Standing With My Students: A Reflexive Examination of Youth Activism in Rural Communities

• In Event: Rural Education Research for Social Justice: Antiracism in Research and Practice

Abstract

Recently, in the Midwestern rural community where I was raised and also returned to live, teach, and advocate, I co-organized a Black Lives Matter protest. At the event, I witnessed something unexpected: my former students, angry and passionate, holding signs and leading the protest. As a former middle school teacher committed to social justice pedagogy, I explicitly focused on empathy and activism in my classroom. But I never taught my students how to protest.

How do students know how to protest without being taught? Using autoethnography, this study seeks to disrupt the discourse on student activism in rural communities by examining the intersectionalities of students as community protesters and calling educators to reflexively examine their own social justice praxis.

Author

• Amy Walker, Indiana University - Bloomington