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Tapping Teen Power: (Re)Positioning Students for Civic Action
Author(s) -
Koudelka Cindi M.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of adolescent and adult literacy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.73
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1936-2706
pISSN - 1081-3004
DOI - 10.1002/jaal.1126
Subject(s) - praxis , participatory action research , action research , sociology , pedagogy , civic engagement , citizen journalism , civics , citizenship , action (physics) , agency (philosophy) , power (physics) , social science , political science , politics , physics , quantum mechanics , anthropology , law
Conducting Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is more than a methodology; it is an epistemology—a way of positioning adolescents as agents for critical civic praxis. Educators attempting to use YPAR in traditional spaces often must navigate tensions between this type of critical pedagogy and systems that limit the definition of citizenship to civic engagement and position adolescents as passive consumers. The author examines how engaging adolescents in an action research project is subsequently reflected in their civic praxis. The author conducted a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2015) to observe patterns of agency, civic praxis, and social discourse among ten high school freshmen from a rural school district in the Midwestern United States. This article describes the second phase of the qualitative study in which the adolescents completed a youth participatory action research project exploring the problem of bullying at their high school.