The Challenges and Possibilities of Youth Participatory Action Research for Teachers and Students in Public School Classrooms

Abstract

This study explores the challenges and successes that two public school teachers experienced while implementing youth participatory action research (YPAR) with their students in core academic classrooms. Most academic studies of YPAR have focused on university-based researchers implementing YPAR with youth outside school settings or in special courses inside schools such as electives. Hence, the findings of existing research may not adequately predict the experiences of teachers implementing YPAR within the constraints and requirements of core academic classrooms. Using action research and ethnographic approaches including interviews, field notes, teaching artifacts from classroom observations, and reflective conversations with teachers, I found that the two teachers successfully implemented the epistemological tenets of YPAR in many ways and achieved positive outcomes. However, they were also stymied by structural issues common to core academic classrooms, such as required curricula, standardized testing, and large class sizes.

Visões de educadoras de educação ambiental para o desenvolvimento sustentável: Entre o empoderamento e a orientação de crianças e jovens

“…Desta forma, os/as alunos/as podem exercer a sua cidadania "com assunção da sua própria voz e de voz própria" (Magalhães & Stoer, 2005, p. 93), ou seja, que sejam realmente ouvidas e que a sua voz tenha significado no seu íntimo, mas também no coletivo. Como Lucie Sauvé adverte, não se trata de "moldar futuros cidadãos" (2017, p. 115), mas antes de as/os envolver em projetos significativos, relacionados com questões que as/os afetem, e através dos quais possam desenvolver a sua capacidade de investigação e de ação (Buttimer, 2018). Até porque a cidadania é "uma prática de identificação com questões públicas (…) de interesse comum (…) e não um resultado" (Biesta & Lawy, 2006, p.75), muito menos de um trajeto educativo instrumentalizado.…”

Reimagining literacies through child–parent collaborations

“…Hillier and Kroehle (2021) explained that “adultism…fails to acknowledge the agency and heterogeneity of young people” (p. 2). In K‐12 settings, administrative control and curricular constraints might lead to such silencing (see Anderson, 2020; Buttimer, 2018). Additionally, Hillier and Kroehle (2021) argued that the very approaches designed to support the emergence of youth voice ironically can work to suppress it: “across research methods and findings, adultism can render young people marginalized, disempowered, and exploited” (p. 2).…”

“…Similar disempowerment occurred when youth had limited decision‐making roles (cf. Anderson, 2020; Buttimer, 2018; Cullen & Walsh, 2020; Petrie et al, 2006) and were not represented as co‐authors (Caraballo et al, 2017). Nonetheless, reviews of YPAR research (Anderson, 2020; Cullen & Walsh, 2020) suggest that youth typically are part of the process in some capacity.…”

Youth Participatory Action Research in School: A Posthumanist Account of Participation and Mattering

“…On the other hand, researchers have identified a fear of YPAR being co-opted within schools for the use of improving standardized performance (Brion-Meisels & Alter, 2018). There have also been difficulties in relation to YPAR endeavors in schools living up to the epistemological and ontological commitments of YPAR (see Buttimer, 2018;Rubin, Ayala & Zaal, 2017). While this body of literature has expanded our understanding of YPAR in school, there is little accounting of the relational agency of non-human actors and the co-constitutive entanglement of human, non-human, and discursive bodies within such school-based endeavors.…”