Small Group 1: Navigating Co-Authorship and Research Dissemination as Intergenerational Educational Priorities

• In Event: Challenging Extractive Epistemologies and Fostering Participatory Justice: Reflecting on More Than a Decade of Community-Based Research in Philadelphia

Abstract

In our research-practice partnership we have navigated the process of co-authoring and research dissemination with community researchers in the form of various presentations and publications. In 2019, the idea of writing a book for educators catalyzed from the parents’ years-long desire to support practitioners who seek ways to better serve children like theirs, whose families are refugees or immigrants. The seeds of our intergenerational collaborative book were thus planted when the whole research community, including parents and children of Indonesian, Mexican and African American communities, came together to discuss the most prominent educational issues that impact students of our group. Based on their original research, the community wrote a set of “Educational Demands” which has been a fundamental guide for our subsequent work in the last 3 years. As part of the participatory composing process, we have conducted an inquiry into how everyone can contribute to the book in a manner that honors their diverse literate repertoires, even if they may not be comfortable with conventional scholarly writing. This process has entailed looking closely and with a critical eye at existing texts for teachers, inquiring into our own purposes for writing the book and how the those goals would influence the its style, tone, and content, and rethinking the writing process to include multilingualism, community literacies, and families’ diverse ways of knowing.
Throughout our writing process, we wondered: to whom is our work addressed? What kind of impact do we imagine or hope it will have? In this small group, we hope to explore similar questions that inquire into how we approach and navigate the co-authorship process in our community-based research contexts. For example, what are some tensions we grapple with collaborative writing and research dissemination? How might oral conversations, the arts, and multilingualism be mobilized as a form of composition that value community members’ literacy repertoires?
Our writing process dynamically changed throughout the inquiry, and we sought to challenge pre-conceptualized notions of what the writing should be about or how it might look. Our co-authorship aimed to integrate our experiences and epistemic privileges, as parents, youth, doctoral students, and university professors, in short, as teachers of each other, to outline the ideas that shape our collective voice. At the core of these community-generated ideas is the commitment to create an educational system that offers equitable academic opportunities to all students – a system that is based on relationships and centers the strengths and critical voices of youth and families. This small group invites participants to challenge and resist conventional, school-sanctioned forms of writing to reconceptualize how we can think and write into new forms of “becoming.”

Authors

• Jacqueline Winsch, University of Pennsylvania

• Zion N. Sykes, Pennsylvania State University

• Ericka Graciela Staufert-Reyes, University of Pennsylvania

• Rita Gracián, University of Pennsylvania