"It's All About the Community": The Trifecta of Inquiry-Centered Healing Practices

• In Event: Consequential Teaching: Centering Teachers' Identities-in-Practice in Complex Times

Abstract

Though currently entering a decade of informal and formal teaching, it was among the teaching artists/adult allies at Cyphers for Justice (CFJ), a youth research and social action program, that I witnessed inquiry-based models of learning that honor the youth’s process of self-actualization as researchers and activists.
This paper examines a multi-year, auto-ethnographic research collaboration of teachers and students dedicated to amplifying the stories/voices of CFJ youth researchers in order to sustain the focus on experience-based knowledge. Reflections will come from two former youth participants that continue to redefine the essence of the "storified" nature of youth identities and how teachers can nourish activism in their own classrooms and communities beyond. We discuss the challenges and successes of speaking against the criterias in which our identities are substantiated and tethered to existing understandings using inquiry-centered practices to engage in the shifting identities and positionalities of self first by paying attention to the shifting needs and experiences of our communities. Implications of these practices will be drawn from transcriptions of conversations and written reflections of a teacher and former CFJ youth participant. Through methods of critical reflections, counternarratives, or narrative constructions, one might generate data around how the self is experiencing a given context of study, combining these with the aforementioned data from participants (Hughes & Pennington, 2016).
In taking a critical autoethnographic approach, we took a deep look at ourselves as individual adult allies who work to hold space for youth-led intergenerational inquiry, and made connections to how we make meaning in this context against the backdrop of systems of power (Lyiscott et al., 2020). We examined how youth researcher-activists make meaning of their realities within this sociopolitical moment, the exigency of their needs, and the self-examination of our roles within an intergenerational space of resistance work led by youth. Data collecting for autoethnographic approaches to inquiry involve seven steps: recalling, collecting artifacts and documents, interviewing others, analyzing self, observing self, and reflecting on issues pertaining to the research topic (Chang, 2013). Informed and inspired by Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (2009) work on “inquiry-as-stance,” the inquiry we nourish in our collective work assumes that youth, educators, researchers, and community members have an ethical obligation to understand the dynamic social and political contexts in which all stakeholders construct identities and engage each other.
I will discuss three ways in which inquiry (1) invites folks across intersectional identities and positionalities to open up to possibilities and nuanced needs of facilitating intergenerational praxis, (2) equip adult allies to understand their role in critical pedagogical stances and within what narrated identities are critical and reflexive to struggle forward in equity work and the internal work of detachment of former identities and lastly, (3) interrogating the measures in which our identities exist within the matrix of capitalism. Together, we seek to reiterate the need to build new possibilities to our imagination-scape and praxis for how we will continue the lineage of collective liberation and the courage to act upon liberation of self and community.

Author

• Mijin Yeom, Queens College - CUNY
  Presenting Author