Supporting Youth Well-Being in Uganda: An International Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: Grasping the Elephant: International Perspectives on Truth-Making in Participatory Design Research Projects

Abstract

This proposal is based on research within a cross-country international research-practice partnership (RPP) between the UC San Diego (UCSD) and Africa Educational Leadership Initiative (Africa ELI), an NGO supporting refugee learners with out-of-school activities during school holiday breaks, scholarships, and other educational programming in Uganda. RPPs are partnerships between universities, school districts, or nonprofit organizations; the goal is to investigate problems and pose solutions for improving educational outcomes (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). RPPs have a long-term commitment for collaborative work, are focused on designing roles, rules, and protocols that structure interaction, and highlight co-design and testing solutions (Coburn & Penuel, 2016). Because youth wellbeing in Uganda is an issue of pressing concern (Renzaho et al., 2020), the goal throughout our three-year partnership has been to use out-of-school programming to investigate how youth define wellbeing and to document what supports and challenges they encounter in order to co-design stronger curriculum to improve adolescent wellbeing.

Youth play a vital role in developing solutions through their active engagement in The Wellbeing Club. UCSD and Africa ELI co-designed an 11-module curriculum to be used in Ugandan settings. The curriculum is built around a holistic model of wellbeing that includes these dimensions of wellbeing: freedom from harm, personal safety, care for the earth, basic needs, fair and just community, engagement, belonging, mutual care, purpose, voice , and growth and flourishing. Through arts-based activities, youth dialogue circles, games, and mindfulness, youth define the dimensions within their daily lives, discuss which dimensions are strengths and which are challenges for them, and receive support from peers, mentors, and facilitators in both the U.S. and Uganda. As a culminating activity, youth are asked, “What is a local issue concerning wellbeing that you would like to solve?” Youth then dialogue, record community needs, gather information to make decisions, plan action steps, and implement their ideas. To date, youth have created films on drop-out prevention for girls and have cleaned a large marketplace in Kampala, providing the community with posters about hand-washing during COVID-19.

This research presentation investigates the nuts and bolts of our RPP from a standpoint theory (Hartsock, 1983; Harding, 1987). Our international team of professors, graduate students, nonprofit leaders, undergraduate mentors, and graduate students have shifted our understandings of what it means to be “well”. We critically examine how privilege impacts wellbeing through both youth and adult activities that we collectively engage in. We provide examples of RPP recommendations by Vetter et al. (2022) to support equity and social justice in RPPs, but also interrogate the specific challenges we confront in Uganda. This presentation documents our protocols for working with one another cross-culturally, highlights ways that “scientific knowledge” of well-being has been challenged by youth voices and leadership, and e discusses the successes and challenges of building opportunities for our UCSD team of students and researchers to promote Afrocentric, rather than Eurocentric ways of mentoring, researching, and communicating research results.

Authors

• Amy Vatne Bintliff, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca S. Levine, University of California - San Diego
  Presenting Author

• Zaharah Namanda
  Presenting Author

• Peninah Beinomugisha
  Presenting Author

• Norah Nalutaaya
  Presenting Author