Ceding Space, Seeding Emancipation with Alternative School Students

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 1:45 pm
  In Poster Session: Experiential Education and Community Engagement: Scholarship and Practice SIG Poster Session

Abstract

Our work with students at an ‘alternative’ school is guided by a commitment to redistributing power away from positional authority toward youth. This axiological commitment is evidenced by our attempts to “cede space” to young people. The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1. to describe how the culture of surveillance and labor extraction in the alternative school building impeded our efforts to empower youth, and 2. to explore our more successful enactment of this axiology in a community-based learning environment. We draw on ethnographic methods, personal reflections, and archival program data to assert that the more we were able to cede space, the better able students were to authentically contribute to decision making.

Authors

• Sean Forbes, Auburn University

• Carey E. Andrzejewski, Auburn University

• Eric Hogan, Georgia Southern University