Masters of Our Thinking: Co-Designing Teaching and Learning Spaces With Youth Activists

• In Event: Your Liberation Bound Up With Mine: Defining the Public Good Together in Critical Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

This qualitative study posits that youth are best positioned to discover how young people learn and what skills and content are most relevant to their lives. While research informing K-12 schooling increasingly emphasizes student-centered and culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995), actual practice in most public school classrooms still reinforces the hierarchy of adults and teachers as the experts on what and how students should learn, while positioning youth at the margins of discussions on curriculum and pedagogy. In order to dismantle hegemonic structures of schooling, educational research must engage students in the process of building structures for teaching and learning.

Oftentimes, in the practice of critical pedagogy and social justice teaching, the distinction between youth-centered and youth-led can become distorted, with educators engaging themselves and each other in the thinking and reflecting components of activism and involving youth only in the action. In order to become “masters of their thinking” (Freire, 2000, p. 124), young people must be directly involved in the process of reflection and action in the effort to bring about social transformation.

This study emerges from an annual event, the Hip Hop Youth Summit, organized and facilitated by the author for six consecutive years on a college campus in a Northeastern U.S. city. The purpose of the summit was to provide culturally relevant social justice education for high school and college-aged students who operated at the intersections of Hip Hop, spoken word poetry, and social justice. While this event was student-centered, the author realized that by having non-youth teach all of the workshops and by structuring and facilitating the event for, rather than with the young people, she was inadvertently reinforcing a hierarchical structure of schooling that places adult knowledge and experience above that of the youth involved.

This paper examines how a group of 5 middle school and high school students worked with the author to co-develop the Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism conference, a restructuring of the Hip Hop Youth Summit that decenters adult knowledge and highlights the praxis of young people. The 5 students collaboratively conceptualized, organized, and reviewed proposals for the conference, while working with youth presenters on developing skills in instruction and facilitation. The data discussed in this paper includes 20 workshop proposal submissions, 5 recordings of group meetings with the author and the youth collaborators, and 1 recorded group debrief after the conference.

This project was designed and analyzed through the framework of Black feminist theory, building on the work of Black women activists who understood the necessity of supporting and developing youth leaders during the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. This includes leaders such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark who recognized that the struggle for equality in the U.S. is critically tied to youth leadership and empowerment (Collins, 2009). The youth involved in this project learned collaboratively how to build a community of young people and adult allies who co-construct intergenerational knowledge and support networks that are grounded in youth culture, research, and activism.

Author

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education