The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 13: “There’s no one way to do this”: On youth-adult partnerships and embracing complexity, a conversation with Sharif Mahdy, Stoney McCart, Kwaku Agyemang, and Maddy Ross
Citation:
Ross, Madeleine. ““There’s no one way to do this”: On youth-adult partnerships and embracing complexity, a conversation with Sharif Mahdy, Stoney McCart, Kwaku Agyemang, and Maddy Ross”. Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Qichun Zhang at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. May 12, 2023. Podcast, MP3 audio, https://youthresearchlab.org/whypar
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Host: Welcome to The WhyPAR podcast, a project of the Youth Research Lab at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Music
Host: In the WhyPAR podcast, youth participatory action research practitioners discuss the ethical dimensions of conducting YPAR. In our podcast, we explore issues of co-leading YPAR projects, building relationships, power dynamics, and sharing our work together. The Youth Research Lab is located at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in Toronto or Tkaronto, on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently being cared for by the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Sharif: There’s a lot of appreciation for the human reaction to complexity in the work that we do... The work with young people is usually less focused on managing that, and more focused on managing some of the, you know, some of the trauma that can emerge from divulging what’s really going on. But with adults it’s about managing them through the process.
Host: Welcome everyone! My name is Maddy Ross, and I’m an OISE alum and former graduate assistant at the Youth Research Lab. Today’s episode features part of a conversation I had with Sharif Mahdy, Stoney McCart, and Kwaku Agyemang, who joined me from the Students Commission of Canada. In some ways this conversation felt like a full circle moment for me, because it was the Students Commission that first introduced me to YPAR back when I was a teenager and involved in some of their projects.
In this episode, we talk about conditions for meaningful youth engagement, disrupting adult structures, and the dynamics of doing research through intergenerational partnerships.
This conversation was recorded over Zoom.
And with that, let’s jump in!
Maddy Ross: Why don't we start by having you all introduce yourselves.
Kwaku Agyemang: Hey my name is Kwaku, Kwaku Agyemang. Yes, I'll start with my role. So I'm the Program Delivery Manager at the Students Commission of Canada and the fun work I get to do is around, you know, supporting and overseeing our national programming, you know, contributing to the vision of our youth centre space at the 23 Isabella location here and just really pushing forward to how we can engage young people across the country from coast to coast to play an active role and put their ideas into action on the change they wanted to see and addressing issues that impact them the most.
Stoney McCart: And, uh, hi, I'm Stoney McCart. I've been with the Students Commission and the Center of Excellence since their founding. I'm currently doing work with them supporting throughout the organization, and assisting in the development of youth voice and turning it into research projects, and also into programming. So, turning the programming into research and the research into programming.
Sharif Mahdy: Hi everyone, my name is Sharif Mahdy, and I use he/him and il/ils pronouns and I am privileged to be the Executive Director of the Students Commission of Canada and the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement. And primarily my role is focused on supporting our organization to achieve our 10-year strategy, which is really focused on working with others working purposely with others to ensure that young people's voices are heard and valued, and to support organizations across the country in turning knowledge into action, and action into knowledge. We're in year five of the strategy and it's been a very interesting kind of, interesting experience so far and we're really looking forward to the next five years.
Maddy Ross: Fantastic. So, tell me a little bit about the work that you do and how this work began as an organization.
Sharif Mahdy: I think that Kwaku is probably the best person to do the origin story because he's been doing it so many times. So I'm going to throw it over to Kwaku to share a little bit about the origin story, because you need to understand the origin story in order to understand what we do.
Kwaku Agyemang: Thank you Sharif. For where do I begin with this amazing origin story we have? So, the Students Commission was built out of Tiny Giant magazine. And so we'll start there, so Tiny Giant magazine was an amazing magazine, you know, led by Stoney, who, you know, really rallied high school students from across the country to submit, every province of territory submitted, you know, submissions to this magazine and there'd be a monthly release. So you know, Tiny Giant magazine started that move in terms of spreading, you know, youth voice across the country on, you know, important issues, and there was a conference that, you know, took place, that was organized by some educators in Ottawa that was looking to bring together youth from every province and territory to engage on, you know, important conversations and what happened was the main organizer of the conference got cold feet and didn't, you know, really show up or just ran away - I heard that they hid in a closet somewhere - they couldn't be found, in a nutshell. And you know, strong leaders and adults rallied together to really carry forward the conversation, knowing that young people were traveling on planes, nervous and anxious to this, you know, new place and really wanted to respect their participation and rally them together, to, you know, lead a conference that would, you know, generate important recommendations for decision makers. Important stuff happened at that conference. The bilingual, francophone youth, you know, youth-adult partnership rallied together to ensure seamless translation, to ensure that youth were supported, to make sure that facilitation took place in the right way. And from that, the conference generated 30 recommendations?
Stoney McCart: It’s 250…
Kwaku Agyemang: That's the first time I've heard that. Why did I think 30? 250 recommendations that was delivered to the Prime Minister and one of the recommendations was to commission an organization to act on behalf of youth in Canada to put their ideas into action. And that was the Students Commission of Canada. And, so that's how we came about. We've been doing conferences every year, and in 2001 we were named the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement. And we've been given the lease to, you know, keep doing this amazing work that we enjoy doing and really providing that space for young people to feel like they have their voice heard.
Stoney McCart: I can say, I always love hearing Kwaku tell the story because it's the importance of story in the work that we do in terms of passing on the story and where we emphasize, what things we emphasize in a story for which audiences, and I think just to, just to you know distill it down too. It was really important, as an observer there, I think what we took most out of it was that clash potentially of the formal idea of something that's formally organized as a conference and happens in a very kind of adult way, with what happens when you just really unleash the energy and the ideas and the voice of 365 young people who were there who got to share without an imposed agenda on them, because the organizer had disappeared as Kwaku said. And out of that came a certain magic, the word that was used with magic, and we've been capturing that magic ever since, when we let go of some of the expectations that we as adults have when we come to bring young people together and to listen to them accurately.
Sharif Mahdy: I think the other part of the story that's really important, especially for the discussion we're having today is, you know, Kwaku alluded to the Tiny Giant magazine, Teen Generation, TG Mag, and you know, the roots of that magazine go back to the early 1940s. So, in the 1940s, pulling a magazine together, getting that printed, circulated across the country in wartime was a pretty innovative feat. But we've adapted and evolved based on what's needed. The magazine is no longer being published in, you know, as a formal magazine that is circulated across the country, but the ideas, the cycle of how an article comes together are the roots of all of our methods and processes. Right, so that thread of youth voice and then adapting to the times in terms of the media and how young people receive messages is part of the core of who we are. And I think it's an important kind of piece to remember when thinking about engaging youth in decision-making, policy making, and research. Like which media are going to be effective at reaching and engaging and amplifying those various messages. The second kind of piece from the origin story that really stands out for me, but also really highlights when participatory action research is most effective, is when things occur in an intergenerational way. So, you know, throughout our history, going back to the 1940s, whenever partnerships between youth and adults have been relatively strong, we have been healthy or have been able to achieve a lot of change. Whenever those partnerships shift, so whenever, you know, the youth grow up as adults and still try to be youth, or whenever there's youth, there's more youth than adults or whenever that balance is off, is when we start to see dips in our organizational effectiveness and also in our innovation. So, one of the other kind of key messages that we would have is that working in intergenerational partnership is a really effective way to engage in participatory action research. And it's not about hiring a bunch of students and the academics are here, the students are here, to this, this wall, this invisible wall. It's about working with each other, getting messy together, you know, like going through the process of every step of the research methodology, working through that together is what we're talking about. We're not talking about, you know, "I hire students, they're in a room, I'm in a room, they do their thing when I do my thing," it's about being in the same space together, gather the voice, and make the change happen.
Maddy Ross: I'm curious how you approach this work through youth-adult partnerships because, obviously there are wider power dynamics that impact the way young people and adults traditionally communicate and work together. Are there guiding values that inform this work, that emerged from that initial conference? And how do those continue to shape the work that you do?
Sharif Mahdy: It's interesting because I have been, you know, the pandemic's been an interesting time to catch up on some reading. And you know I had the opportunity to go through some of our archives and notice that throughout our history, the words, even actually Stoney, I read a few of our magazine articles and these words did pop up in the magazine as well, but the words like "communicate" "understand" "respect" "listen"- those words are kind of also part of the origin story, and at some point - and we can't quite pinpoint when this happened in our history - the words got organized in such a way that it was Respect, Listen, Understand, Communicate, which ended up becoming our core values and our core processes. And I remember when I was thinking about joining the Students Commission of Canada like 13 years ago, I remember like getting a document with these pillars like, and I just remember being like. Holy shit, like this is intense. Like this is really magical. And, for me, so I mean if it starts with respect, respect for young people and their capacity to change the world respect for all people and the unique gifts they carry within. And what really struck me about respect was that it's not earned, its granted. You know, we grant respect right away, we don't make you go through a process of earning it, or you know, you have to prove yourself. The respect is granted immediately, and I think that's very different from how a lot of our institutions work in terms of respect. You have to prove yourself, you have to get your A in a course, you have to publish so many articles, you know, respect is granted right away and it's all about looking at the diverse, respecting the diverse ways in which different people interact and exist. And then you know, when you have respect as your foundation, you can listen. And listening is not just about sound, it's about listening to actions, to silences, to deeds, to written word, like it's about really taking in all the different ways in which we share and try to express ourselves. And then, when you listen, you can put yourselves in the shoes of others, which is understand. You can really ground yourself in seeing the world from a different perspective, you can disagree without being disagreeable. You can develop empathy for another cause that might be so different than your own. And with those three pillars in place, the obstacles tend to fall away, and that's when you can communicate the change and action you want to see in the world. And so these pillars are not only are our core values, but they're also our core underpinning process for how we do all of our programs and research activities.
Stoney McCart: Yeah, to build on that, we had a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant on youth-adult partnerships, so we had a group of academics who were interested in researching and publishing on this. And we had a group of organizations who had young people who were also interested in it. And we work together, for, I think it was two or three years, and in some of the partnerships, we had an academic paired with an organization and with a young person. And some of the partnerships worked really well, and some of them didn't. And we were looking in particular to one academic who had been very successful, so as we were doing our research and we were doing our research, we looked at this one academic where the partnership was working really well, young person was participating fully and equally, had value and didn't hold back in the sessions, was doing what Sharif just described. And we wanted to probe that a little further and find out why. And when we went to that academic, we were looking at the differences and we asked why and how this academic had hired this young person and brought them in. And one of the key questions we asked is, did you hire - because this academic had hired differently than the others - and we asked this academic, why, and was different and whether this was how they always hired? And their response was an instant, "Oh no, oh no, I would never hire a student the same way as I hired a student for this project." And I asked, I said, “Well why? Why did you hire differently?” And the academic's response was, "I've never thought about it before, but because I was working with you and the Students Commission, I knew I needed to hire differently and I needed to hire a different type of young person." And it was really insightful for all of them then to look at and we had similar projects in which the power dynamics that are implicit in the academic-student relationship are a barrier to the kind of youth engagement that we practice and the kind of youth participatory action research that we do there. And so I think for academics who are really interested in this kind of work, they actually really need to look at and acknowledge in some ways, some of the - and we've had this conversation with our academics - some of the necessary barriers that are there in the student-academic credit power relationship, that if unacknowledged, are something that will affect the way you do youth participatory action research in your work.
Sharif Mahdy: I think also there’s, young people pick up on this regardless of who they are, their backgrounds, their experiences. Young people can pretty quickly pick up YPAR. They don't need to be trained extensively. They can have one hour training that gathers 500 voices, you know, in like a week and do so in a very engaging way. I think where the efforts, and I think sometimes because respect isn't granted in a lot of spaces, it's needed to be earned, there's an assumption that these young people have to be taught how to gather voice and gather research, etc. But the onus actually needs to shift to the adults to unlearn some of the practices that they've learned over time. I just read an article about how the myth of the lazy millennial - and the millennials are not young people anymore, so I'm just being clear – but at the time, the myth of the lazy millennial has been debunked. You know, like there was like in the employment participation rates, millennials were the lowest teen, whenever they were teenagers, they were the lowest participants in employment compared to previous generations. And now Gen Z is returning back to pre-millennial levels in terms of teen participation in the workforce. Okay. And there was this myth that it was like, you know, the lazy millennial. Like you know, entitled whatever. But it just so happened that the millennials, at the time that they were teens, were serious, like major recessions. Like they were completely blocked out of job positions because other generations were competing for the jobs, right? You know, and this is all clear like 20 years later, with lots of employment data. My point about this particular story is that there's so many assumptions and perceptions that adults have of young people that our entire discourse about an entire generation was that they were lazy and entitled, when in fact there were so many structural and systemic factors at play that were preventing a large group of people from being in, employed, right? So, going back to the point of like young people can pick up on this stuff pretty fast, adults actually need a lot of training. And our first activity in the adult-ally training is to imagine them going back to being 15 years old. And what it was like to be 15, and to put themselves in their shoes. And they get very uncomfortable when we start to ask these questions, but it's necessary to get back to that third pillar of "understand" in order to debunk some of the - and I don't blame individuals for these assumptions, like this is on a societal level that these assumptions exist, especially in North America - to debunk some of the myths and assumptions that people have about young people. And I think that that, you know, that that training component needs to flip the script, like, you can actually spend maybe like one to two hours with a young person on YPAR, and they pick it up like this. But we've had to like years sometimes to get some of our adult partners on board with YPAR, and they're still like unlearning, right? And I don't want to also put the onus on adult individuals. Again, it's like systems that they're part of that are like reinforcing these messages about what's professional and what's not, and what's what's right and what's not, and what's research and what's not. So, you know, we're up against, we're going up hill on this, and a lot of factors, but the point I'm trying to make here is really that we need to kind of focus our energy on unlearning amongst adult generations.
Maddy Ross: I want to come back to something you said earlier about Respect, Listen, Understand, Communicate being your process, really the essence of the way you work. And then Stoney, you were talking about the tensions sometimes working with academic researchers, bringing young people into these settings, or bringing researchers into young people's settings. I'm curious how those tensions are worked out, and especially because these Four Pillars, they generate a very emergent process, which is often also in tension with the way research is done. And so how do you navigate that, and what does that look like while these adults are unlearning?
Sharif Mahdy: Sometimes we put them in a different room for a few moments. And sometimes we go, I mean, I don't want to sound like this be all end all expert either, because there are many moments in our processes, where each of us have moments. I think we as humans, we resist complexity, right? Like we don't like complexity, even though the world is complex. And even if intellectually we know that the world is complex, in those moments of absolute complexity, which is usually our processes, it's very uncomfortable. And so, I mean, that's why our model is also grounded in Head, Heart, Feet, and Spirit, you know? Making sure people feel like it's a safe space to learn, to feel what they're feeling, to like engage in really productive behaviour and to connect. And sometimes we have Head Heart Feet Spirit moments where we stop and label a moment, and just say, "Hey, this is messy right now, like sit in the mess, trust the process". And some of the, you know, some of the adults who really can't trust the process get a one-on-one talk, right? But there's a lot of, there's a lot of appreciation for the human reaction to complexity in the work that we do. Young people seem to be more attuned to it and seem to be more comfortable with complexity, and I think as they get older, they go through systems and processes that make them uncomfortable with the complexity. But young people seem to like understand their relationships of systems much better than you know, than you know, other generations. So the work with young people is usually less focused on managing that and more focused on managing some of the you know, some of the trauma that can emerge from divulging what's really going on, right? Like that's usually where our focus is with young people, but with adults, it's about you know, managing them through the process. And in a lot of times, you know, one of the big learnings for me was, when I first joined, all my attention to the young people. And anytime an adult had a reaction, I was like, they're grown up, they're fully formed, they should, like, they're done. You know and like over my time with the stu, like I don't have time for that. And then as I, you know as I continued in the role, I was like wait a second, every person is just a, you know, there's a part of them that's still a 12-year-old child that needs to be nurtured and supported as well. And so, that is also part of the process.
Stoney McCart: Kwaku, how do you manage us?
Kwaku Agyemang: It's so funny cause the adults are the hardest to manage, I feel. It's weird, it's weird, I just feel like…I'm gonna be a little bit more loose. You know, adults still have feelings, and egos. So when it comes to being like, "Hey just stop talking" or "talk less" you know, you have to take it from a Four Pillar approach too. I will say, I think it's, there's a lot of gifts associated - so this is the pillar of respect - there's a lot of gifts associated with you know adults in terms of like wisdom and experience that comes out in the space. There's the need to share that. But then often times that can like, depending on the context of the conversation, how that comes off sometimes can sort of take away from the safe space, just because, like, especially if you're dealing with vulnerable youth populations, you never really know which young person has a difficult experience at home, and within their community that, you know, how an adult conducts themselves takes up space, takes up too much space, or even sometimes not taking enough space. You know, might be a trigger, or you know, might allow them to detach from the space, so it's really important to be mindful of trying to you know, give attention to the adults, so you know, make sure that you know their participation in the space is intentional, meaningful. But also just so that they're not excluded. I think it's always like, it's always like, it's the youth only, let's take the adults outside of space. Sometimes you know, the support of adults can be helpful. There are times, where it could be a challenge. But I think where you find a meaningful middle ground to make it make sense, can, can really add value to the space. But there are times where you definitely have to, like Sharif said, have to ask them to leave the space.
Stoney McCart: I think you hear a theme that there's no there's no one way to do this, that it's always an ongoing assessment and adjustment. The experiential part is really important because as Kwaku alluded to, there are situations where adults think that they're doing the right thing by getting up and leaving or by letting young people be completely alone. And we've had young people tell us that that feels like abandonment, that feels like they're not interested in listening to us. But there'll be moments when that's not true. So, it's actually this level playing field, like the striving to recognize that everybody is an equal player in what you're doing. Has an equal stake and understands the purpose, is equally there for some common thing, and they're working out the best way to work with each other, which I think both Kwaku and Sharif talked about this notion of working with. And it's not that you're, you know, you're working, the adults have to truly truly believe and authentically work this way in terms of, their project would, their research would not be as good without the partners, their youth partners. They have to treat their youth partners exactly the way they would treat any other stakeholder who's absolutely necessary to the successful execution of the project. And they're not there, they're not there to help the young people do YPAR, and nor are the young people there to have, like, this is a, together we'll do a better job.
Sharif Mahdy: And I think that's that's I mean, I think you know I think there's in research and policy making and you know, one of our biggest struggles communicating the voice into action is people want a toolkit after an event, or like they want, they want a roadmap of exactly how to like, how to fix systems based on what people have said, without actually understanding that the process of engaging youth in the policy making, in the research is what will achieve your outcome. Like the process is the outcome, right? And you can't just, you take a curriculum, and follow it line by line, because you need, the best ways of engaging in YPAR and engaging in meaningful youth engagement are all about adapting and being flexible while staying rooted to a really core goal, right? So often in our YPAR processes, I think of the work we did with a, you know, a rural community, we had a very clear focus around wanting to know what, what the issues were that were occurring in the community. And, how we got there was completely different than how we planned, but resulted in a much richer kind of story around the need for better LGBTQ2S+ inclusion, and the need for improved mental health resources and services, like that was a key finding from the process. But if we had stuck to the formal methodology of it, it was very possible, actually, it's not like, it's certain that we would not have achieved the outcomes that we achieved. So also making sure that people, training people on where to be adaptable and where to bend is also a bit of an art, more than a science. And I think it's something that you know, it's not intuitive. Certainly there are folks who really pick it up easily, and it is intuitive for them, but it's something that's really hard to quantify and train. I think people are looking for a simple solution to complexity all the time, and you know, our answer is, you have to embrace the unknown unknown.
Maddy Ross: Thank you for joining us on this episode of the WhyPAR Podcast. In this conversation, Sharif, Stoney, and Kwaku discussed possibilities that arise when adults question their social authority and collaborate with young people as inherently capable knowers and partners in research. We talked about the Four Pillars as both values and a research process, and why embracing complexity is a condition for turning youth knowledge into action. I hope you enjoyed this episode and hold onto the reminder that when YPAR feels most difficult and overwhelming, you’re probably on the cusp of something important. With this in mind, stay tuned for our next episode, and see you then!