Leveraging Youth Transformative Agency to Design a Protocol for Addressing Discrimination and Harassment

• In Event: Youth Voice, Agency, and Activism as a Future-Making Tool to Reimagine and Enact Inclusive Futures

Abstract

Purpose
This paper delves into one year-long of a formative intervention, Learning Lab (Bal, 2018; Bal et al., 2014) in Greenville School District (GSD) to create an equity-oriented protocol for addressing bias-based discrimination and harassment. GSD is socio-politically located in a predominantly white middle-upper class town in New Hampshire with a national reputation of being one of the best high schools in the country. However, GSD has been struggling with multiple inequity issues, one of which is underreporting of bias-based incidents of discrimination and harassment. Learning Lab in GSD was a commitment from the school district to address the lingering issue. In collaboration with GSD, we created an Equity Task Force (ETF) consisting of parents, community members, teachers, school administrators, and district administrators. The purpose of this paper is to explore how and to what extent youth in the ETF leveraged their transformative agency, their empirical knowledge and day-to-day experience as legitimate knowledge producers in the design of the protocol.

Theoretical Framework
This paper is grounded in the framework of transformative agency (Sannino et al., 2016). Transformative agency represents the departure of ETF members from the prescribed frame of action amidst multiple contradictions (Bertrand et al., 2017). ETF members, youth and adults in collaborative work transformed district level policy expanding the boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) in this case the protocol for addressing discrimination and harassment.

Methods & Data Sources
Data for this paper was obtained from 18 ETF biweekly meetings between September 2022 and May 2023. The ETF consisted of 16 members, including three students, two district administrators, two high school teachers, two middle school assistant principals, one elementary school principal, one elementary special education case manager, two high school assistant principals, two parents, and one community member. Meetings were audio and video recorded and transcribed. An iterative analysis approach was employed, employing a theoretical framework and the data itself to guide the process of sense-making and interpretation.

Results
Preliminary analysis indicated a significant shift in the roles ascribed to the youth, moving from being passive recipients of policy decisions to becoming active agents of transformative change. Youth transformative agency challenged the prevailing whiteness inherited in the school district’s approach to policies. This transformation occurred despite multiple resistance from school administrators, who positioned themselves as the knowledgeable and qualified authorities in school/district policies. For example, ETF student members urged for the expansion of the protocol, now encompassing a section dedicated to addressing incidents of discrimination and harassment initiated by educators and administrators, in addition to those previously targeted at students.

Scholarly Significance
Across educational fields and practices, adults’ perspectives have been traditionally privileged over those of children/youth especially when power imbalance, perceived expertise, and other forms of contradictions arise as multiple stakeholders engage in boundary crossing activity to transform the school system. This paper indicated that students do have agentic capability to create systemic changes. They are legitimate knowledge creators toward an equitable school system.

Authors

• Dian Mawene, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Andres Mejia, SAU 16 - Exeter NH

• Beatriz Mella, SAU 16 - Exeter NH

• Hana Cass, SAU 16 - Exeter NH

• William Bowie, School Administrative District 16, NH

• Kelly Childress, SAU 16 - Exeter NH