Ethical Concerns in Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Youth Participatory Action Research on the Next Level: New Complications in an Evolving Field

Abstract

Objective
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) encourages youth and teachers to claim power through conducting their own research (Cammorata & Fine, 2008; Hipolito-Delgado & Zion, 2017). Increasingly, teachers engage in YPAR with their students without working with university-trained researchers overseeing projects (Buttimer, 2018). While this move into public school classrooms is encouraging, potential risks to teachers, students, and other research participants are significant given that these various stakeholders may have not been trained in research ethics and lack the protection of universities. In raising these concerns, we do not wish to discourage teachers and students from conducting YPAR but rather to help support and prepare them for the challenges they may face.

Perspective
Academic researchers go through internal review board (IRB) processes and yearslong training that assures research subjects protections including informed consent, voluntary participation, and confidentiality. While we are not suggesting the IRB process is ideal--Tuck and Guishard (2013) note IRB’s colonial roots--it does provide ethical clarity regarding research. For classroom teachers and students, it is not so clear. Because schools are not designed for this work, supports are often non-existent, creating potential legal and ethical ramifications for teacher and student researchers. It is careless then, as a collective field of YPAR, to ask students and teachers to do the powerful work of research without providing the support and training needed to ensure that they and their participants are kept safe.

Methods
Our research team has partnered, individually, with various teachers and students in US K-12 schools to engage in YPAR for years, while conducting numerous literature reviews for publications in academic journals about the work. Based on our collective analysis of extant literature on YPAR, coupled with our own experiences enacting YPAR with teachers and students in K-12 schools, we determined that very little academic writing has wrestled with the ethics of conducting YPAR with schools and even fewer resources exist outside of academia and within schools to guide teachers and students in conducting ethical research. Specifically for this paper, we draw on cases from our own work across districts in different parts of the US, and we put it in conversation with existing literature on YPAR, while theorizing new possibilities for ethical YPAR in schools.

Results
Our initial research reveals four emergent takeaways. First, we notice a gap in the research and literature around the ethics of YPAR training. Second, we want to illuminate the theoretical concerns--including conducting research without consent, not properly securing sensitive data, breaching confidentiality, and navigating pushback from unsupportive adults--by connecting them to concrete cases we have observed in our research. Next, we propose additions to existing YPAR curricula that would potentially support youth and teachers in thinking through ethical concerns. Finally, we ponder the creation of a modified, appropriate, and relevant IRB-like process that could include members of the school, district, and community.

Significance
The session fills a void in the literature around the ethics of YPAR and proposes approaches that could better protect student and teacher researchers and their subjects.

Authors

• Dane Stickney, University of Colorado - Denver

• Christopher J. Buttimer, Boston Public Schools

• Shelley Zion, Rowan University

• Garron Hillaire, AERDF