Care as Developing Sustainable Partnerships With Youth Participants Over Time

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Critical Care–Based Research Methodologies: Training the Next Generation of Qualitative School-Based Researchers

Abstract

Considerations of “researcher positionality” are often central to early methodological training of new qualitative researchers. Educational researchers learning with and from youth must grapple with and attend to varying factors across intersecting points of difference. This often includes lines of inquiry which may or may not align between researcher interests and youths’ practices, in addition to considerations for ‘entering’ and ‘exiting’ research projects.
Our work, highlighting co-authorship between a Black, female Muslim immigrant youth and a white, Christian, U.S. born researcher is grounded in humanizing approaches to research (Paris, 2011) as an avenue for researchers to enact care in their qualitative studies with youth. Specifically, Paris (2011) frames humanizing research as a methodological stance that seeks to develop relationships of care and dignity between both participants and the researcher as they dialogue with one another and engage in consciousness-raising over time. By extension, Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) show how interactions grounded in reciprocal listening create an “in-between space” (p. 380S) that disrupts traditional separation between researcher and participant. Specifically, this space represents a sort of a comfort zone that emerges through listening and dialoguing, a grey area in which research participants open up their feelings, vulnerabilities and emotions.
In this session, we showcase Author 1 and 2’s four-year journey of learning with and from one another resulting in two scholarly co-authored publications (Authors, 2022b; 2022c) by carefully interrogating and examining our intersecting identifications (Crenshaw, 2010) in response to topics centering race, religion, politics. We draw on empirical data (observations, interviews, social media related artifacts) collected from 2017 to 2018 and advance conceptual understandings which can be used pedagogically in qualitative methods courses.
First, to cultivate a sense of caring and being there in their qualitative work with youth participants we believe that a genuine, shared interest in the research topic is important for both the researcher and youth participants for the research process to feel worthwhile and productive, both parties should have a sustained interest in continuing to explore lines of inquiry that matter both to the youth participant and the researcher. Second, we believe it’s very important that when having conversations with those who come from marginalized or minoritized backgrounds, that the person with less power feels they can have a sense of control over the conversations when discussing matters surrounding their identities. Often the researcher takes the lead and the research participant is the one who answers in response. However, we challenge the researcher to not only be listening, but to ensure, in the spirit of dialogical listening, that what is being shared is actually being heard.
Ultimately, we argue that when participants believe their words are listened to and valued through relational constructions of knowledge; one that takes place together as opposed to separate from one another, youths’ concerns that their sharing may be met with disapproval, or judgment are likely to subside. That is, relationships which support a sense of caring and being there are possible when commitments towards dialogic-listening are fully realized.

Author

• Matthew R. Deroo, University of Miami
  Presenting Author