Connecting the Threads and Spreading the Innovation: An Invitation to Allied Researchers and Practitioners

• In Event: 52.012 - High School Students as Social Justice Researchers, Connecting Praxis and Theory: A New Generation Emerging

Abstract

This final poster brings together the themes of all other presentations in this session, highlighting how the work addresses the challenge of the annual meeting theme by presenting research by high school students who are learning to interrogate issues of power and social justice through inquiry based practices in their schools and community organizations. Here, we highlight the importance of having researchers work in close connection with schools and community organizations, as well as with teachers and mentors, to effect meaningful change, and we invite connections beyond the conference with a broadening network of allied researchers. We seek to connect with additional scholars who re-imagine learning in the disciplines in addressing how issues of culture and heritage contribute to the forward flow of human knowledge and provide demonstrations of the opportunities for personal empowerment and a deepened understanding of the nature of societal challenges associated with race/ethnicity and class and sources of resilience that attention to social justice, culture and the holistic needs of youth make possible.

We outline our shared vision for spreading the innovation of research-practice alliances that are collectively rooted in understanding the affordances of the broad array of repertoires youth develop out of participation in routine cultural practices that are situated in the broad ecologies of these youths’ lives; and that span across family, community, school and peer social networks. These repertoires of practice include ways of using language and interacting, funds of knowledge that span domains – including disciplinary domains. The interventions developed are theoretically rooted in conceptions of what constitutes generative knowledge in the domains of interest, the centrality of relationship building and scaffolding forms of prior knowledge that learners bring to the tasks, the importance of attending to perceptions that learners bring to the tasks, the setting and the people, and the centrality of issues of identity to learning (e.g. in terms of race/ethnicity, class, ability, and youth as learners); and to the power of youth voices in examining the challenges and opportunities of their lives.

Authors

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University

• Megan Bang, University of Washington

• Christopher Emdin, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade, San Francisco State University

• Nichole D. Pinkard, DePaul University