Youth Wildin’ in the (re)Shaping of Policy: Toward a Critical Youth Model of Racial Justice and Community Accountability

• In Event: Beyond Schools: Rethinking Policies for Justice and Equitable Education Systems

Abstract

Objective
In this paper, we advance a critical race youth policy model grounded in a synthesis of three lines of youth-centered research and praxis that have shaped our scholar-activism. In our critical race youth policy model (informed by our respective research areas: double-dutch methodology, Black storywork, and liberation literacies pedagogy), we–as a set of guiding principles–create space for youth processing, youth criticality and sensemaking, and youth voice and being across five areas of influence. The five areas of influence include: racial equity; critical teacher education, youth leadership; fugitivity & abolition; and community-engagement. Central to our policy model is reclaiming the term youth wilding (wildin’), which surfaced in 1989 during the height of the Central Park Jogger Case, which was used to create dominant policy narratives that worked to enact great violence against Black and Brown youth. In conceptualizing policy counterstories, shaped by our lines of research/praxis, and highlighting the Youth Board on Boston (YOB) and the Chicago Public School’s Radical Youth Alliance, we reclaim the term youth wildin’ to highlight minoritized young people’s performance of wilderness (Mexal, 2013) as resistance and disruption against racialized discourses and policies designed without their input. To enact wildin’ in a youth policy sense is to advance a different story that runs counter to dominant narratives of policy that work to shape youth life without youth input. Through this lens, we insist on youth culture, voice, activism, and leadership as central to a new conception of education policy, both in terms of goals and process.

Theoretical Framework
Informed by critical youth studies scholars Quijada Cerecer and colleagues (2013), we ground our new vision of youth policy by wrestling with the primary question: How can the lives of youth of color be leveraged in humanizing ways to restructure US schooling? Essentially, how might education policy be more racially just if we conceptualized it through the intricate, everydayness of youth life; with you and not just for youth? When we speak of centering youth lived experiences as a pathway to restructuring schooling, we are referring to schooling taking a radical departure from enacting policies that are harmful to racially minoritized students, particularly as a result of refusing to incorporate or be informed by their conceptions of and relationships to schooling. We conceptualize our new vision of educational policy through theorizing in critical youth studies, given its commitment to move beyond racialized, pathological logics that position youth as mere pawns in society rather than agentive players of change.

Methods & Data Sources
Data from two youth organizations, our individual youth-informed research, and a synthesis of relevant literature will be the primary forms of evidence to help shape the paper’s findings and conclusions, which have resulted in the development of our policy model.

Results
We provide direct examples from young people across our lines of research that work to embody policy counterstories as layered along the lines of the three guiding principles that organize our policy model. Moreover, we communicate how these principles have worked to frame and develop our collective work at a Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, particularly work with our own Youth Board.

Scholarly Significance
Our analysis of two youth organizing examples, naming our individual youth-informed research areas, and highlighting our Center as a model for critical race youth policy work provide insights on the possibilities of youth-led policy models. We benefit from honestly examining the ways we currently work with youth. Inviting feedback from youth and other trusted critical scholar colleagues and, by being uncomfortable and okay with dislocating ourselves (i.e., adults) from perceived locations of power or authority. White supremacy, patriarchy, and adultism under which we have been socialized and conditioned or that shape old youth policy, undermine the promise and possibility of youth policy futures. This moment requires attending to and taking seriously the many ways youth are challenging oppressive institutions and structures, shifting policy landscapes guided by their own life experiences, and demanding that these policy counterstories and new visions for a racially justice world be (re)centered as a matter of youth of color survival and thrivance at local, state, and federal levels.

Authors

• Justin A. Coles, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Keisha L. Green, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst