What Is the Role of Adult Facilitators in Critical Participatory Action Research? Employing Affective Labor While Navigating the Politics and the Perils Alongside Minoritized Youth Researchers

• In Event: The Politics of Student Voice: How Students Interrogate Policy Discourses, Processes, and Practices

Abstract

Purpose
Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) represents a tool for minoritized youth in shaping educational policies. Despite its promise, the politics of engaging in CPAR within structures ensnared in hegemonic ideologies can negate, devalue, and deny the contributions of youth voice. This paper highlights how adult facilitators supporting youth researchers negotiate methodological tensions when the politics nested within oppressive structures converge with the ideals of CPAR. Using LatCrit methodology and employing affective labor theory, this qualitative study offers four counterstories interrogating the role of adult allies in CPAR, navigating the politics and perils of engaging in this work alongside minoritized students.

Theory, Methods, and Data Sources
Centering an affective labor framework (Hardt, 1999), and employing a LatCrit metholodogy of counterstories we do not aim to offer answers; instead, we highlight challenges threaded across our experiences to give readers insights into the methodological complexities and political entanglements of this work as they engage youth in critical inquiry. LatCrit is a strand of Critical Race Theory that was designed to spotlight the ways in which Latinx individuals are excluded from institutions in the United States (Valdes, 2005). This epistemic approach has expanded and has been used globally as a base for praxis that is “community-building based on shared principles, ethics, practices and aspirations” (Valdes, 2005 p. 148). Furthermore, we use counterstories to highlight “taken-for-granted assumptions” (Atwood & López, 2014, p. 1145) of CPAR with young people. While a robust body of CPAR literature discusses issues of power within these projects (Grant et al., 2008), few show the “behind the curtain” aspect of how emerging scholars navigate the politics of interacting with youth, school leaders, and district administrators.

Findings
Each author addresses a particular tension in their own work as adults researching alongside youth in CPAR. Author1 details the complexities of survey data from youth of color who harbor internalized oppression. Author2 contends with issues regarding the decision-making process as an adult in a collaborative CPAR project. Author3 elaborates on the challenges she encountered working alongside adults with power and authority in a school district and university partnership. Lastly, Author4 shares her insights on the ethical dilemmas of the labor we expect youth of color to expend to do CPAR. The narratives are connected through the understanding that there is an emotional toll in performing this work that is not often recognized in academic spaces.

Scholarly Significance and Connections to AERA Conference Theme
Empirical studies that employ CPAR rarely dive into the methodological tensions, with a few exceptions (Bettencourt, 2020), but rather these projects center the research findings. The typical CPAR story fixates on the outcomes and successes of the research. In doing so, these studies may be inadvertently offering an inaccurate portrayal of this work. Our usage of counternarratives, highlighting our own lived experiences as CPAR facilitators navigating these challenges the idea of truth in educational research since, unlike traditional research paradigms, CPAR demands an emotional investment from the adult facilitators involved.

Authors

• Van T. Lac, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Ana Carolina Fernandes de Bessa Antunes, University of Utah
  Presenting Author

• Julia A. Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• Janiece Z. Mackey, Young Aspiring Americans for Social and Political Activism
  Presenting Author