“Oh My God. You Are Gen Z”: Youth-Informed Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Social Transformation

• In Event: Repositioning Youth of Color in Teacher Education

Abstract

This study examines the intersections between pedagogy, culture, and activism in order to learn how youth can transform classroom teaching through their imaginative capacities. This qualitative research study employs social design methodology to investigate the design processes of youth of color as they co-construct pedagogical theories and practices for teachers that are socially, culturally, and critically relevant for their daily lives and social futures. Addressing the absence of the insights and imagination of students of color and the limits of social justice education when youth are not invited into the process of educational design, this study explores how youth engage in social design-based experimentation to develop pedagogical theories and identities as well as the impact of this development on their perceptions of agency and capacities for enacting social change.

Speculative education offers the intertwining of theory and imagination as integral in the pursuit of social transformation. Grounding such transformation in youth identities, Mirra and Garcia (2020) called upon educational researchers and practitioners to center youth imagination in the cultivation of young people’s speculative civic literacies. The concept of youth speculative civic literacies is rooted in the understanding that “literacy is the conduit through which we understand and enact our freedoms” (Garcia & Mirra, 2021, p. 641). Thus, it is through young people’s literacy practices, particularly their creative forms of expression and approaches to imagining a world free of oppression, that we can collectively work towards social transformation. This research draws from theories of critical pedagogy and youth speculative civic literacies in order to investigate how young people activate their collective imaginations, literacy practices, and activist identities to develop pedagogical approaches for teachers that can transform schools into sites of youth activism and freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002).

Through social design methodology, this study seeks to build models for educational practice that are “theoretically and experientially informed” and are “co-designed, studied, and revised in the present” (Gutiérrez, 2016, p. 192). Data collection for this study took place over the course of ten months and included: (a) audio-recordings of the monthly seminars during each stage of the project; (b) the teacher training curriculum and materials created by the youth leaders, including the feedback and revisions documented throughout the development process; (c) 2 focus group interviews and one individual interview with participating teacher attendees of the PD seminar; (d) two focus group interviews and 2 individual interviews with the 6 youth leaders conducted before Stage One and after Stage Four of the project.

Preliminary analysis of this data reveals that young people value teachers establishing trust and vulnerability in the classroom; the opportunity to engage in low-stakes learning activities; centering students’ physical, social, and emotional safety as a foundation for academic learning; honoring student choice; and the establishment of clear structures for learning with the ability for students to shape or inform these structures. In their design of teacher training, these students also prioritized practicing and receiving feedback, student-generated content, and engagement in design-based activities that inform classroom practice.

Author

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University