The "Impact" of Youth Participatory Action Research: In Their Own Words

• In Event: Explicitly Antiracist Research: Exploring Possibility and Necessity

Abstract

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) offers an epistemological and methodological project that requires the formation of a collective enterprise – alongside students and youth – for the express purpose of questioning societal exclusions and boundaries while aiming to reveal “what is” and “what could be” (Fine & Torre, 2004, p. 16). Based on critical theories that contemplate cultural claims as incongruencies rather than assertion (Collins, 2010; Freire, 1970; Habermas, 1984; Harding, 1987), YPAR offers a frame of resistance to the conventional research enterprise that limits the generation of valid “evidence” to trained scholars. By drawing in community members as co-researchers, the YPAR practitioner navigates university and community boundaries, gathering expertise gained through lived experience and making decisions democratically with the collective (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2007; Santos, 2015).
This paper presents a conversation about how impact has been seen and felt by youth and adult co-researchers in a long-term, school-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project, Courageous Conversations. It provides an example of how, in multi-racial, intergenerational research collectives and intentionally created contact zones (Pratt, 1991), we can start and facilitate dialogues about topics that are often considered taboo and that are silenced within the walls of typical high school classrooms. We want to start this revolution both within and outside of academia – a revolution that allows youth and community-based researcher voices to be heard and seriously considered alongside their adult, university-based research counterparts on scholarly stages. As people who are on the academic job market or soon going up for tenure, we often think about how we can or should frame the “impact” of our participatory work. After all, we all engage in inquiry that values and honors the voices, experiences, and expertise of people with whom we work outside of academia – people who are often silenced or wounded through typical research practices and processes. Our co-researchers are youth, community members, Black women, refugees, indigenous people, teachers, and others. So, we wonder, how might our co-researchers frame the impact of our work together?
In this paper, our school-based co-researchers begin with a discussion of the impact our
YPAR collective originally hoped to achieve and then discuss each of those layers of
impact: individual, community, and broader impact. Through this conversation, we
arrived at a reconceptualization of impact, reoriented to the epistemological commitments of YPAR (e.g., privileging lived experience, democratic deliberation, mutual understanding). This challenges the status quo, problematizing the quantification of impact as the primary measure of worth. We do not simply see this as the responsibility of trained scholars; we must establish spaces where youth co-researchers are able to challenge scholarly notions of validity and to promote the type of transformation that they deem worthwhile. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on what impact could or should look like in their work.

Authors

• Meagan Call-Cummings, Johns Hopkins University

• Sharrell Hassell-Goodman, George Mason University

• Giovanni P. Dazzo, University of Georgia