Youth Participatory Action Research for a New Political Competence

• In Event: TLC at APSA Virtual Panel

Abstract

Civic education is the primary formal opportunity for students to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for democratic life. However, civics curricula and tests are inadequate and often unjust because they teach and assess knowledge of a narrow set of political facts irrelevant to the lives of many young people, particularly students from race-class subjugated communities who experience politics in distinct ways from their white, more resourced peers. This randomized youth participatory action research (YPAR) project with Philadelphia high school students, which emerged from focus groups with a similar but larger population of students, leverages a critical policy analysis to democratize both political learning and the policy making process by centering student voice and young people as crucial policy stakeholders. Students are randomly assigned to a participatory policy classroom or a traditional civics classroom where they engage with a series of five meetings for a “civics mini course” taught by the PI. Post-mini course surveys underscore that students prefer to actively learn about local political and policy knowledge and feel more efficacious and interested in politics when they are empowered as policy thinkers and leaders. This content and pedagogical approach is typically absent in traditional civics curriculum at the K-12 and postsecondary level. YPAR opportunities that center youth as co-producers of new social science knowledge proves to build trust and self-efficacy and can be a model of reconceptualized civics curriculum and collaborative, mutually beneficial research.

Author

• Abigail Dym, Providence College