Picturing Kids and “Kids” as Researchers: Preservice Teachers and Effective Writing Instruction for Diverse Youth and English Language Learners

Struggling with/against the unintentional reproduction of power structures in participatory research: Using reconstructive horizon analysis

“…For example, YPAR findings have been used to inform preservice teacher education programs to better prepare candidates to work with diverse student populations (Brown & Rodriguez, 2017; Galletta & Jones, 2010; McIntyre, 2003). Because youth tend to spend the majority of their days in schools, YPAR projects often function as pedagogical interventions, for instance, to enhance instruction by engaging students more actively in writing (Zenkov et al., 2014), to encourage increased autonomy (Ozer & Wright, 2012), or to facilitate personal identity development, particularly for minority, low-income, and immigrant youth (Guerrero & Tinkler, 2010; Scott, Pyrne, & Means, 2015).…”

“…Especially when engaging with youth or vulnerable populations, participatory research raises questions of consent (Cooper, 2017; Dentith, Measor & O’Malley, 2012; Miles, 2011), representation (Guerrero & Tinkler, 2010; Holtby, Klein, Cook, & Travers, 2015), privacy (Burles & Thomas, 2014; Hannes & Parylo, 2014; Wang & Redwood-Jones, 2001), and the ownership and future use of data (Allen, 2012; Harley, 2012; Pittaway, Bartolomei, & Hugman, 2010). Such projects can evoke deeply personal details and traumatic experiences (Burles & Thomas, 2014; Cooper, 2017) and can even make participants targets of ridicule or physical harm as they expose community problems and challenge the status quo (Dentith et al., 2012; Prins, 2010; Zenkov et al., 2014). Participation can lead to very real risks for vulnerable subjects, such as survivors of civil war (Prins, 2010), indigenous peoples (Lemelin et al., 2013), lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth (Holtby et al., 2015), individuals with disabilities (Woolhouse, 2019), and immigrant and refugee children (Guerrero & Tinkler, 2010).…”

“…This is amplified within schools, which often operate under hierarchical power structures and have historically marginalized minority and immigrant children (Fine & Torre, 2004). Adults inevitably hold more power even as they try to “empower” children in decision making (Cooper, 2017; Guerrero & Tinkler, 2010; Zenkov et al., 2014) and recognize children’s expertise on their worlds (Kellett, 2010). As a result, although often enacted with good intentions, PAR in schools runs the risk of reinforcing power relationships of teacher/knower and student/learner rather than positioning all participants and their knowledge as equal; resulting in a separation of this methodology from its underlying epistemology (Call-Cummings, 2017; Evans-Agnew & Rosemberg, 2016).…”

“…On the first day of a PAR project in a local middle school English for Speakers of Other Languages program, two university faculty researchers introduced the 10 graduate student mentors and explained the project that the classroom teacher had invited us to lead. As researchers and mentors, we would work with small groups of students (ages 12–14) who had recently come to the United States from other countries on a photovoice project, a type of PAR that uses participant-produced images to increase awareness of social justice issues (Wang & Burris, 1994; Wang & Redwood-Jones, 2001; Zenkov et al., 2014). Over a period of 10 weeks, the students took pictures representing challenges in their school, community, or world and constructed extended captions or stories to explore and explain their ideas about these challenges as well as potential steps they might take toward finding solutions.…”

Evocación de creencias y teorías del profesorado de Educación Primaria durante procesos de foto-elicitación

“…En el campo de la formación del profesorado, la función de la foto-elicitación ha sido un procedimiento de apoyo en las entrevistas para recoger datos para el desarrollo de competencias en el profesorado. Investigaciones sobre educación ambiental (Legge, & Smith, 2014), enseñanza de la escritura en ambientes multiculturales (Zenkov, et al, 2014), representación de conceptos geográficos en las aulas (Seow, 2016) y los procesos de aprendizaje en educación física (Parker, Patton, & Sinclair, 2016) van en esa dirección. Menos frecuentes son los estudios que han utilizado este procedimiento para el conocimiento de las creencias de los educadores, como el trabajo de Taylor y Caldarelli (2004) que indaga las creencias sobre la enseñanza de educadores del ámbito no formal.…”