Young People as Agents of Change: Disrupting Dominant Institutes of Schooling with Student Voice

• In Event: Radical Imagination, Transformative Teaching Practices, and BIPOC Communities: Multiply Marginalized Children as Participatory Action Researchers

Abstract

Next, the fifth grade student panel will model the impact of this kind of pedagogy and approach to educational research by having another student research team report the findings from their own research projects that investigated the necessary components of an effective school serving systemically vulnerable and historically targeted BIPOC youth. This portion of the student panel will further challenge the field by amplifying the voices of children in the discourse of school reform, a process well underway around the country, but one that has paid little attention to lifting up the voices of those who will be most impacted by these reforms. Critical participatory action research is a research paradigm that positions students to conduct, “Research that is ‘critical,’ ‘participatory,’ and ‘action-oriented” (Morrell, p. 3, 2006). According to Morrell, practitioner action research, “engenders [youth] who envision themselves as innovators and agents of change and teachers who see possibilities in urban youth and urban… classrooms” (p. 12). Thus, emphasis will be placed on the potential of this research to provide concrete and constructive feedback for improving schools from the ground, through the work of research and student and community voice.
Complicating American schooling as an oppressive phenomenon linked to European colonialism and U.S. Imperialism has been a marginal part of critical educational discourse despite the recent, relevant contributions made by Donaldo Macedo and Lilia Bartolome’s Dancing With Bigotry: Beyond the Politics of Tolerance (1999), Sandra Grande’s Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2015), Peter McLaren’s Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy against Empire (2005), and others. These discussions examined education in its historical, political, and material contexts and situated critical pedagogy in the movement to challenge the social and political ideologies that characterize U.S. oppression in and out of schools. Yet while these critical scholars point to the need for more critical and anti-imperial pedagogies in academia, educators actively engaged in designing, implementing, and evaluating these types of transformative teaching practices rarely narrate corresponding studies to illustrate their claims. To that end, this presentation will address two relevant questions that emerge from the expanding literature of critical pedagogical praxis and abolitionist teaching in educational discourse:

1. How can an interrogation of social stratification, colonization, and U.S. imperialism inform a critical understanding of the American elementary schooling context in educational research?

2. How can critical, decolonizing, abolitionist, and anti-imperial theories inform the trajectory of critical pedagogical praxis in a classroom, and as a theory for change from the empirical perspective of fifth grade BIPOC children?

Identifying and complicating several inherent tensions concerning liberatory educational schooling, teaching, and research in ideologically constricting boundaries, this study problematizes multiple ways of constructing, enacting, and engaging critical pedagogy and meaning making processes among teacher and student populations. These empirical and theoretical analyses of critical and decolonizing pedagogical applications in a public elementary school setting offer descriptions of and share insights into teaching and learning among multiply and historically marginalized and intersectionality diverse student populations contextualized in and against dominant institutes of schooling.

Author

• Laurence Tan, University of California - Los Angeles