The Critical Complexities of Youths’ Analytic Contributions to IA in Participatory Research

• In Event: Expanding Participatory Video Analysis for Ecological and Ethical Validity

Abstract

Objectives.
This is a methodological story of a research project where youth, originally positioned as participants, forged new roles as researchers. The study comes from a research project focused on studying learning on a high school robotics team.
When I presented an IA (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) analysis to members of the robotics team a powerful discussion ensued. Two youth articulated the connections to their experiences as young Latina/x women. These youth and I formed a youth participatory action research (YPAR) group and invited others (described further in Author, et al., 2023).
Theoretical framework.
Torre et al., (2008) describe YPAR as creating spaces where “differently positioned adults and youth are able to experience and analyze power inequities, together,” (p.24). This paper focuses on the temporal relations of the research group and the robotics team itself to consider the expansive possibilities of framing IA methods with youth researchers. Such frames the research teams’ ongoing development of spatio-temporal relations as heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1984) and sociopolitical (Author, 2020), supporting youth researchers’ positions as knowledgeable contributors to analyses of team practices, learning, and its connections to structural hierarchies of power (Sengupta Irving, 2022).
Data and methods.
Reflections for this paper draws on various sources of data generated by the research group including: meeting notes, analytic memos, video recordings of team practices and video recordings of video analysis sessions. I centered reflections – informed by Interaction Analysis’ embeddedness in ethnography (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and YPAR methodologies (Cammorota & Fine, 2008) – as an iterative review of the groups’ engagement with video analysis. I coded for emerging spatio-temporal relations (i.e. “experiences after video;” “what happened before and where;” “connecting to previous/future schooling”).
Results.
Youth’s analytic contributions were complex displays of doing microgenetic analyses. Three themes emerged in reflection: 1) Youth’s analyses of often spoke directly to how their own positioning was consequential to what we could analyze (whether in the video or not); 2) youth innovatively traversed space and time to articulate how what was happening in the video under review had consequence including regularly comparing video to their schooling experience; and 3) youth used an expansive take on what “interactional resources” are made available (Jordan & Henderson, 1995).
As an example, one youth (now a CS major) who continued doing video analysis on the project analyzed a video of her and a peer being called “female coders” who actually programs the robot as “at the time I felt validated” but “I hear in my CS classes it used as a [negative] stereotype.” She continued that being labeled a female coder depends on “the way people use it in context.” In this short analysis, she offered an analysis of the video that situated her position both in the moment of the video and as differently consequential now (became part of colleagues & author, 2021).
Significance
The brilliance of these youths’ analytic perspectives adds to the burgeoning subfield of “critical interaction and microgenetic analytic analysis” (Philip and Gupta, 2020) seeing the sociopolitical at the interactional level (Author, 2021).

Author

• Colin Hennessy Elliott, Drexel University