"Wise Beyond Their Years": Teacher Discourses of Youth Scholar-Activists and the Reproduction of Man-as-Human

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Thirteen
  In Roundtable Session: Challenges of Accountability, Activism, and Standards in Educative Spaces (Table 4)

Abstract

There is growing recognition that adults invested in education for liberation should learn with and from youth scholar-activists and organizers. To create meaningful, generative collaborations between teachers and youth scholar-activists, more research is needed to understand how teachers conceptualize youth activists and their work. I seek to address this need by examining the stories early-career teachers tell about the youth scholar-activists they encounter in a university-based collaboration, alongside the stories they tell about the students they teach. I use Foucauldian discourse analysis and draw on critical childhood and youth studies and anticolonial theories of the human to frame my analysis, surfacing how teachers discursively construct youth scholar-activists in ways that disrupt, reinforce, or complicate historically contingent constructions of young people.

Author

• Karen Zaino, Miami University (OH)
  Presenting Author