YPAR Themes as An Index to Youth Voice About Education and Needed Change

• In Event: Lessons From an Encompassing Teacher Preparation/Diversification Project

Abstract

The oldest action part of this project is a collaborative initiative with youth at several of the state’s most diverse high schools that was initially funded by two state department of education grants. This allowed project leaders to engage high school students who had at least some interest in the field of education in youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects. Consistent with the initial premises of participatory action research (Fals-Borda, 1991) and their modification to engage young researchers (Berta-Ávila, et.al., 2021; Cammarota, et al., 2016), youth who chose to participate in their schools’ ‘YPAR clubs’ have had broad autonomy to choose what themes they wanted to further investigate. Then university faculty and high school teachers (as YPAR coaches) have offered support regarding various ‘how’s for the pursued lines of inquiry. YPAR youth have then pursued their themes over the span of a year that culminated with their attending and presenting at the university of the project’s faculty supporters. So far there have been three YPAR summits that have included 43 presentations by 161 youth from seven high schools.
Acknowledging that the majority of students are student of color (which reflects the student enrollment of the schools they come from) and that they broadly (but not unanimously) profile as more engaged and successful students—YPAR club participation is voluntary and thus attracts students who more engaged at school—this paper does a theme analysis across the YPAR Summit’s three years (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Vaismoradi, et al., 2016). One point is to show the range of student concerns, like the creation of a subtitled orientation video about Guatemala that Guatemalan heritage students from a small meatpacking community thought would help their peers and teachers better understand something that seemed vital to these students and a ‘queer analysis’ of district and state-approved curricula to see when/if/how same-sex couples were referenced. Another is to highlight how concerns seem to have changed over time. Perhaps reflecting the raised consciousness of racial matters provoked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, many of the 2021-22 Summit presentations examined race and ethnicity-related themes. In contrast, a dominant theme in 2023-24 were issues related to student stress, overwork, and mental health. A goal of this paper is to provide insight into what topics are on youth’s minds as the consider various facets of schooling and what issues merit further attention. It follows that these topics also pertain to what themes new teacher preparation could pay attention to as part of a referencing of what new teachers need to succeed and stay in the schools of partner project districts.

Authors

• Amanda Morales, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Edmund T. Hamann, University of Nebraska - Lincoln