Student Agency in Responding to Pushback From Adults in School-Based Transformative Student Voice Programming

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: The Critical Civic Inquiry (CCI) project is a multi-year Research Practice Partnership (RPP) with the Student Voice and Leadership (SVL) program of Denver Public Schools, which creates opportunities for students to carry out justice oriented YPAR and action civics projects. In an earlier study, York & Kirshner (2015) explored how variations in learning opportunities related to voice and agency were related to building-level context, particularly how adults positioned students as either competent and trustworthy or troublemakers. In a follow up study, Salazar-Nuñez (2020) investigated how students characterized their principals’ stance in policy narratives describing their projects, often as support/engagement or obstruction/delay. In 2021, we decided to build on this line of inquiry after hearing that our SVL partners wanted to know more about how students respond to pushback from adults to enact school level change.

Perspective(s): The CCI research team is multidisciplinary and we draw primarily on interpretive, ethnographic modes of analysis. We use in situ research to learn about the various ways that contexts shape learning environments and sociocultural theories of context that document multiple planes of analysis, ranging from the interpersonal to institutional (Cole, Rogoff, 2003). We also believe students should be centered in research about student voice. Given this, rather than focusing on adult behaviors as the unit of analysis, we focused on students’ agency in these interactions.

Methods: Data analysis began during bi-weekly research team meetings over two years of data collection. During this time we also met with educators and student interns from partner organizations in DPS, and shared initial noticings and wonderings with each other. After narrowing our focus for this inquiry through this collaboration, we developed a codebook and began a systematic analysis of qualitative data sources to bring back to SVL students.

Data sources: This study focuses on a sampling of 68 observations and 53 student interviews across four high schools and one leadership group called Young African American and Latinx Leaders. Additionally, we include artifacts from “report back” sessions where we shared initial “hunches” with SVL students, who made connections and shared their interpretations.

Results: We found that students responded to adult pushback in a variety of ways, e.g. working to recruit principals as allies, seeking advice from other trusted adult mentors, speaking truth to power by sharing honestly about their experiences with adults, and persevering with plans when adult support was absent or inconsistent. We think these examples can be helpful to students and adults in other transformative voice settings and that there is a need to build avenues for students and their adult partners to share experiences with each other. We also think it is important for students to offer their analysis of these examples, because their interpretations can differ in key ways from research partners. For example, our research team initially framed student actions from a cognitive lens as “strategies,” but in one of our report back groups, students responded to data excerpts by focusing more on students’ “courage” and “bravery”.

Author

• Melissa R Campanella, University of Colorado - Boulder