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Listening and Co-Creating Knowledge: A Qualitative Analysis of University Student Experiences of YPAR

Thu, April 9, 4:15 to 5:45pm PDT (4:15 to 5:45pm PDT), Westin Bonaventure, Floor: Lobby Level, Palos Verdes

Abstract

As community-engaged scholars interested in supporting under-resourced communities’ access to resources and sociopolitical power, our research team comprised of undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students and a professor collaborates with 4th through 6th grade children in an after-school setting using Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). YPAR fosters critical literacy, empowerment, and community change through knowledge production; children are typically excluded from this form of power (Langhout & Thomas, 2010). Community narratives written by members of a marginalized group, in this case low-income children, provide a different vantage into community challenges and possible futures, and promote individual and relational development (Morrell, 2008; Thomas & Rappaport, 1996). Through credit-bearing research team experiences in an urban Northern California community setting, university students facilitate and document a YPAR project in a low-income multicultural neighborhood at risk of gentrification and housing displacement. Graduate, undergraduate, and post-graduate students, thus, experience firsthand the power of creating knowledge and working toward community-driven change with community members while also developing skills and competencies helpful to careers and/or graduate study. The school/university/community collaborative research and university-community partnership that supports this work is part of the University-Community Links network.

This study is grounded in theoretical frameworks of liberatory critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Goodman & Cocca, 2014; Morrell, 2008; Shor, 1999) and relational empowerment (Christens, 2012; Speer et al., 1995). Critical literacy moves beyond functional reading skills, and is a self-knowledge connected to multi-modal ways of questioning and understanding the world (Shor, 1999). Relational empowerment is defined as the relational practices and capacities that undergird the development and exercise of sociopolitical power (Christens, 2012). Together, these frameworks suggest that children and university students in the after-school setting develop critical literacy, or the ability to read the world and become agents within it, in relationship with each other and their shared contexts. We put these frameworks in conversation with literature on High Impact Practices (HIPS) in teaching and learning, as undergraduate research and community engaged learning have been identified as HIPs ​​by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). HIPs are associated with greater academic success for underrepresented students (Finley & McNair, 2013; Kuh, 2008).

The purpose of this study is to examine university student experiences with a YPAR project as a HIP, illuminating the pedagogical and experiential aspects that students found most meaningful. Participants are 14 students and data are written reflection papers and reflexivity essays completed during Fall 2023, Spring 2024, and Fall 2024 semesters, after participants’ first semester on the research team. These texts were collaboratively analyzed by a team of student co-authors and their faculty advisor using the Listening Guide relational approach to qualitative data analysis (Gilligan & Eddy, 2021). Results focus on relationships, solidarity, shared cultural and social experiences, and reciprocal empowerment, which suggests the children are implicated in, or drivers of, the undergraduate students' empowerment, and this is understood as a mutual process. We share results and implications for YPAR processes and community-engaged learning/service-learning and community-engaged research in the university curriculum.

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