Youth Perspectives in Primarily Adult Scholarly Spaces: Creating and Sustaining Welcoming Environments for Youth Researchers

• In Event: Silent or Silenced? Naming and Disrupting Institutional Barriers to Community-Engaged Scholarship in Academic Spaces

Abstract

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a type of community-based research that places young people at the center of the research process—including design of the research question, data collection methods, and results analysis (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Kirshner, 2015). Further, as is the case for many forms of community-based research, YPAR calls for young community members to actively participate in the dissemination of findings in ways that promote informed action or policy change based on study results. Disseminating findings from YPAR-informed research, then, necessitates that young people co-present at education conferences like American Educational Research Association conference (AERA).

Over the past decade, use of YPAR approaches to education research have become increasingly commonplace, including but not limited to scholars of education policy and the learning sciences. Indeed, the authors of this workshop, and their mentors, have submitted and gained acceptance to AERA with studies using YPAR as primary method for nearly two decades. AERA has also long honored and celebrated the use of community-based and community-engaged scholarship, like YPAR, and in 2022, formally organized and promoted youth-driven research symposia. For the authors of this workshop, these actions signify forward progress toward the collective goal of co-constructing educational possibilities—because it is toward the improvement of educational opportunities for young people themselves that animates equity-oriented education research.

At the same time, we believe more work is needed to create and sustain authentically welcoming experiences for young people to fully and robustly participate in scholarly spaces like AERA. As chaperons of youth researchers to AERA for the past several years, the authors have witnessed myriad challenges in addition to the obvious opportunities young people experience as co-presenters at the conference. Youth of color researchers who co-presented at AERA 2022 and 2023 conferences reflected recently on some challenges:

“[We need] better communication, accommodations, and overall support. The conference logistics, with last-minute hotel and flight confirmations that were out of our control, added some stress to my experience. Being a newcomer to the research conference scene, I found myself on a steep learning curve, grappling with the intricate terminology and navigating the conference program, which left me with a sense of being overwhelmed and uncertain at times on whether I should attend sessions and networking opportunities.”

“It was difficult to find things that were engaging for a person that hadn't graduated college - all the activities were geared towards active education professionals, rather than students.”

In addition to these issues, adult chaperones experienced added pressures of ensuring adequate social scaffolding with regard to youth participation in informal and formal adult-centered spaces at the conference, from SIG gatherings to university/foundation receptions. To be sure, youth participants also shared many grateful and positive reflections on participating in the conference. Nonetheless, this workshop aims to collectively trouble-shoot and problem solve issues that may hinder equitably-oriented inclusion of young people at top-tier education research gatherings like AERA, so that organizations and scholars can authentically and ethically embody YPAR, in all stages of the research to action process.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Kentucky

• Sam Mejias, Parsons School of Design

• Deepa Sriya Vasudevan, American Institutes for Research

• Syeda Safwath-Tabassum

• Sanaa Kahloon, Harvard University

• Connor D. Flick, Brown University