Moving Toward an Intra-Active Praxis of Care: Learning in and Through Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Caring and Being There: Toward a Framework for Care-Based Research With Youth in Schools

Abstract

Objectives, Perspectives
As a form of critical pedagogy, youth participatory action research (YPAR) engages adults and children – often educators and students – in a praxis of critical dialogue, action, and reflection to create knowledge and consciousness about oppression and ultimately dismantle it (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991; Freire, 1970). This mutual education and collaboration process upends hierarchical power dynamics dominant in traditional schooling to conduct research with youth rather than on or about them. This work requires overcoming the adult/child binary dominant in traditional schooling and educational research as adult and youth co-researchers examine and resist structures of power and oppression together (Dennis et al., 2019). In order for this to occur, intergenerational collectives must build trust and mutual respect (Dennis et al., 2019; Garnett et al., 2019) and intentionally create space for youth agency and autonomy.
Drawing on Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy and Noddings’ (2002a, 2002b) concept of ethical caring, Caraballo and Soleimany (2019) suggest enacting “an ethic of care, grounded in affective relationships” to create “transformative third spaces in which traditional roles and hierarchies might be temporarily suspended” (p. 84). This ethic of care makes it possible to address power dynamics, renegotiate roles, “examine and interrogate the social injustices and disparities” (p. 85) that youth experience, and become advocates for themselves and their communities. DeNicolo, Yu, Crowley, and Gabel (2017) call this ‘cariño conscientizado,’ a culturally grounded praxis of care.

Modes of Inquiry and Findings
This chapter highlights moments over the past three years of a YPAR project, Courageous Conversations, as we have worked to build, maintain, and honor the shifting and evolving identity and associated goals of our research collective. We present these moments as three vignettes that help to illustrate our own collective’s experiences engaging an either/or, dualistic approach to caring and moving toward a collective approach to caring. By interrogating each of these experiences, we find that a praxis of caring that is built on the commitments of YPAR requires moving beyond a dualistic, subject-subject framing of care to one that is more complex, a caring with, a unified propulsion forward anchored in intra-action.

Scholarly Significance
Learning to care with our co-researchers and to allow them to care for us is crucial to resisting adult/child binaries and to challenging deficit models of schooling and broader structural inequalities (Dennis et al., 2019; Fox, 2019). However, pushing against a normative, dualistic framing of care can be difficult, especially in the academy and amidst today’s schooling policies and practices. As Cahill et al. (2019, citing West, 2008) express, “To struggle against, and within, neoliberal racial capitalism is an exhausting, ongoing and uphill battle– and yet we engage in it together with a sense of ‘critical hope.’” It is when we work in solidarity with those who have been pushed to the margins in precarity and survival that the YPAR collective becomes a “site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (hooks, 1989, p. 206).

Authors

• Meagan Call-Cummings, George Mason University

• Melissa Hauber-Özer, George Mason University