Speaking Back: Youth Participatory Action Research and Language Justice

• In Event: Invited Roundtable. Youth Participatory Action Research: Collaboration Across Generations for Social Justice Education

Abstract

This paper documents the development of Jóvenes con Derechos (JcD), a collective of multilingual Latinx high school students, which started at Eleanor High School in the 2012/13 school year. JcD was born out of the creation of a series of Spanish as a Heritage Language classes in response to this student demand from the school to provide Spanish language electives designed specifically for multilingual Latinx youth (Cushing Leubner & Eik, 2018). Using a cohort model and a sociocultural approach to language and literacy development (Flores & Rosa, 2015), youth and their teachers spend two years together. In this time, youth use and develop their multiple varieties of both Spanish and English to study critical race theories, justice movements across Latinx, Chicanx, and Indigenous communities across the U.S. and the Americas, borderlands identities (Anzaldua, 1987), and arts-based approaches to collective action and transformational voicing of selves and communities. In their second year together, students draw on this shared knowledge base to engage in youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects (Cammarota, 2008). They develop critical and community-based research techniques, digital storytelling skills, and arts-based methods for data gathering and dissemination. Data reflect how youth draw on their angers and dissatisfactions with subtractive and suppressive schooling experiences (Valenzuela, 2016), micro-aggressions, and linguistic constraints in schools and broader social contexts. They utilize their multiple languages to engage in a local-global nexus of transnational community-based research to speak back utilizing protest literacies (Kynard, 2013) to oppressive realities and to draw multilingual community knowledge (Yosso, 2005) into the often flat-affect monolingual and Eurocentric spaces of schools.

Author

• J. Eik Diggs, University of Arizona