Collaborating Toward Change: Examining Youth's Enactments of Intercultural Solidarity in Youth Participatory Action Research

• In Event: Youth Research, Civic Engagement, and Learning for Community Change

Abstract

*Research Framing: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and BLM protests of Spring and Summer 2020 drew the effects of systemic racism, oppression, and anti-Blackness into sharp focus, the need for educators and education researchers to enact change was urgent (Haddix, 2020; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated existing inequities for students experiencing marginalization. Yet possibilities for reimagining education also emerged from the on-going pandemic (Ladson-Billings, 2021). Our work with high school students in The Youth Voices Project, a community-based YPAR initiative, offers glimpses into such possibilities. YPAR offers an approach to educational research that seeks to honor various knowledges and understandings youth bring to collaborative inquiry about issues that affect them (Caraballo et al., 2017; Fine et al., 2007; Mirra et al., 2016) while furthering their understanding of issues of local and global importance. In this presentation, we consider how youth collaborated to make sense of multiple pandemics and work toward social justice in and beyond their racially and ethnically diverse subsidized housing community. Specifically, we examine the following research question: How do youth seek to learn from and with the experiences and perspectives of diverse peers in their housing community as they engage in collaborative inquiry about issues of social justice?

*Methods: The Youth Voices Project is an on-going, multi-year, out-of-school YPAR initiative in a subsidized housing community in the US Midwest. Youth participants are high school students who self-identify as Black, Lebanese-American, and white. Data examined in this presentation were collected from June 2020 - June 2021 and include recordings of weekly Zoom sessions with youth, youth-generated artifacts (e.g. art, Google slides, playlists), individual interviews with youth participants, and GroupMe chat messages shared between youth and adult collaborators. Data analysis was iterative and on-going (Luttrell, 2010), and included writing and discussing reflective and analytic memos (Horvat, 2013; Saldaña, 2013) as we identified themes connected to our research question.

*Findings and Significance: As youth engaged in collaborative inquiry and action in response to the on-going pandemics of racial violence and COVID-19, they critically reflected on their social identities, challenged assumptions, and expanded their individual perspectives through conversation and action alongside diverse peers and adult collaborators. Across this work, youth demonstrated enactments of intercultural solidarity. Specifically, youth sought to learn from and with one another across similarities and differences in their multiple, intersecting identities (e.g. race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender) while envisioning collective change. Across two findings, we examine how youth: 1) demonstrated vulnerability in sharing their experiences, perspectives, and questions as they made sense of social issues and on-going injustice in the world around them; and 2) envisioned new possibilities for a more just future through their participation in arts-based literacy projects designed and facilitated by three of the youth participants that extended youths’ initial considerations of the Black Lives Matter movement to include additional movements and recognitions of social justice. Taken together, these findings contribute new insights into possibilities for supporting youth in collaborating across difference to address issues of importance to them and their communities.

Author

• Joanne E. Marciano, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author