Working Toward Sovereignty: Indigenous Youth and Participatory Action Research as a Liberation From and Refusal of Public Schooling

• In Event: 56.021 - Beyond State-Sanctioned Schooling, K–16: Imagining Black, Brown, and Indigenous Futurities

Abstract

Native American youth frequently experience racism in state-sanctioned public schools (Johnston-Goodstar & Roholt, in press). Possibilities exist for liberatory spaces, which could affirm the self-determination and identity of Native students, but mainstream youth development, afterschool and out-of-school-time (OST) programs often replicate the colonialist logics of public schooling. The very constructs of ‘youth’ and ‘youth development’, emerge from a theoretical position which assumes the inferiority of Indigenous peoples (Mintz, 2004; Lesko, 1999) and the continued focus on prevention, deficiency and assimilation in youth development, afterschool and OST spaces serve to reify this logic.
Positive youth development, often considered the progressive response to traditional youth development, attempted to buck this “preventative” trend and recognize assets and resilience in youth and communities but failed to reject these colonialist logics or to provide adequate socio-political and historical analysis and engagement. Recently scholars have begun to articulate a social justice youth development (SJYD) approach which not only rejects these logics but situates young people as active agents in their lived environments via youth participatory action research (Johnston-Goodstar & Sethi, 2013; Cammarota & Fine, 2010; Ginwright & James, 2002).
This paper will demonstrate alternative possibilities to state-sponsored education through the presentation of a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project that explored school climate for Native American youth (team members included author, 2 youth workers and 8 youth research assistants). Through an analysis of our own lived experiences with public schooling, we generated knowledge of the multiple ways that public schools serve to harm our minds, bodies and identities and subsequently limit our educational opportunities. Utilizing this knowledge, we are collectively designing a school climate survey that can adequately measure our experiences in school. In time, we plan to implement this survey and use the data to propose reforms for both schools and youth development programs alike.

Author

• Katie Johnston-Goodstar, University of Minnesota