Youth Civic Engagement in a Virtual Space: Fostering Community and Intergenerational Dialogue During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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

Abstract

*Research Framing: Throughout high school, youths develop new identities, grapple with forming their own ideas often setting them apart from their peers and adults, and navigate familial expectations and societal barriers (Cohen, 2010; Kirshner, 2015). Some scholars (Hart & Atkins, 2002; Mirra et al., 2013) point to a “civic opportunity gap” between youth in urban, inner-city schools and those in other academic institutions (Kirshner, Strobel, & Fernandez, 2002; Moya, 2017). This project focuses on the intersections across multiple contexts in which youths learn, engage with social issues, and form identities as knowledge bearers and actors for change. By knowledge, we are referring to the body of information that has been described as political literacy (see Dudley & Gitelson, 2002) and that encompasses a fundamental understanding of sociopolitical dynamics (see also Checkoway & Aldana, 2013). Rather than baseline knowledge aimed at becoming citizens or leading to voting, youths interrogate political knowledge that include the full gamut of decisions associated with the ability of individuals to engage as critical observers and participants in public systems. The presentation highlights youths’ enactments of their understandings through their own research—intergenerationally constructed and implemented, intended to enhance their communities and social worlds, and grounded in efforts that promote social justice.

*Methods: This project focuses on two cohorts of high school youths participating in a social inquiry group, part of a civic and community participatory program. The 31 youths who identify as Black, Asian, Latinx, Middle Eastern, and white attend schools in a large northeastern city and its suburbs, four different states, and Southern Africa. Drawing on YPAR and ethnographic-focused methods, data were collected through biweekly virtual sessions that began in February 2020, after pivoting from planned in-person sessions due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Data sources include recordings of biweekly sessions, weekly virtual meetings between youths and mentor-collaborators, interviews with youth participants, youth-collaborative experiences with experts, and research projects created and conducted by the youths. Data are being analyzed thematically (Charmaz & Belgrave, 2019; Stauss & Cobrin, 1994) and collaboratively.

*Findings: The findings in this presentation focus on issues of access and equity emanating within two broad activities: (1) critical discourse and generative discussions around salient local, national, and international topics reflecting the shifting political context and questions of social order; youths’ questions, assumptions, and discomforts around the political process and implications for them and their communities; and the ways they are imagining and re-imagining their contexts and their roles and responsibilities in them, and (2) emergent themes from their community-focused research projects within four areas: climate, health, education, housing, and incarceration. Data uncover the complexities and challenges associated with virtual school during the pandemic and the evolution of perspective-building and vulnerability elicited from peer and intergenerational dialogue and civic community. Findings are consistent with Ginwright and Cammarota’s (2007) call for a new framing of urban youth activism and social capital and analyses pointing to the need to understand how civic and community engagement is cultivated across generations working together as an intellectual community.

Author

• Vivian L. Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author