Stewarding Social Changemaking and Repair through Youth Activism: Reflections on Teaching and Learning

• In Event: Education, Reparations, and the Elusive Quest for Black Educational Justice in Evanston, Illinois

Abstract

Purpose
As a K-12 educator, ethnographer and learning scientist, working closely with youth committed to addressing racial injustice within Evanston, IL, a racially-diverse, yet segregated community, I explore two questions: What can I learn about teaching and supporting a multiracial coalition of youth committed to racial justice by exploring archival records of Black youth activism, agency, and leadership of the 1960s in the community where I teach (RQ1)? How does my storytelling of local Black youth activist histories serve as a mediating tool for cultivating student agency, identity and leadership development today for a multiracial coalition of youth engaged in racial justice initiatives in the same community (RQ2)?

Perspectives
I am inspired by Aldan Morris’s (2019) work and his challenge to social movement researchers in asserting that their work should “enable it to produce far-reaching insights on how social movements achieve social change” (p. 125). I write providing insights that explore the intersections of social movement research on Black activism, multiracial coalitions towards educational justice, teaching and learning, identity development, and leadership education (author, in press).

Methods & Data Sources
I take an autoethnographic (Adams, Jones, & Ellis, 2015) approach in storying my learning while exploring local archival records of correspondence between Black students, school administrators and the school Board during a period of Black youth activism during integration in the 1960s. I offer my understanding of how I shared those histories with youth who are currently part of a multiracial justice-based high school student organization that I co-sponsor, Students Organized Against Racism (SOAR). I take up portions of endarkened storywork (Toliver, 2022) as a pedagogical tool to explore liberatory possibilities for remedy and repair in educational settings with SOAR students, who seek to cultivate racial justice in the community. I use cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) which, in learning, explores the shifting and expanding goals that individuals work towards within specific activities (Engeström, 2001; Pacheco, 2012). Endarkened storywork in this context serves as a proleptic mediating tool (Sengupta-Irving, Vogelstein, Brady, & Phillips Galloway, 2023), building on endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard & Bell, 2011) and Indigenous storywork (Archibald, 2008), for cultivating leadership agency, activism, and enactment.

Findings
1) Based on sharing lessons from my archival research, storytelling serves as a powerful mediating pedagogical tool toward educational justice in how it fosters opportunities for repairing & remedying lived histories of educational injustice. (RQ1)
2) Endarkened storywork positions youth with opportunities to explore their sociopolitical identities while engaging in social changemaking as racial justice work in the community. (RQ2)

Significance
Endarkened storywork, as a proleptic mediating tool, can offer opportunities to teach and bridge past local histories of Black youth activism to today's multiracial coalitions of student leaders interested in racial justice. This finding echoes historically and contemporarily, how youth have been agentic changemakers & worldbuilders across justice-oriented movements, like the Civil Rights Movement. It becomes important to steward stories and actions of hope and resilience in how youth-centered liberation work has led to social change then and how it is at the forefront of freedom dreaming now (Kelley, 2002).

Author

• Corey A Winchester, Northwestern University