Embodying Conocimiento in Research, Remedy, and Repair: Adult Allies Negotiating Multiple Positionalities in YPAR Contexts

• In Event: Youth Participatory Action Research to Inform and Transform: Insights From Five States

Abstract

Overview
By challenging traditionally hierarchical educational relationships, YPAR spaces can offer opportunities to document harm experienced by some students in schools as well as explore possibilities for beginning the process of repair. This paper explores the intersection of conocimiento (Anzaldua, 2002) and culturally responsive approaches by investigating how adult allies negotiate their own selves-in-context (Caraballo & Soleimany, 2018), as they engage in disrupting traditional power dynamics as part of a co-curricular YPAR program. Our study builds on research on YPAR (Caraballo et al., 2017), culturally responsive pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2012), and educational reparations by centering adult allies’ individual and relational experiences, drawing parallels to those of many educators who seek to support youth agency in an increasingly complex and polarized sociopolitical context (Love, 2023).
Conceptual Frameworks
From a sociocultural and practice theory perspective, youth as well as adult allies construct and negotiate multiple identities and positionalities across cultural contexts (Caraballo, 2023; Holland et al., 1998) whether in institutions such as schools or in their own communities. Our understanding of context is particularly framed by Anzaldua’s conceptualization of conocimiento (2002), which emphasizes the importance of embodied knowledge and challenging conventional realities. As Anzaldua notes, "Conocimiento comes from opening all your senses, consciously inhabiting your body and decoding its symptoms" (p. 54). We drew on the principles of YPAR to create a brave space (Arao & Clemens, 2013), an intergenerational context for critical participation that relies on relationships of care and trust between adults and youth (Lyiscott et al., 2020; Mirra, Garcia, & Morrell, 2015).
Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
Using a critical autoethnographic approach, we use the “self-in-context” as a framework to consider how adult allies from diverse backgrounds (e.g. race, age, experience) make meaning individually and collectively and experience their roles in a youth-centered intergenerational space (Caraballo & Soleimany, 2018). We draw on conocimento as a lens to analyze the backdrop of multiple systems of power within this sociopolitical moment. Our autoethnographic inquiry involved self-reflection and recursive readings of multiple data sources (Chang et al., 2012): field notes, transcripts from YPAR sessions and research team meetings, and program artifacts. As Greene (2018) suggests, "self-reflection and critical consideration can be as liberating as they are educative…[and] have the potentiality of opening multiple worlds" (p. 32).


Warrants and Implications
Our findings suggest that “democracy, codes of power, and feelings of miscommunication” (Kinloch, 2012) significantly impact adult allies’ engagement with each other in YPAR spaces, and might offer insight into how youth experience complex interactions in educational spaces.
As Love (2023) contends, repair requires reparations; conocimiento can serve as a lens to explore what an individual stakeholders’ role might entail in a particular context. A teacher’s openness to reflect on their own experiences, as demonstrated by the inquiries of adult allies, can provide important insight when making consequential choices (Greene, 2018, p. 21). Educators’ engagement in autoethnographic inquiry can thus provide situated insight based on their own selves-in-context to navigate the complex landscape of addressing harm and beginning the process of repair.

Authors

• Limarys Caraballo, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Vivett Cereta Hemans Dukes, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Edith P. Middleton, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Fabiola Quinones, Teachers College, Columbia University