Centering youth knowledge
Overview
Youth In Action — In the present, most community-based organizations exist as non-governmental bodies and function as a collective effort of communities. That collective effort in a community means that the knowledge, inquiry and evaluation rest upon mutual meaning-making between local individuals. However, since the CBEO often times depends on state-affiliated bodies for survivability and functionality in their world, the appreciation and centralization of local knowledge is unlikely. Therefore, it is crucial to consider decolonization of white-centered thought in these spaces. I raise the questions: If and how do/can community-based educational organizations utilize humanizing methodologies like YPAR for activism and organizing within a changing contentious educational landscape? How and in what ways can these methods be successful in youth-centered activism and organizing in non-exploitative, sensationalist or neutrally objective ways? Through YPAR-centered approaches in a community-based organization, this study explains what happens between young people define their own realities and the tensions that creates with adults in their space.
Conceptual Framework
By valuing the types of knowledge and experiences of young people, community- based educational organizations become a reimagined reality (Checkoway & Richards- Shuster, 2006). As mentioned, the transference of critical social capital builds a collective social identity, thus unlearning the duping processes of self-hate and misplaced blame. The reimagining of young people as partners rather than inferior vessels also can be common in many community-based educational organizations, further pushing back on who creates ways of being and knowing. The ways in which these data were created, understood and used in each organization rely on the use of humane and truly ethical approaches to research.
Unfortunately, the current educational climate rooted in colonialism and white-centered racist ways of knowing, fueled by structural inequities and economic restructuring, means that frequently used pedagogies do not center the humanity of young people (Solorzano, et. al, 2002). Reasons supporting the use of traditional methods in community-based educational spaces resemble those supporting their use in formal spaces. Ranging from “resources, politics and decision-making,” there are limits to the use of humanizing methodologies and pedagogies on the terrain controlled, determined and aligned with a White-centered racial agenda (Hopson, et. al., 2012).
Methods
This project used ethnographic methods of inquiry centered on participant observations and triangulated with individual interviews and discourse analysis. Altogether, this project conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with participants from “Rainier Community Center’s AYE (Action and Youth Empowerment) Program”, a youth organizing program within a large community organization. In addition to the interviews, participant observations research has been conducted since 2015.
Findings & Implications
YPAR has tensions with traditions of CBEOs within economically restructured environments. In order to maintain the integrity of the space, the removal and silence of the “researcher” in anti-colonial spaces is almost a prerequisite and understanding when and how to go about the process is the result of collective meaning-making. If we chose to participate in the performative games of the state, continuously calling out the biased frameworks on which the games are based and only functioning within one’s own epistemological approaches.