Youth Participatory Action Research in the Borderlands

• In Event: 29.082 - Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: 29.082-22 - Decentering School: Exploring Community Spaces as Rich Sites for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Historically , within educational research, scholarship on Latino/a students and families has been largely deficit, creating narratives suggesting lack of investment in education and a dearth of valuable knowledge within the home and community (Valencia & Black, 2002; Yosso, 2005; Delgado Bernal, 2006). For Latino/a children of im/migrant [1] families, Eurocentric and normative views of academic success, parent involvement, and cultural capital have been used to further marginalize these students within U.S. public schools (Orellana, 2001). In this paper, the author argues that these narratives are rooted in legacies of colonialism, which work to maintain racial hierarchies and dominant notions of knowledge legitimacy, and thus continue to surface particularly in discourses surrounding immigration and the education of immigrant and undocumented children (Ghiso & Campano, 2013; Patel, 2013). In this paper, the author draws on empirical data to highlight the ways in which im/migrant young people used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to disrupt dominant notions of their community, a migrant housing complex in the western rocky mountain region. With that, she examines how the bridging of YPAR and Chicana feminist scholarship is one way to engage in liberatory and transformative research in education, particularly with young people as collaborators (Sanchez, 2009; Torre & Ayala, 2009; Torre, 2009).

This approach to research, "recognize(s) the critical insights young people have about racial injustice and to generate cross-generational communities of inquiry around research, critique, and action" (Torre & Fine, 2008, p. 165). It is a partnership that acknowledges youth as holders and producers of knowledge and actively works against deficit ideas of marginalized students, particularly students of color. It recognizes youth as capable of mobilizing efforts towards social change (Akom, Cammarota, Ginwright, 2008; Irizarry, 2011). This paper specifically works from the assumption that im/migrant homes and communities are rich sites of knowledge production and works against deficit ideas that often deem these spaces illegitimate for teaching and learning.

The author draws on data excepts from youth’s writing, interviews, and artifacts produced throughout the research process determined and carried out by youth to answer the following research questions: How do the residents of this community define and value community? How do these ideas influence participation in community events? And, how does this community resist and disrupt stereotypes of Mexican, migrant families and communities? The analysis within the paper situates the data within the rich theoretical conversations between literacy, anti-colonial scholarship and education and Chicana feminisms. Through the analysis, the author highlights the following findings: (1) Youth Participatory Action Research creating spaces for critical literacies of inquiry, (2) feminista consciousness and the gendered ways of knowing for im/migrant Xicana youth, and (3) the tensions im/migrant youth work through within colonial discourses of their families and communities. Concluding with critical insights and implications for non-traditional spaces of teaching and learning, the paper exposes the ways in which we can call upon youth as collaborators in anti-colonial, community based research.

[1] While ‘immigrant’ and ‘migrant’ are not interchangeable terms, the students I work with come from families who can be considered through both terms.

Author

• Monica Gonzalez, University of Colorado - Boulder