Critical Thinking on Youth Participatory Action Research: Participation, Power, and Purpose

This book draws together insights on the past, present, and future of youth participatory action research (YPAR) through interviews with ten scholars whose work has been central to the field. In this critical moment, it allows readers to hear from scholars who have been foundational to the visioning and enacting of YPAR projects, as they reflect on the fundamental tenets and boundaries of their work.

By engaging directly with leaders in the field, the book allows readers to explore many of the nuances, roots, and tensions of youth participatory action research. Throughout their conversations with scholars, Albright and Brion-Meisels pose three questions: What is the purpose of YPAR, and how does it get defined? What makes for authentic participation, both on the research team itself and in the process of the research? And how, if at all, does YPAR investigate and seek to dismantle existing power structures within schools and communities? In taking an intentionally dialectical approach, this volume builds on the centrality of dialogue in PAR/YPAR processes, both in terms of pedagogy/mode and in terms of content/matter. By sharing direct excerpts of conversations, readers can participate in the co-construction of knowledge, and gain more nuanced understandings of how purpose, participation, and power have shaped the foundations of YPAR, and how they might shape future collaborations.

Elucidating the knowledge and perspective of leading YPAR practitioners, this timely book will be crucial reading on Research Methods and Education for Participatory Action Research programs and related courses.

Gretchen Brion-Meisels is Senior Lecturer on Education and Faculty Co-Chair of Identity, Power, and Justice in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA. Brion-Meisels is also a former middle-school educator whose research seeks to explore partnerships between youth and adults that support collective wellbeing. She is particularly interested in intergenerational, critical participatory action research that investigates issues of educational justice in school settings.

Thomas Albright is Assistant Research Professor in Middle and Secondary Education at Georgia State University, USA. Albright’s scholarship is steeped in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, youth participatory action research, posthumanism, post qualitative, critical qualitative methodologies, and social justice education. Albright’s current research includes exploring youth inquiry as a form of resistance to schooling, a posthumanism accounting of schooling, and examining issues of racial and social justice within teacher education.