Writing in Partnership: The Emergence of a Youth-Led Online Writing Community

• In Event: Youth as Our "Present Already": Youth-Led Spaces at the Center of Advocacy, Research, Practice, and Design

Abstract

This participatory design research (PDR) study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) traces how youth and adult researchers worked together to co-design an online writing community (“W4C”) as a youth-led, affinity-based space for adolescent writers interested in digital writing and social activism. Drawing on a collaborative inquiry approach to engaging in qualitative research alongside youth (Lyiscott et al., 2020), we explore how the community emerged through collectively-imagined design decisions.
In 2022, the author team (comprised of high school juniors/seniors, graduate students, and university researchers) met to establish W4C as an affinity-based writing community on Discord, a voice, video, and text-based social platform. The main data source is transcripts of bi-weekly meetings of the research team across the 2022-2023 academic year. We also analyzed artifacts created by team members when establishing the community and all materials posted in Discord. We trace the shifting roles involved as the team moved from adult-youth partnerships (adult-driven, adult-designed curriculum) to youth-led efforts to design the writing community. The shift entailed working as a collaborative team of researchers making sense of the W4C community and engaging in collaborative data collection and analysis.
We drew on computational (Aragon & Davis, 2019) and ethnographic (Jackson, 2013) methods in our PDR study to explore how these practices of ‘partnering’ emerged/developed. PDR centers partnering through collaborative methods and analysis, as roles like ‘researcher’, ‘researched’, and ‘designer’ are unsettled, remediated, and reflexively studied. We used Light et al.’s (2018) method to engage in a critical ‘walkthrough’ of our W4C Discord community and engaged in rounds of emergent coding of the transcript and artifactual data using Atlas.ti (Saldaña, 2016). As a team, we interacted with and made sense of data through collaborative analysis activities (Lupton & Watson, 2021).
We explore three findings about how engaging in youth-led intergenerational inquiry (Lyiscott et al., 2020) together in our ‘partnering’ work has disrupted traditional educational and research power relations. First, we explore how youth’s expertise as digital writers familiar with Discord upended hierarchical notions of adult-youth relationships. Second, critical dimensions of platforms became visible when youth introduced auto-bots as a moderation tactic, bringing attention to the governance of the online community and our roles as ‘humans’ in the space. Third, as we engaged in conversations about the centrality of trust and relationship-building in forming a vibrant/sustainable writing community, our own intergenerational team developed the relationships necessary to sustain our research and writing community.
This paper illuminates how centering youth as expert knowers/doers in research with (not about) them might “interrupt stubborn hierarchies” (Lyiscott et al., 2020) As the field continues to uplift Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) (Caraballo et al., 2017) and youth-led approaches, researchers must take into account both the centrality of relationships and the power negotiations inherent to this work. Especially as we develop a writing community outside the boundaries of the K-12 classroom, we learned to lean on young people’s expertise as writers and build the trust necessary to interrogate normative power relations in educational spaces.

Authors

• Mary Elizabeth Talian, University of Pennsylvania

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Keerthanya Rajesh, Research for Action

• Opal Jawale