Reflection

My findings revealed that there are direct links between youth activists’ studies, extracurricular involvement, and the change they enact in their communities. These associations take place through both advertent and inadvertent incorporations of activist themes into the classroom and extracurricular environments. Advertent incorporations of activist themes into coursework are demonstrated through teaching strategies like Ray inviting a guest speaker to his third-grade class and accompanying his students to a rally. By bringing an activist to his students and later bringing his students to an activist demonstration, Ray helped to inspire the early activism of a group of students as young as eight years old. Advertent incorporations of activist themes into extracurricular activities are demonstrated through the GEM Project’s artivism project which allowed members of the program like Ayoko to highlight social injustices in a creative and meaningful way.

In contrast, inadvertent incorporations of activist themes into the classroom are demonstrated through conversations like the one Karen Falcon had with her sixth-grade students. A simple question to her class, “What can we do?” prompted a youth activism effort from her students that resulted in multi-school collaboration and recognition by the UN Small Arms Conference participants. Inadvertent incorporations of activist themes into extracurricular activities are demonstrated through clubs like Ayoko’s middle school debate club. While the primary objective of the club may not have been to inspire youth activism, the club equipped Ayoko with competencies like critical thinking and articulation, which ultimately helped strengthen her activist pursuits.

When previewing this website for my classmates, one classmate raised a question about how parents respond to the ways that teachers’ activist efforts in the classroom affect their children. This is an excellent question and something that I did not consider in my study, but I think that it would be beneficial for future research on this topic to consider parents’ perspectives. If research on this topic is to be used to encourage more direct incorporation of activism and action civics into school curricula, it is important to recognize how parents— key players in education alongside students and educators—, will respond to such a change.

Based on this question, I would also expand future research to consider the willingness of school leaders and the leaders of students’ extracurricular engagements to explicitly incorporate activism into their curricula and programming. What would their reactions be like? In my own elementary and secondary schooling experience, I never had projects that encourage activism as expressly as Seán Arthurs’s youth organizing program within Lakewood High School’s Conflict Resolution and Community Justice course. Considering the outcomes discussed by the authors whose work I reviewed for the classroom case study section of this website, I wonder how my school might have adopted action civics or what type of resistance those who attempted to implement action civics might have met. Unpacking the resistance, or support, that school decision-makers would offer is also important for research that aims to encourage a fusion between “traditional” education and a social-change-informed education.