Centering Youth Voices in Intergenerational and Participatory Inquiry

• In Event: Toward Transformative Intergenerational Collaboration: Identities, Literacies, and Contexts for Participatory Research With Youth

Abstract

Overview
The purpose of this interactive presentation is to expand our understanding of how intergenerational inquiry methods can be used between youth and educators that requires collective engagement by educators and students in order to interrogate curriculum and pedagogical practices. This presentation will feature youth’s participatory action research (YPAR) inquiries, presented by the youth, and involve the audience in small group dialogue to create a space of “in between-ness” toward reimagining discourses in educational research.

Perspective(s)
Intergenerational research can disrupt conventional paradigms and challenge the traditional and rigid roles of researcher/participant and teacher/student and invites discussion about unspoken power dynamics. Our presentation illuminates this “in between-ness” through a pedagogy of love, a practice that attends to the “relational understanding of the curriculum that defines teaching as the work of the heart” (Caraballo and Soleimany, 2019, p.85). This approach represents a radical collective endeavor to take inquiry knowledge and production out of academic institutions and focus on youth, who “directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand” (Caraballo et al., 2017, p.2). At the foundation is the need to work collectively and in community (students, teachers, professors, and more).


Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
Greene (2000) calls for people (educators, students, etc.) to engage in collaborations, and our mutual sharing of stories “can radiate to inform the ‘conversation’ and to empower individuals to open themselves to what they are making in common. Once they are open, once they are informed, once they are engaged in speech and action from their many vantage points, they may be able to identify a better state of things—and go on to transform” (p. 59). It is critical that teachers and students engage in dialogue to begin understanding the historical roots in which literacy and language has shaped the tensions that exist in both maintaining social inequities and supporting struggles for social justice. Therefore, reading and writing are forms of cultural production and “creative expression must be viewed as a reading of the world and a negotiation of discourses that have significance for social action” (Filipiak et al., 2020). This research draws specifically on qualitative research methodologies through narrative inquiry (Vinz & Schaafsma, 2011), in particular: critical autoethnography (Chang, 2008) and storying (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017). Data sources include field notes, meeting transcripts, surveys, empirical data from YPAR inquiries, as well as youth and adult allies’ critical reflections on the research process.

Findings, and Significance
As will be demonstrated in this interactive presentation, student-generated insights alongside educators in the classroom can richly inform current and future educators and researchers to rethink how knowledge is produced in research and engage in authentic dialogue with youth. Designed to reimagine and develop a “renewed consciousness of possibility” in which we envision our interconnectedness (Greene, 1995, p.43), intergenerational dialogue can sustain collective efforts toward transformation and justice in an increasingly complex educational landscape.

Authors

• Diana Liu, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Vivett Cereta Hemans Dukes, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Edith P. Middleton, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Gregory D. Petershack, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Fabiola Quinones, Teachers College, Columbia University