Designing Toward Dignity: Exploring the Literacy Productions of Youth Solutionaries in a YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research) Filmmaking Class

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

Abstract

This ethnographic study, located in a public middle school in the Bronx, New York, explored how 8th grade students enrolled in a year-long filmmaking class leveraged digital literacies to capture the impact of an in-school, youth participatory action research (YPAR) initiative that they had participated in across grades 6-7. The goal of this study was to 1) explore the digital literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008) students leveraged to assert and reflect upon their experiences as researchers of social inequities within their local community and 2) examine what these literacies revealed about youth’s brokering of dignity- or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being, within the context of YPAR. Overall, this paper offers an important phenomenological portrait of youths’ production of emancipatory and liberatory visions for the future, ushering in opportunities to “learn to see” ingenuity and new forms of agency in youth and communities who have been historically perceived through a reductive and racialized lens (Gutierrez et al, 2017).
This study builds on existing bodies of literature surrounding youth epistemologies (Author & Colleagues, 2020; Caraballo, 2017; Kelly 2023) and commitments of critical literacy scholars (Freire, 1970; Janks, 2013) to tease out the complexity and precarity of power relationships that shape youth-led research, including how youth are positioned and invited to read and produce text. Moreover, scholarship on felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens & Kanov, 2017), is central to understanding the affective dimensions of participatory literacy production involved in YPAR.
This study was grounded in a critical ethnographic framework that centered on a comprehensive, qualitative study of literacy and cultural practices that excavate issues of power and social inequality (Carspecken, 1996, Creswell, 2012). The YPAR filmmaking class, catalyzed by adult facilitators’ desire to create stronger mechanisms for youth leadership within the school’s YPAR program, invited twenty, 8th grade students who had participated in YPAR since the 6th grade to design a film that captured the impact of YPAR on the school. Data collection centered around 5 months of observations of the filmmaking class, which met twice per week and included field notes, student and teacher interviews, and analysis of multimodal literacy products. I utilized the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss,1967) to guide data analysis in order to tease out emergent themes.
Findings that emerge from this research are that participants’ use of digital media tools within the filmmaking course emphasized the importance of relationality, humanization, and intergenerational collaboration within YPAR. As students worked to reflect the impact of YPAR on the school community, they continually accentuated its role in fostering opportunities for critical listening and collective vulnerability, which youth cited as significant in transforming the larger social ecology of the school. Second, students credited YPAR in supporting their negotiation of two prominent spaces of dehumanization: media and adult/youth relationships.
The significance of relationality and in disrupting sources of degradation are crucial in better understanding dignity-affirming contexts for student learning and for equipping youth as “solutionaries” (Boggs, ) who are able to contribute to the well-being of their communities and create the world anew.

Author

• Danielle R. Filipiak, Michigan State University