Youth and Intergenerational Strategies for Preventing School Pushout

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Handing over the Mic: Centering Youth Voices in Research and Practice

Proposal

Youth in Zanzibar, Tanzania have been questioning whether school is preparing them for equitable, sustainable, and secure futures, as promised to them by education policies and proclamations (Morris, 2018; OPM 2019). Yet youth are also hopeful that education is a pathway to greater social mobility, becoming more active community members, and greater confidence in themselves and their relationships with others. Even when youth endure long periods of waithood between when they complete school and when they get a job (Honwana, 2012), this hope persists. This presentation explores how to build solidarities between youth, education leaders, practitioners, and policymakers across Zanzibar to transform education.

This in-depth, mixed-methods research presents quantitative and qualitative findings from a longitudinal study of youth that spans from 2007 to 2023. Using a mixture of surveys, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, and storytelling, this mixed-methods research explores how to center youth perspectives and strategies in a combination of intergenerational and youth participatory action research. The findings and recommendations push education researchers, policymakers, and school leaders to be more responsive to the changing realities of youth living in an island community dependent on tourism and vulnerable to climate change. This research took part in three phases: tracking youth across the duration of their schooling (grade one through post-secondary), in-depth lifestories with 19 rural youth gathered through the popular theater approach, and youth-led conversations across 17 government secondary schools in 10 of the 11 districts in Zanzibar. This third phase of research (2022-2023) was conducted with over 1,000 secondary school youth and their parents/caregivers, alongside 200 teachers at 17 government schools. Research was co-lead with youth-researchers alongside a civil society organisation that works closely with the government schools.

Through this research, young people have shared what they want out of school and how they think education needs to change to deliver the promises of greater wellbeing and social mobility. This presentation presents some strategies for centering youth viewpoints in educational policy and practice as documented by the youth. This presentation also details the deep intergenerational process required to arrive at policy-relevant recommendations. As one youth mentioned, “I never imagined that the education system could change;” imaging this change takes community-driven data and dialogues in collaboration with youth.

This research argues that while we need to center youth voices and hand over the microphone—we need to remember that youth do not have a single voice and that they will use the microphone towards different goals and outcomes. While in youth studies the term “youth” is often used in the singular this panel argues that understanding the pluralism is vital. Youth represent diverse identities, intersectionalities, and positionalities, such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, ethnicity, faith, disability status, education levels of families, political affiliations, immigration status, to name a few. These different identities enrich youth research and practice and push the field of youth studies and education to continue to create more intentional spaces where youth can situate their solitaries in relationship to each other while maintaining their plural and diverse voices.

Author

• Emily Markovich Morris, The Brookings Institution