Analytical Essay

Youth as the source of knowledge:

From student-centered assignments to YPAR

A typical question that students ask in the classroom is “why do we learn this?” The standard answer, if not the only one, is “because it is important to you.” The problem is, are teachers perfectly sure that the knowledge he/she is teaching is important to the students, or are they just doing what is told by the department of education and their professors from college? Is the importance of the knowledge the same to every student in the classroom? And finally, who gets to decide whether which knowledge is important, and which knowledge is not? These are the questions that youth participatory action research (YPAR) poses to challenge the school.

YPAR is a pedagogy that entitles students to a leading role in academic learning. When students wonder why they are learning something at school, it often implies that the knowledge is somehow detached from their life experiences, and they can resonate with neither the context of the knowledge nor the knowledge itself. This is because students do not have the power to choose what to learn. All they do in class is passively absorb what their teachers give them. To reverse this situation, YPAR invites students to bring their personal experience to the classroom, and gain knowledge that is the most relevant to them through the process of investigation. Here is the definition by Mirra, Garcia, and Morrell (2015):

YPAR refers to the practice of mentoring young people to become social scientists by engaging them in all aspects of the research cycle, from developing research questions and examining relevant literature to collecting and analyzing data and offering findings about social issues that they find meaningful and relevant. (pp. 1-2)

From the definition above, three principles of YPAR are formed. First, the role of the teacher is a mentor instead of an instructor, who facilitates the process of YPAR rather than taking the lead as in a traditional classroom. Second, the essence of YPAR is research, which includes the process of real-life academic research rather than an assignment. Third, the topic of YPAR is meaningful and relevant to the researcher, namely the student. Adhering to the three principles, teachers can use YPAR as an approach that “allows the possibility of a collaborative space” constructed by teachers and students, and students can take advantage of YPAR to “disrupt dominant understandings of who gets to identify and practice being an educator” (Caraballo & Soleimany, 2019). As a result, YPAR shifts the power from teachers to students and makes the classroom an interactive environment.

In addition, since YPAR is a form of academic research, it has a more specific definition. Morrell (2006, quoted in Caraballo & Lyiscott, 2018) stated that an YPAR framework

consists of the collective investigation of a problem; relies on the knowledge of those most directly affected/involved; is driven by a desire to take action; and engages youth in addressing issues of social inequality. (p. 196)

These elements suggest that YPAR is a deep dive into a problem of social injustice that youths hope to solve or ameliorate. However, such a deep dive requires students to have the ability to interrogate what they observe and construct the knowledge they need to form a solution. Thus, before students become researchers, teachers should provide them with sufficient training to better prepare them for YPAR. In my opinion, student-centered assignments can be a good start.

Student-centered assignments are assignments that include students’ personal experience and allow them to act according to their will or interpret through their point of view. They are different from traditional assignments that has a standard answer provided by the teacher. In my multimodal project, I used two assignments as examples: a personal narrative on inter-generational difference and a self-designed worksheet of a YouTube video. The first assignment focused on the experiences of students’ family members who were from an older generation. Students needed to interview a family member of their choice, usually a parent or a grandparent, about things in the past that were different from today’s world and wrote down their answers along with how the interview was conducted and their reflection in the form of a narrative. This assignment is designed, in the teacher’s words, “to validate the premise that the experiences and lives that make up a person's background are valid sources of knowledge, which is why talking about these things qualify as ‘research,’ just as much as what is printed in books.” Thus, students’ families become a source of knowledge and the interview becomes the medium to that knowledge. In addition, students can cultivate essential research skills such as data collection (interview), critical thinking (reflect on the interview), and academic writing.

The second assignment created a “third space” (Bhabha, 1994, quoted in Caraballo & Soleimany, 2019) that allowed students’ interests to be part of the curriculum. In a group of four, students needed to select an English video of their interests and design a worksheet that contained a vocabulary list, five multiple choice questions and another set of questions in a form they favored. Since it was an English listening class, the teacher often used YouTube videos as materials and designed worksheets for students. However, there were topics that students were interested in not covered in the teacher’s selection. Students’ choice of videos reflected the diversity of their fields of interest. Furthermore, as they became teachers who taught the knowledge of the video to the class, they gained the power to design the materials, select the contents to be tested, and decide the forms of questions. Even though the teacher demanded five multiple choice questions be added to the worksheet, students could still decide what the options would be. Eventually, students could not only learn English in an authentic scenario, but could also reflect on two aspects of their education: (a) who gets to decide what they learn and (b) who gets to decide how they are tested.

Based on their rationales, both two assignments can be seen as preparation for conducting YPAR in the future. They trained students to recognize personal experience as a source of knowledge and think critically about the existing contents of the courses. Meanwhile, the assignments “nurtured the creation of researcher identities” (Caraballo & Filipiak, 2020, 437) as they enabled the students to explore what is most relevant and meaningful to them.

If we view the two assignments through the lens of pedagogical love (Caraballo & Soleimany, 2019), which deals with teachers’ role in YPAR, we can further understand teachers’ positionality in these assignments. Starting from the internal element, the teachers realized their role of the decision maker and thus re-examined their position as the facilitator and even learners. Next, for the conceptual element, the teachers created the “third space” for students to bring in their (and their families’) personal experience as sources of knowledge. Lastly, for the external element, the teachers fostered critical consciousness by yielding their role of the decision maker of what to teach and how to do assessment to their students. As Caraballo and Soleimany noted (2019), the three elements are neither linear nor hierarchical. Instead, they contribute to one another in a cyclical relationship. Consequently, teachers’ self-identification, the third space they create, and the critical consciousness they foster build up the foundation of pedagogical love, which is crucial to a successful YPAR experience.

After discussing much about the characteristics and purposes of YPAR, we must ask “why is it important to secondary education?” Let us take a closer look at the contexts of the two student-centered assignments mentioned above. The personal narrative assignment was given by an ELA (English Language Arts) teacher at a dual-language school, where more than 70% of the students were of Chinese descent. However, the ELA teacher himself was an American White man, and the official standards of ELA were also made, presumably, by White people. Reading materials selected by the teacher were often limited to the classical pieces of English and American literature. Then, how could the ELA teacher make his lesson more relevant to the students’ culture? The simplest answer was letting students and their families be the source of knowledge. After all, they were the people who knew the best about their culture. The assignment has become a bridge between Eastern and Western culture and provided more possibilities for the traditional White-dominant ELA class. It also realized cultural maintenance for Chinese immigrant families. The most successful part of this assignment, in my opinion, was the way the ELA teacher evaluated students’ works. In his rubrics, English language use accounted for only a small proportion. The deciding factors of the grade were how students started the conversation with the interviewee and how they reflected on this experience. It echoed the rationale of the assignment and the characteristics of YPAR.

The worksheet design assignment was given by an EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher to vocational high school students majoring in applied English in Taiwan. Even though the students were not from ethnic minorities, there were stereotypes against them, such as being only interested in English and being low achievers in other subjects. Furthermore, since education in Taiwan was highly test-oriented, all the materials had to be related to the college entrance exam. As a result, students’ interests in fields that were not included in the exam were often invisible and wasted. In other words, these interest or talents were viewed as deficits that could hinder students from achieving higher goals in academics. Even the school believed that teachers should “compensate for their deficiencies” (Takacs, 2002, p.170) by adding in more test-related contents. The worksheet design was an opportunity for students to break the stereotypes and demonstrate what they were interested in doing aside from the school subjects. The traditional test-oriented curriculum was thus challenged. With some topics of the videos not considered as an academic field, the assignment also resonated with Denzin (2013) that a new paradigm is needed that “wanders in spaces that have not yet been named” (quoted in Caraballo and Lyiscott, 2018, p. 195).

As we can see from the contexts of the examples, the importance of YPAR and student-centered assignment lies in the equity of the curriculum. Because of the “standards” that the country and the society want students to meet, many contents are thought of as useless or redundant while they are meaningful to students. Unfortunately, in most cases, students cannot bring those contents to class, and therefore become unaware that those contents are in fact valuable. As Lesko (2001) pointed out, adolescents and children were conventionally considered primitive and ignorant of the civilized world (p. 33), so adults often deprived them of the right of participation just like how imperialist countries exploited people of their colonies. The result of this kind of education is that students do not know why they learn what they are learning at school and feel marginalized in class. Conversely, with YPAR, teachers share their power with their students and construct an environment that encourages student-teacher and student-student collaboration, as well as turning students’ deficits into assets. With YPAR, the classroom is no longer similar to a colony in the last century.

Indeed, adopting YPAR or student-centered assignments is more risky than traditional pedagogies. Teachers need to be careful when they deal with cultures and topics that they are not familiar with, and students may feel uncomfortable when they talk about their own cultures as marginalized or underprivileged. It is when a “safe place” transforms into a “brave place.” Arao and Clemens (2013) suggested that the learning of diversity and social justice issues takes place in brave spaces because it often involves discomfort, which is exactly how these issues make people feel in reality (pp. 141-142). Nevertheless, if teachers and students do not take the risk, these issues will forever be marginalized in schools and even in society. Therefore, the brave space of YPAR is a necessary evil, but is also a solution to the inequity that has long existed in education.

As Takacs (2002) put, “by respecting the unique life experiences that each student brings into the classroom—by asserting that the broadest possible set of experiences is crucial to helping each of us understand the topic at hand as completely as possible—we empower all students as knowledge makers.” YPAR challenges the traditional concept of knowledge, teachers, and learners, and creates a brave space where diversity and equity issues can be confronted by those who are the most relevant. Even if it starts as a student-centered assignment, it may become a seed and grow into a tree that can make a big change.