Better Methods or Bust: Youth Reclaiming Power Over Research About Them

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Systems and Structures: Youth and Community Action for Liberation, Resistance, and Transformation

Abstract

Objective
Youth of Color and youth from low-income/impoverished communities continue to build pathways towards their desired futures against stark inequities across their education landscapes. How scholars study this must fight against reproducing such inequities. This study centered youth expertise on their own lives using new critical participatory approaches, to shift power in studies about youth written by scholars who do not own the right to youth stories. This resulted in a new model, critical participatory co-analysis, to address power asymetries in research and to center marginalized youth perspectives on what’s required to support their efforts towards equitable futures.
Perspective
Within a longitundinal context of deep partnership (Greenberg, 2019), youth and adults collaborated to explore how youth construct learning and development pathways in-the-moment, as they move across space-time-power matrices to co-construct futures with agency and purpose. This collaboration drew from a mobilities of criticality framework (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2018) and a multidimensional framing of equity (Milner IV et al., 2018; Sleeter, 2015) to more explicitly disrupt intersecting forms of injustice acting on a) youth life pathway-making efforts and on b) youth-adult research partnership efforts.
Methods and Data
Using a critical ethnographic participatory approach (Greenberg, 2019), five youth partners (ages 12 to 15 at the conclusion of the multi-year study) illuminated how they construct complex life pathways over time/space, and how adults can better support these efforts. Youth partners and I spent 9 months curating and co-analysing data we had cogenerated over 5 years. I leveraged strong relationships with youth and their families to co-research our interwoven lives as we continued to work together (as an afterschool and summer teacher in a low-income community in the Midwest). Multimodal cases of learning and development framed a co-exploration of co-generated data. Data included photos/videos, interviews, and 5 years of my participant observation field notes as their afterschool and summer community teacher.
Findings
Youth-adult method co-creation in our pathway research resulted in a new model of practice for research analysis I am terming critical participatory co-analysis. Our deep partnership work grounded a reimagination of what research could look like, feel like, and produce. As youth partner Amara explained, we did not seek to produce “a White person’s Black Lives Matter Story.” Instead, “this is our story we’re writing together.” This shared desire necessitated a thorough questioning of currently available research tools, resulting in a new analytical model that better fit our partnership and commitments of mutual trust and respect. This new method of analysis assisted us in uncovering and co-examining important patterns across data with more participatory rigor, more micro-level constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and more multivocality in critique and interpretation (Tracy, 2010).
Significance
Youth expertise on their own lives can inform and enhance research. New methods and approaches are urgently needed to enhance and power-check adult-written research about youth, especially for scholars working with youth from communities in which those scholars did not grow up and communities of which such scholars do not hold lived expertise through lived experience.

Authors

• Day W Greenberg, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan