Data Carnival: Participatory Analysis of Youth Environments

• In Event: Creating Spaces for Critical Praxis, Agency, and Empowerment in Formal and Informal Learning Environments

Abstract

Environments are rooted in a sociohistorical-political system of inequality that is apparent when looking at the lives of young people in urban contexts. A critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003), interrogates the network of power relations through which unjust socio-environmental conditions are produced and maintained. As a way to engage young people in investigations of their local environments, youth participatory action research (YPAR) has proven effective at privileging the experiences and voices of young people. YPAR as a pedagogical praxis and research methodology embraces a Freirian vision of problem-posing education, “providing young people with opportunities to study social problems affecting their lives and then determine actions to rectify these problems” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008, p. 2). In this praxis, youth are co-researchers, and involved in varying aspects of the research including data analysis. Cahill (2007) describes participatory analysis specifically as “a critical process of making visible the invisible” and should embrace a commitment to producing counter stories (p.187). Addressing issues of direct importance to the lived experiences of youth, YPAR as an epistemology and methodology challenges conventional assumptions about who has the right to research.

The focus of this poster is to explore how participatory data analysis and interpretation in a research collective create space for youth to articulate the ways they understand the natural and socially constructed environment in which they are situated. A ‘data carnival’ was designed to analyse three years of data generated in a high school environmental science course that focused on students examining their local environments. We conceptualized the ‘data carnival’ as a way for all participants to return to data they generated, share in the process of analysis and interpretation and learn more about themselves and their individual and shared meanings about their relationships to lived spaces.

Participants from the 2011-2014 schools years came together to look across multiple data sources including neighborhood reflections, photovoice narratives, mental maps, and course reflections. Ten former students and seven education researchers participated in small and large group discussions and activities. Participants identified a wealth of of issues and experiences impacting youth including the ways diversity, segregation, and neighborhood identity intersect with gentrification. Issues of access and equity to quality parks, food, and safety were also prevalent. As a group we unpacked these issues, collectively illuminating the interconnections of varied youth experiences, as well as multiple sites of contradiction and tensions experienced in local environments.

The participatory data carnival afforded youth the opportunity to engage in dialogues around how they understand their individual and collective lived experiences in place. A critical pedagogy of place utilizing YPAR illuminates how youth experience their local environments as not independent of class, gender, ethnicity, or other power struggles but clearly see the ways power has been maintained within privileged groups, while disempowering more marginalized groups. By reimagining environmental education as a process of continued exploration and understanding of one's local and lived community, I argue that these processes of investigation that young people are engaged in democratize research and knowledge production.

Authors

• Marissa E Bellino, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Olivia Kazior