“Do the Right Thing!” Youth Participatory Action Research and Black Political Education

• In Event: Accounting for the Black Radical Tradition in the Heart of Black Pedagogy

Abstract

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is one of the primary vehicles for proletarian youth of color and Black youth in the United States to formally engage in political organizing around community social problems and school-based inequalities (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Caraballo, Lozeneski, Lyiscott, & Morrell, 2017). Much of what contemporary educational-research-initiated YPAR has defined as foundational principles of emancipatory teaching theory and practice in the internal colonies of Black America extends from the humanist tradition and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In response, this paper asks, “what would happen if instead of relying on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, YPAR relied on the political educational expertise of Black America’s proletarian movement leaders?”
Although a product of this time and context, Freire himself did not situate his own praxis within the participatory action research (PAR) that evolved in 1970s Latin America. Recovering the historical record, I explore the Cold War context of Latin American PAR (Allende, 1997; Becker, 2017; Cendales, Frenando, & Torres, 2005; Harman, 2017; Holst, 2006; Rapport, 2020; Spektor, 2018) to center the contributions of Orlando Fals-Borda and Camillo Torres as they articulated a PAR theory of praxis that involves two overlapping goals: 1) the attainment and production of political knowledge amongst the poor and oppressed, and 2) the building of grassroots power that is expressed through political action (Fals-Borda, 1987). While educational-research-initiated YPAR has distilled from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed an axiological pedagogical commitment to “do the right thing” vis à vis subverting the power dynamics between teachers and students, it has almost nearly waylaid a pedagogical commitment to advancing the material position of proletarian youth.
Breaking from the compulsion in educational research to place Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at the conceptual center of U.S.-based YPAR with poor and working-class Black youth, I argue instead that YPAR must embrace radical materialism and more specifically, the political educational traditions reflected in the praxis of Black American radical materialists: Ella Baker, Kwame Ture, and Fred Hampton. In these three, one finds political education commitments in close proximity to the PAR theory of praxis articulated by Fals-Borda and Torres. Given that these three experienced material victories organizing in Black America’s internal colonies, drawing from their expertise is a crucial corrective that places YPAR back in right standing with the PAR theory of practice articulated by Fals-Borda and Torres. Fals-Borda and Torres’ PAR prioritized contextual reflexivity in political struggle, and marked winning material victories as the only legitimate basis upon which to evaluate the efficacy of the PAR approach. Thus it is crucial to center materialism rather than humanism as the foundation of political education in (Y)PAR organizing with proletarian youth in Black America’s internal colonies.

Author

• Kevin L. Clay, Rutgers University