent girls’ school-based spoken word poetry writing, in an urban middle school ELA classroom. Given the girls’ extension of their bodies as tools, mediums, and social texts, we recognized a responsibility to ensure our methods were humanizing and decolonizing. We strove to be “worthy witnesses” (Paris and Winn, 2014, p. xiii), through our commitment to transparency and ethicality in our engagement in research that foregrounded youths and their bodies.

Authors

• Rick Coppola, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Rebecca L. Woodard, University of Illinois

• Andrea Vaughan, University of Illinois at Chicago