Shifting the paradigm of top-down research: Youth-led research on ICT instruction and positive youth development in schools in Saint Lucia

• In Event: Youth as Agents of Change: Cases from Nepal, Rural USA, Saint Lucia, and Dominican Republic

Proposal

In Saint Lucia, a country already challenged by limited access to quality technological infrastructure and high youth unemployment, the mandate for online instruction and the closing of youth education and training centers has deepened the divide between digital “haves” and “have nots" and further decreased opportunities for youth skill building and development. A global survey by the International Labor Organization (August 2020) found that the decrease in youth earnings and earning potential resulting from business closures during the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected youth’s mental health and optimism towards the future. These challenges have exposed the need for quality instruction to develop students’ digital literacy, a skill necessary for employability and workforce readiness.

At the same time, youth are regularly excluded from designing the very solutions to address the challenges they face and to build their futures. Project evaluations and research are generally relegated to “experts,” those with formal education who are often disconnected from and do not represent the communities being researched. This not only misses the opportunity to achieve nuanced data, analyses, and results, but unjustly excludes the voices of the researched.

This paper presentation will explore the important shift in research methodologies from top-down examination to those driven by the researched. The presentation will examine the power of youth-led research (YLR) to protest the traditional research paradigm. It will do so by presenting and analyzing a YLR research initiative in Saint Lucia on digital skills instruction in secondary schools through the USAID-funded Saint Lucia ConnectEd Activity (ConnectEd), led by World Education (WorldEd).

ConnectEd partners with the education sector in Saint Lucia to strengthen teaching practices of secondary school educators to integrate digital skills and to provide opportunities for youth to learn and practice leadership and employability skills through digital education. ConnectEd is grounded in principles of Positive Youth Development (PYD), an approach centering youth in the design of activities, building on their strengths and knowledge. ConnectEd thus advances digital skills through program interventions and educational practices that emphasize the inherent potential, strengths, and capabilities of youth. This approach is unique in a context where young people are typically not engaged in or consulted on solutions to address the issues that affect them the most. Under ConnectEd, youth play an active role in all aspects of program design, implementation, evaluation and learning.

ConnectEd’s youth-centered and youth-led philosophy are key to its evaluation and learning. Through the project’s YLR component, ConnectEd aims to simultaneously investigate the project’s approach to PYD-rooted ICT integration while building the research capacity of the next generation of leaders in Saint Lucia. In this paper presentation, ConnectEd will share conclusions on overall project effectiveness, gleaned from youth researchers’ assessment and analysis, as well as learnings on the merits and best practices of youth involvement in project evaluation. We will also seek input from the CIES audience on best practices in ensuring youth voices drive all components of projects, research and policy making.

Research conducted under this project aligns closely with the conference theme of “The Power of Protest.” ConnectEd’s youth-centered and youth-led approach contrasts starkly with the status quo of excluding youth voices from initiatives that directly affect them and embodies the important slogan used by activists, “nothing about us without us.” It is contradictory to the tendency for top-down evaluations and research, in which students are the subjects, rather than the leaders of research. And when consulted or included, youth participation usually ends at data collection and not data analysis and presentation, limiting youth voice and leadership. The ConnectEd YLR addresses the inherent power imbalances in research and serves as a model to expand and diversify the number and type of individuals with data analysis skills. This initiative is novel in Saint Lucia as this will be the first time young persons are included as key actors in measuring the impact of an educational project and lending their voice to a national initiative.

Through the YLR activity, ConnectEd engaged youth researchers in an action research course, during which participants explored the fundamentals of participatory action research (PAR), as well as the project’s approach to ICT and PYD integration in classrooms. Youth researchers built data literacy through identifying research questions, developing data collection tools, and instruction in descriptive statistics for data analysis - skills that are not only important for drawing conclusions from data , but also are crucial for employability in the Information Age. The youth then led the research process through classroom observations and interviews with ConnectEd-trained teachers and their students. Key to this process is active and ongoing reflection, whereby youth guide teachers to reflect on their practices, while also reflecting on their own experience leading the research process - and thinking through how to analyze and present the data.

The infusion of PYD principles into the design of the research course and activities elevates youth voices within a project designed to benefit them. Youth researchers provide evidence-based suggestions from their experience as they support teachers to work through challenges and monitor changes in their attitudes, practices, and skills over time. The impact of the YLR approach is being monitored through qualitative data gained from youth researchers’ reflective journals and interviews with program facilitators throughout the research process. Youth are helping measure the extent to which ConnectEd has built teacher expertise and confidence in integrating both digital skills and PYD approaches into instruction through 1) a classroom observation checklist, in which youth measure educators use of PYD and Edtech approaches; 2) one-on-one interviews and targeted self-assessments with teachers and students; and 3) teachers’ reflection journals. Ultimately, this level of involvement also ensures that youth contribute to a national initiative, an approach that, while novel in Saint Lucia, has been applauded by government officials.

The panel presentation will explore future opportunities to strengthen youth-led research in the education sector by exploring with the CIES audience opportunities to expand the scope of this PAR, involving all parties being researched, including teachers and other actors across the education sector in implementing changes based on the youth-led research findings.

Authors

• Royston Emmanuel, World Education Inc.

• Michaela Tobin, JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc.

• Ben Vorspan, World Education