Youth Participatory Action Research in Language Policy as a Site of Repair for Bilingual Youth

• In Event: Toward Remedy and Repair in Multilingual Education: Critical Participatory Inquiries With Emergent Bilinguals and Families

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, we explore what happens when educators and researchers co-construct a bilingual space with youth to imagine and advocate for bilingual futures. Through the use of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR; Fine & Cammarota, 2008), during the 2023-2024 school year, a doctoral student and undergraduate student with the support of university faculty bilingually co-facilitated a weekly workshop at a local high school to collectively research high school bilingual pathways for their school and district. High school participants in the workshop had diverse linguistic identities with all students being emerging bilinguals and about half, heritage speakers of Spanish. For many of our heritage speakers, including our Chicana undergraduate TA for the project who was a recent graduate of district schools, our workshop was a site of repair from the impacts of subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999) and deficit views on their languaging practices.

Methods and Data Sources
Through interviews and participant observation, we conducted a critical ethnography (May & Caldas, 2022) of the process and products of this year-long YPAR workshop. Additional student products included in the analysis are: students’ exit tickets and reflections, students’ policy recommendations and report to their school board, students’ collaboratively produced poster for the AERA Youth Teams in Education Research 2024 program, and students’ presentation on their project at the [State] Association for Bilingual Education Conference in 2024.

Perspectives and Results
The findings informed and spoke back to our conceptual framework: students’ identity negotiation, solidarity in the counterspace (Solórzano et al., 2000) and the authentic work of creating policy recommendations for their school board, all woven together, led students to develop their own critical language consciousness (Lee, 2014; Leeman, 2018). In our co-created bilingual counterspace, through collective identity negotiation and reflective and iterative action, students both became language policy actors and came to realize they already were language policy actors. Inside the bilingual counterspace, students could also interrogate negative ideologies about their languaging practice. This paper seeks to embrace the messiness of participatory partnership research and map what happened in our co-constructed bilingual space that became a site of repair where students could develop as language policy actors.

Significance
This project explores the essential role youth can play in advocating for bilingual education and against subtractive practices in local policy at the school and district level. Collaborating as expert researchers, gaining access to adult spaces, and having their voices heard are crucial elements of healing and repair for participating students. One of the most critical results is the development and awareness of youth that they are language policy actors. Students left our program empowered with the confidence and skills to organize and advocate for linguistic justice and other types of social justice in the future, resulting in unknowable future positive impacts on our education system and world (Oakes & Rogers, 2006). Ultimately, to expand bilingual programming in our schools, districts, and states, we need to partner with young people and provide space for their voices to drive change and build just linguistic futures.

Authors

• Laura Meinzen, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Maya Milán, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Deborah K. Palmer, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Michelle Renée Valladares, University of Colorado - Boulder