Youth Participatory Action Research as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

• In Event: Imagining Sites of Possibility in Immigrant and Refugee Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into a research/pedagogical project that offers an alternative to what immigrant adolescents learning English frequently experience in school. More specifically, it outlines a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project in which the youth co-researchers craft their own research questions and design. In addition to inherent academic rigor, the project provided cultural sustenance as it sought to not only recognize and affirm individuals, but also to perpetuate and foster “linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (Paris & Alim, 2017).

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This project has the tenets of YPAR as its foundation. YPAR represents a “radical epistemological challenge to the traditions of social science,” including where it locates knowledge and who is deemed expert (Cammarota & Fine, 2008, p. 215, italics in original). More specifically, YPAR offers young people the opportunity to identify heartfelt and real issues in their lives and devise a plan to remedy these issues. It also offers adult researchers the opportunity to observe and talk to young people as they construct research projects of their own, thereby offering two levels of data—the data collected through adults observations and interviews with the co-researchers and the data the young people collected as they probed the social landscape with their own questions.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Such a theoretical foundation requires corresponding methods. Critical ethnography challenges positivistic scientism and is more of an epistemology than a strict methodological school (Carspecken, 1996). Alvesson and Skoldberg (2000) describe critical research as a kind of triple hermeneutics: First, individuals interpret their own subjectivity and cultural reality, and assign meaning to them; second, social science researchers attempt to understand and develop knowledge about this reality; and thirdly, there is “critical interpretation of unconscious processes, ideologies, power relations, and other expressions of dominance…” (p. 144).

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Given the YPAR epistemology and design, the data emanated from three sources: (1) my interviews, focus groups, field notes and photovoice projects with the youth co-researchers; (2) the data collected by the co-researchers from participants in their own projects; (3) mentoring the youth researchers through the design and implementation, including data analysis, of an action research project. In addition, we presented at two conferences and wrote a paper about our research project, which subsequently served as the youths’ college application essay.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The results of this study emanate from the youth researchers’ questions, which are results in and of themselves. The co-researchers chose to investigate topics such gender, the undocumented, conflict between/among immigrant groups and immigrants’ schooling experiences.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
There are few examples of such a research design and the results have implications for pedagogy, teacher education, and education policy.

Author

• Daniel R. Walsh, The New York City Department of Education