Building Student Power Through Critical Participatory Action Research After Pandemic Schooling Betrayals

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Into the Fray: Critical Participatory Action Research Approaches for Impacting Policy and Building Community Power (Table 39)

Abstract

Without question, public schools across the United States were radically transformed by the COVID-19 Pandemic. However, school closures, COVID protocols, and the eventual “return to normal” – that seemingly attempted to wipe the memories of fear, loss, isolation and insecurity, and overlooked the tremendous energy of resistance produced by the national uprisings against state violence of 2020 – produced educational climates that have been anything but normal. In New York City, while students took to the streets arguing for radical and systemic changes like defunding the police and reinvesting in public education and mental health, City officials instead responded with well-worn narratives of discipline and control. Government and educational policy-makers pronounced the City schools as chaotic and unsafe (Woods & Raskin, 2021) doubling down on budget lines for school safety agents, metal detectors and scanning.

This dramatic misalignment of punitive neoliberal educational policy and NYC visionary student demands sparked a partnership between legal advocates and local academics launching a mixed method, intergenerational critical participatory action research (CPAR) study of student experiences, needs, and desires in/of public schooling in pandemic times. Refusing to accept the terms set by policy makers, youth researchers asked: How do we build schools that attend to students academically as well as to the multiple crises exacerbated by the pandemic? How do students define and understand safety since the pandemic? How have students experienced care? What expectations and priorities do students have of schools during covid? These questions were explored through a sequential reflexive design, where methodological spaces offered our youth adult collective ongoing opportunities to meet, reflect, theorize, and create the next method, an iterative approach combining elements of organizing, arts, political and personal analysis, action, and methodological interview/survey construction. A two-day workshop with 45 youth surfaced urgent “post-covid” issues, which then informed focus group questions. This led to an intensive “data-blitz” day that began with five simultaneous two-hour focus groups (N=36) with students from 30 NYC middle and high schools and ended with a series of arts-based research methods and community power-building activities. Themes from the “data blitz” informed a survey (N=600+) of high school student experiences of safety, community and mental health. Our research culminated in a series of collaboratively designed products used to inform a city-wide legal advocacy agenda, create a public art performance, and challenge overly simplistic frameworks dominating policy conversations about “post-covid” schooling.

Our paper offers up a conversation on the potential of CPAR as an epistemological approach for academics and organizers interested in cracking open the tensions of misaligned/ maligning policies and building community power. We will discuss, using the instance of our research, how CPAR helped us clarify the broken contract between schools and students that left students feeling unsupported and misunderstood during the (now lingering) pandemic, as well as the student mandate for future research and action that recognizes meaningful youth participation, relationships, care, academic engagement, cultural responsiveness, and emotional well-being as equally essential elements of safety in schools.

Authors

• Maria Elena Torre, The Public Science Project

• Brett Stoudt, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Mike Williams

• Aiyana Porter, Graduate Center - CUNY