Youth as Knowers Already: Critical Conversations With an Urban Youth-Led Coalition Advocating for Student Voice

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

Abstract

Young people are already participating, socializing, following personal passions, organizing, producing complex media, demonstrating agency in physical and online worlds (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Ito et al., 2013). They are already doing many of the literacy practices educators want to cultivate with youth. In this paper, together with members of a youth-led coalition (14- 18 years) that runs an online newspaper and are advocates for youth voice, we explore their collective literacy practices to center what youth are ‘already doing’. We define youth-led spaces as situated outside adult-run educational spaces and organized and sustained by young people acting as leaders and facilitators. We ask: What kinds of knowledge do youth bring into these spaces; how do they position themselves as knowers? And what can we learn about creating youth-centered practices, from studying youth literacy practices in these youth-led coalitions?
This study of youth as knowers draws upon decolonial perspectives and onto-epistemological theories of knowledge (Todd, 2016; Cadena, 2015; Govindarajan, 2018) that are open to multiple ways of knowing and knowers. We draw upon critical feminist epistemologies (e.g., Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983; Delgado-Bernal, 2006; Smith, 2012) to understand how these youth-led coalitions collaboratively come together, build on each other’s ways of knowing, and work across differences—- Critical feminist collectives (see Combahee River Collective) understand the potential of collaboration, interdependence, and community in creating powerful spaces that are built on shared commitments.
This participatory ethnographic study draws from critical ethnography (Madison, 2005) to understand research as a collaborative endeavor. The study combines ethnographic methods– participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with digital methods that allow for centering of youths’ perspectives. Media go along, scroll back methods (Robards & Lincoln, 2017), walkthrough method (Light, et. al., 2018) used for tracing the collective’s online discourse, connections, networks, and platforms. We used Video Cued Elicitation (VCE) for reflections from youth on their collective practices using videos of their artifacts. Data sources included field notes, analytical memos, interview transcripts, audio/video recordings of discussions, screen capture videos and images, artifacts (articles, social media posts), and VCE transcripts.
Youth members' shared commitment to advocacy brings them together, and they are able to do this work because “this is a youth-led space”. As one participant shared, “youth-led spaces are flexible, we understand each other’s needs, we give each other grace when something is not done”. Members position this work as valuable but also understand that to recruit members, they must focus on “making it work” for everyone (e.g., telling new members to highlight this work in college applications). The various moves of empathy, care, flexibility, understanding, leadership, networking, navigating dissonances that they make, offer valuable insights into building intergenerational collaborative relationships (Caraballo & Lyiscott, 2018) to educators, practitioners, and researchers who are interested in creating, designing, or offering support to youth and youth-led coalitions. By understanding youth as already engaged and present in the world, this study hopes to build knowledge around the unique ways youth-led coalitions are formed and the practices that undergird these spaces– where youth are knowers.

Authors

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• Kaitlyn Rodriguez

• Joshua E. Cohen

• Rowan Arthur