Emerging Narratives on Inclusive Schooling (Poster 61)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Seven
  In Poster Session: Youth Teams in Education Research Poster Session

Abstract

Since 2020, a group of 16 high school students from different territories of Spain have held virtual meetings with some senior researchers to analyze their school experiences and build a guide aimed at other students initiating processes to make their own high schools more inclusive. They have made up a valuable intersectional support network (gender, ability, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, health, etc.) that has brought an activist movement for diversity: ‘Students for Inclusion’.

The Student Team has developed a Youth Participatory Action Research, to promote educational justice through inclusion, encouraging the young people themselves to lead changes in their own high schools. In turn, some of these students have built their life stories to illustrate school exclusion and inclusion processes as a help for other students.

The information used in the research is that generated through dialogue and joint work on their own school and life experiences. They have been developed through more than 20 online collective work sessions (recorded, analyzed, and categorized by themselves), meetings and coexistence, interviews and participation in public events.
As a result, an activist group has emerged offering mutual support, generating shared reflections, and promoting transformations. They have prepared student life stories, published a guide, participated in meetings with the Spanish Minister of Education, in teachers training programs… And they have starred in a documentary film entitled: ‘Inclusive education. Love is creating’.
The Youth Team and its research is opening resistance and resilience processes in the participants, who are recognized as people able to imagine and build other futures. The scientific rigor of the proposals, the collaborative construction with families and professionals, and the social impact of student work show the value of their knowledge, their critical sense and transformative ability, and the need to recognize the agency of all students without exception.

Authors

• Ignacio Calderon-Almendros, University of Malaga
  Presenting Author

• María Teresa Rascón Gómez, University of Malaga
  Presenting Author

• Luz Mojtar-Mendieta, University of Málaga
  Presenting Author

• Indira Martínez‐de‐Ilarduya, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Darío Calderón‐Cano, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Jorge Osa‐Fernández, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Malena Calderón‐Cano, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author

• Antón Fontao‐Saavedra, Youth Teams in Education Research
  Presenting Author