The WhyPAR Podcast
Episode 6: “Getting to the point where we erase the Y the P and the A”: A Conversation between Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia and Melanie Bertrand
Citation:
Raza, Naima. ““Getting to the point where we erase the Y the P and the A”: A Conversation between Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia and Melanie Bertrand.” Produced by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Sarah Switzer at The Youth Research Lab. The WhyPAR Podcast. March 30, 2021. 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 in Toronto on the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Antero: Probably if you’re doing YPAR correctly, if there is something like correctly, you’re probably pissing off somebody, right? Like at some point, or you’re doing it wrong…
Host: Welcome everyone! My name is Naima, and I’m the host of the WhyPAR podcast. I’m a YPAR practitioner and a graduate assistant at the Youth Research Lab. Today’s episode features a conversation between Nicole Mirra, Antero Garcia and Melanie Bertrand. Nicole, Antero, and Mel are YPAR practitioners and professors at Rutgers University, Stanford University, and Arizona State University respectively. In this conversation, they are going to be discussing the ethical commitments and the politics of knowledge dissemination in YPAR. They are going to be discussing: What are the opportunities and tensions of conducting YPAR in schools? How can YPAR expand the definition of what counts as research, and how can we ensure that YPAR serves purpose beyond academic and towards liberation? What are the tensions of conducting YPAR when its labour benefits adult researchers? This conversation was recorded at Stanford University, and with that, let’s jump in!
Melanie: I'm Melanie Bertrand of Arizona State University and I'm here with Dr. Nicole Mirra of Rutgers University and Dr. Antero Garcia of Stanford University. Thank you so much for joining me in this podcast. We're so excited to hear about your work. To start off with, could you tell me a little bit about what brought you to YPAR youth participatory action research?
Nicole: Sure. I'll start off. I was a high school English teacher before I decided to go back to graduate school. And as I taught high school English, I recognized that oftentimes my students were not given opportunities to express their voices civically about things that were happening in their lives. And so that was one of the, I was kind of curious about how I could do that better as a teacher, and how to create more opportunities for young people to have a say in the, the world around them. So that's the kind of driving force that took me back to graduate school. And I ended up at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles.
Antero: Woo
Melanie: Woohoo
Nicole: And when we, when I got there, I didn't quite realize at the time exactly what kind of, what kind of an amazing youth participatory action research collaborative had already been going on there for almost 10 years at that point, which I think is probably one of the longest running YPAR collaboratives that I know of in existence. And my advisor, Dr. John Rogers, and Dr. Ernest Morrell were the folks running the, what was called the Council of Youth Research. And so I was able to be slowly apprenticed into this community of practice that had already been going on with teachers from across Los Angeles, 30 young people from South and East Los Angeles. And it was the first time I had really been able to snap out of the teacher mentality, which even though, even well intentioned, I think I still believed in kind of teachers, transmitting or helping young people gain knowledge. And it was the first time I had truly been, kind of shaken awake to flip my entire paradigm and see young people being the experts, and the producers of knowledge. And so being in that community is kind of how I got my start into YPAR.
Melanie: That’s cool.
Antero: Yeah. I don't have anything to add. This is the, like Nicole, I was a former high school English teacher and ended up going into UCLA where I also met a few. John Rogers wasn't my advisor, but Ernest Morrell was my advisor, so we were, we were nemeses and as a result.
Nicole: Pretty much.
Antero: But I do remember as a high school English teacher that students, oftentimes they would have some, maybe it’s called an inquiry project or a, we call it today, a project-based learning project, whatever, whatever the sexy thing is that you're going to call kids doing research in schools. And oftentimes that would mean that kids would get really excited. Some kids would get very excited about doing a thing and trying to instantiate some kind of new possibility, or change something. And would very quickly hit the wall of the limits of what a class project can do and feel frustrated in a way that feels very defeatist about what are the expectations around supporting youth engagement, civic participation, something like action research. And it didn't feel like YPAR in establishing particular kinds of research traditions might have been a new kind of possibility. It was also definitely language I wasn't familiar with when I was entering graduate school. And I think, you know, if we started in 2008, is that, is that right?
Nicole: Yup.
Melanie: Me seven, you both eight.
Antero: So if we started in the second half of the first, first decade of the 21st century, whew, it's terrible. Alright, then, that seemed like when the language of YPAR was actually getting formulated. So it was just fortuitous timing. And then I think the three of us and others getting to work with John and Ernest and with the teachers around Los Angeles and the students in Los Angeles, just like, there's like a really nice robust network of organic intellectualism, organic leadership that was kind of emerging across these spaces. And that felt like generative.
Melanie: Uh hum. Yeah, it was, I feel like it was a pretty amazing time both there and just across the country. You know, that revolution, Revolutionizing Education book came out in 2008 I think.
Nicole: And as did Jeff and Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest’s book. And so these two big statements of YPAR in 2008 and now it’s been fascinating to see over these past 11 years the way it's been taken up and in ways that I think are both really transformative but also troubling in some ways too.
Antero knows all about my, my, we have soapbox, we talk often about this is that, and we learned this through all of our graduate program is that, you know, public schooling and the structures of schooling, the stratifying nature of schooling is a really, really powerful force. It has a huge gravitational pull and schooling has the ability to take many transformative practices that happen out in the world that are organic and, critical and abled. And they can often like suck the life out of them and suck the revolutionary power out of them and make them conform to the rhythms and structures of schooling. And I do worry that over time, as I start to see some, um, well intentioned action civics programs that are trying to kind of take that spirit of YPAR and figure out how to kind of bring it to scale and make it work within the constraints of public schooling, that that process of trying to be pragmatic and make it work can sometimes, the pendulum can swing too far into making it like fit school and that robs YPAR of what makes it special in the first place. And then winds up kind of reverting back to what Antero was saying that we had before of like doing a research project. The typical research project is looking for sources. Now we can just replace it with these different steps that seem like youth voice but are actually not rocking the boat or disturbing the system at all, which was the whole purpose. And so I get, I'm very excited to see YPAR, gaining traction. And sometimes it seems like it doesn't need to be, we don't need to keep talking about it, but then you realize that every time it's being shared with a new teacher or a new group of students, you need to keep reminding of that, of that kernel about critical consciousness and youth voice and actually being subversive because if not, it can very easily just become like another set of steps that are problematic.
Melanie: Right. And even having a teacher who is the current teacher of any youth who are in this process, you know, having a teacher who's has to give a grade, forced to give a grade, you know, within standards.
Antero: Yeah. I mean, I think that's, this has been the tension. I don't, I don't know if I ever landed on that decision on this, but of how much can YPAR actually exist within a formal schooling process right around both the structures of school, around the power dynamics of classrooms where you're giving a grade at least within, you know, traditional Western definitions of what school looks like. How much can the school actually be, um, the platform on which you can do YPAR is the question. And I think there's other side of, if it's about developing critical consciousness, consciousness and being subversive, right. At what point does the visibility of doing YPAR in a school run in odds with trying to be an intentionally grounding theories that are subversive to dominant mainstream power, right. That it's sooner or later someone if you're, if, probably if you're doing YPAR correctly, if there is something like correctly, you're probably pissing off somebody, right? Like at some point, or you're doing it wrong. I don't know. Maybe it's, it's too much of a pronouncement.
Melanie: Oh no. I mean I agree with that.
Antero: Yeah.
Melanie: I do. Because, I mean, well it depends on whose version of YPAR you’re doing, but I mean in terms of the YPAR that's founded in critical perspectives that is out to change the status quo. And so that is bound to piss off people in authority positions.
Antero: Yeah. Yeah.
Nicole: And then I think, you know, as and when I start to get, go down the road of being kind of pessimistic or frustrated about the way YPAR gets packaged, I did have to remind myself that like, like we were saying, we kind of think that this is like, like we've been lucky enough to be in with mentors that have been teaching us about this for the past decade, but we can't just cede public school spaces either. So like even if, even if I get frustrated about a version of YPAR that is not like, there's no ideological purity in schools and we all know that as former teachers, is that we are agents of a very flawed system at the same time that we are trying to transform it. But if we just say that like YPAR is a critical practice that conflicts with the structures of schooling and therefore it shouldn't even be in schooling at all. Then we just cede schools to just always be these like deadening spaces. And so we have to believe at some point that there is some space for true education within schooling. And so I think living in those tensions and not necessarily always seeing them as like failed YPAR, but seeing it as like, I don't know.
Antero: Because YPAR?
Nicole: Finding those generative, yeah. The generative generative moments that happen in that friction, maybe we can keep on interrogating it. So at the same time, I think maybe it is a good thing that even in, cause, I mean we have to remember that for a lot of school districts and for a lot of teachers just even letting young people name a topic and research, it could even be a small move that is a radical act.
Melanie: Yeah. Right. And is often blocked. I'm going to give a shout out to Van Lack and Michelle Fines’ recent publication which talks about this very thing, a project, where, you know, the, the youth had wanted to do a project on disproportionality and discipline and racist discipline practices and they were blocked by a school district.
Antero: Oh really?
Melanie: Uh huh…
Nicole: And that's that. Good. You know, the tension of, and we've talked about this a little bit, like I think the rhetoric of schooling has gotten to a place where principals and district folks and admin like, now know that that is an appropriate thing to say. Like you hear a lot of like mission statements or vision statements that want to talk about youth voice and want to talk about civic engagement. And it's now become, I don't know if it's a buzzword or a, but it definitely feels like more normative to say that now that's very interesting to see what happens when the rubber hits the road and we say we want to give young people a voice. But when they use their voices to critique adults, adults often come down with the hammer and kind of like squash that because to truly honour voice means that you have to be ready to be a learner and to be critiqued and to change. And if we just want youth voice in theory and not in practice, then again we're… YPAR can be a powerful way of revealing those contradictions.
Antero: I think there's also, there's not a point to say, Oh I agree with all of that and I think the pendulum can also swing the other way and you can also hear of out-of-school YPAR work that is entirely, not that, not that the motivation isn't, isn't correct. Right. But is purely-activist oriented and like de-centres the R of YPAR, right? That like I think the intellectual premise of doing YPAR oftentimes is theoretically bound and is about, you know, research process steps enough times that can also get left behind. Like, I think there are, there's a range of what of what it’s showing up with and part of it is this kind of watering down in the tensions of doing it in school. And on the other side there could be, you know, purely action, which, which in some ways is just as beautiful. But is it YPAR is also just a question to think maybe.
Melanie: Right. Well we kind of have come to this already.
Antero: We did it.
Melanie: So considering all these tensions that we were just talking about, what kind of ethical commitments do you bring to the work, personally?
Nicole: I think the, the first ethical commitment of why power has to be about transforming what we believe youth can do and how we see youth epistemologies. And I think it sounds pretty simple to just say we have to value youth voice, but it's something that I've had to continually like remind myself of, as I fall back into, I mean as a teacher and now as a, as a professor and as a writer in academic journals, it becomes so easy, you know, that's a very seductive pull to like fall back into traditional hierarchies of knowing and how knowledge should get represented and how it should be written and how my voice can so easily, without me realizing it consciously come back out and kind of reshape or reinterpret what young people are doing or saying in ways that that is not their reality or was not their preference. And so it sounds easy to say youth, but I think that ethical commitment is an ongoing lifelong like constant process of de-centering myself revisiting and understanding that how youth the whole, like we're not giving a voice to the voiceless. They have voices and we all need to be the ones that change to be worthy of listening to them. And I think that's a constant process. But at the same time, and we've talked about this a lot, like the role of adults and youth and YPAR. I think sometimes that desire to value youth voice and to honour youth voice can sometimes lead to like the idea that we have to completely absent our adult perspectives and like step back completely out of the way and let young people take total control of the entire process. But then as Antero was saying, the, the research element means that we do have to see each other as partners in some sense and we as adults do have something to offer in the process and we have to use our expertise to help scaffold and support youth inquiry. So it's not about like denigrating adult knowledge. It's about reshaping and reformulating what our role is to imagine a new educational space that is more collaborative and mutually, like, harmonizing.
Antero: Yeah. There are some folks who talk about it not as YPAR, but as IPAR right, in this intergenerational. And I think that, you know, I think some of the most rewarding work that I've seen come out of the work with council is its impact on the teachers that participate in it. And on us. Right. I think a lot of art, as the three of us around this table, like it's, this has helped shape careers, right?
I think that, in terms of the teachers that we've worked with, there's, there's a lot of changing of, you know, a shifting of consciousness now understanding of our relationship with young people that I think is particularly powerful. I do think one of the tensions that I think about around these ethical commitments is as research, what's this look like when we write it up in journal articles, in chapters and books. So for example, right, like Nicole, Ernest and I worked on a book about the council that includes lots of people's voices, but the end of the day you know, it's three adult academics whose names are on the cover of that book. And we can think about, you know, also we've all written journal articles that are similar to that. And oftentimes we talk about this as research, but then once we've done the YPAR project, then the adults shut the door and open up the laptop and write about the YPAR. And I think this is, and there's no, I mean, some of us are that the job demands, right? That other people, you know, we don't get paid for writing these articles. And so, but we get compensated in terms of our labor in ways that young people aren't. So we just think about there's some ethical muddiness that I think is necessary in terms of furthering this work and thinking about how it's heard, in snobby journals that three people read, right? Like this is just kind of the stakes of this profession. But it's, it's a piece I just don't, I don't have like a good answer around but I think about, I don't know if either of you. Yeah.
Nicole: I think that that, that ethical concern about like authorship and published publication, I always try to remind myself that sometimes I feel, I think previously I felt like the way to deal with that is that we have to co-author with young people and then I realized as I've gone on that that is powerful. It's probably more powerful to, to shake the academy up than it is to shake up young people's lives. Cause then I remember that like, Oh if we say like, oh well, I want to include you as an author. And then when young people say, well that journal article doesn't have any currency in my life whatsoever. So if that's what you need to do your work and you're going to get it out to this community engaging in like dialogic data generation with young people, making sure their voices are heard, whether they are listed as authors or not.
Antero: Yeah.
Nicole: Like that's not necessarily about bringing them into the academic journal space because then that's again, just young adults, we're, we're making this matter in their lives when it doesn't. So I tried to also think it was, okay, if I'm going to write this article for this adult audience about this work, how can I make sure that at the same time simultaneously I'm going to…
Antero: Make a Tik Tok!
Nicole: A Tik Tok with young people like or like somehow expresses knowledge in a way that has relevance and authenticity and meaning to the young people. And if that means going back and giving a presentation at their school, if that's something they, you know, whatever they name as the audience, they want to, like, peers on social media, at the school with parents, with communities. And I think that recognizing that our ways of disseminating in the academy mean one thing, they don't mean the only thing. And to make sure that we are making sure our research spans modalities and spans audiences. And so I think that's if, if in the ethics, like if we can keep coming back to those letters of YPAR, of the Y and the P and the A and the R, and we make sure that everything we do is of a participatory nature and it has a purpose beyond the academic, like the academia, then I feel like that that can be the ethical north star that keeps us kind of coming back to the right place. And I always remember, cause I always remember that like even with teachers I've written with and students and they'll be like, that's okay if you need to take, as the adult, you need to take the lead on this piece because this piece isn't going to, I don't need this in my life. But to make sure that we don't just say that that's the only thing. And it's unfortunate that in our academy it's still not necessarily, it's seen as doing double the work for not, as you know, the only part that matters is the journals as opposed to the community work. I feel like we're slowly trying to, as a field appreciate community-engaged scholarship more. And that's a great thing. But it’s a slow moving process. And so until that press time comes, we just have to do double the work if that's what matters to us and if that's what we believe is valid.
Melanie: It's a good way to put it. I mean, I'm hearing reciprocity in there, you know, and what it means to, and not, and I guess, defining what reciprocity means to everyone involved.
Antero: Yeah.
Melanie: But making sure that we understand the definition of reciprocity from the youth and whatever, whoever else might be involved.
Anyways, so yeah, I think, I think that that's a conversation that's gonna continue to grow in Ed leadership as it, as the presence of YPAR continues to grow because I think that there's a lot of enthusiasm and I think, a lot of graduate students are beginning to use it. So I know that another generation of professors in Ed leadership are going to be using this as a tool.
Nicole: And I think for all of us, like I always, I've been recently thinking about this idea of like that we shouldn't need the Y, the P and the A, like if the more times we have to like list out all those different parts that research should value youth and it should be participatory and it should be action, right? Like I guess the goal would be to eventually erase those and if that, and then redefine and make that a normative idea of what research is and that should be our goal is to actually like not have the need for those letters anymore to define what research, like the fact that they were needed in the first place just shows that that research as we know it in the academy and in the Western tradition was born out of inequitable and oppressive…
Melanie: Colonization
Nicole: ways of naming and forms of ontology and epistemology. And I feel like that's the, hopefully YPAR can erase the need for its own existence if it's really successful to make it just research.
Antero: That’s some heavy shit, I like that, that’s good.
Melanie: Me too. Yeah. (laughing)
Antero: That’s cool. Boom.
Nicole: It got real after these plantain chips. (laughing)
Melanie: Podcast listeners we do have some plantain chips. (laughing)
Antero: The plantain chips came out.
Nicole: They helped my brain. (laughing)
Antero: Get some more plaintain for this person. (laughing)
Nicole: Somebody get her some plantain chips. (laughing)
Melanie: What are some of the ways that you are or have shared the results of YPAR projects?
Antero: So some of it is in the those traditional fuddy duddy. Is that a word I can use? Fuddy. That's the word, right?
Nicole: Wow, that’s haberdashery. Wait, that's, that's hat-making. (laughing)
Antero: We mainly share our journal articles with hat-makers. That really fell off the rails quickly and kind of old normative journals and prohibitively expensive books. Right? Like this is the kind of, that is the gold standard of how you try to stay in academia. Right? So being at, you know, a snobby, elitist institution, you need to do some of that to go to stay employed. That is, I think that's, that is, but also the other side of that, it's not just about playing this game, but that is if we are trying to move to that kind of shift in what research counts as, as Nicole mentioned, that is how you do it within this field, right? Like you need to take space within traditional academic journals? Push on, what's counted as methodology and, and what sounds, so that that is one space for the publishing or I think the other kinds of places where we've seen trickling of writing is in practitioner journals for teachers. Right? So thinking about teacher perspectives on YPAR, Nicole, Danielle Filipiak and I got to write an article for an English journal, where we've done this a couple of other venues too. I think those are nice places for teachers to be able to hear what this work looks like in ways that feels accessible to them. Maybe I'll pause there.
Nicole: Yeah. And when I think back to how the young people have chosen or how we've guided young people through the council to share their, disseminate their work. I remember, I think it always sticks with me as a grad student of how, exciting I thought it was that during one of our years of the council, we were preparing as a group to present to a City Hall and to, to go up to Sacramento and talk to state representatives about their research. But we, we stopped and we kind of thought about the fact that those are important audiences to be able to influence state politics, to be able influence the school district. But we wanted to make sure that we also honored and held space for young people to be sharing this work with their families and their community. And I remember that year we organized a presentation at the UCLA Labor Center, which is located in downtown Los Angeles and was a logistically an easier place for a lot of families to get to. And then we made sure, this is a way, I think that universities can leverage their resources. So we made sure that there were, translation, there's translation equipment available and I remember folks wearing the headsets so that parents could, those that were speaking Spanish could understand when, young people were sharing their work. And I just at that moment, that all has always stuck with me as like a, like a really beautiful way to make sure that all could be included and that like… reminds me that as we are agitating for change, the real joy of YPAR and the where we are transforming lives is in young people's critical consciousness. And then being able to share that, intergenerationally, and to value at the end we valued like the honor, the families that were in the room that were allowing young people to take this journey. Just really seeing it as a community endeavour. Those moments felt like something special that felt like what, what makes YPAR revolutionary and those ways of disseminating were always more powerful in some ways and would prepare us then for the struggle that would come when young people would present to adults who in, you see this Mel has come out in your work a lot, which I think was so powerful is to see the, the ways that adults would sometimes applaud young people as if they are kind of patronizingly like applaud them for their work but never take it seriously or plan to do anything with it. Yeah. And young people were prepared and oftentimes people are worried about doing YPAR and they come to us and say like, well aren't young people are going to get angry or discouraged when they start learning about these systemic forces working against them. And what if they do real research and no one changes anything like, isn't that discouraging? I think the fact that we foreground that process of love and community and the fact that we would have a unity circle before every presentation where Ernest or any one of us would, all the teachers would any whoever was moved would speak and we would all kind of have that, that reminder that, you know, we are changing the world through each of our own minds. That's what gets you the endurance, to not be discouraged when you then see the reluctance of the systems to change and the reluctance of people to open their minds and their hearts. And that's where I find like the, the most powerful kinds of dissemination.
Antero: And that is, that is the dissemination itself, right? That is the, the move from megas… that that is critical consciousness to some extent. It's nice. Yeah.
Nicole: It was happening and then, I mean there's other things we could share. Like, you know, the, we tried to use the online space and Antero and I have been thinking about that more now as we've moved forward. The council did create blogs and we tried to create some online dialogue around their work of, letting young people take the lead in defining the work and writing about it. And then sometimes even, academic researchers would engage with their work on blogs. So I know the author Patrick Finn would respond to some of the work that manual arts students were doing, the blog and kind of creating the conversation on their terms. You know, that's the, that's the push and pull between the academic journal life and then like more public facing forms of dissemination, which I think are all important.
Antero: I think there's something, so even if we go to the, like the boring academic kinds of presentations, right? So when we take students to AERA for example, I always felt like those, when you're, when you're in the room, I feel like a lot of the researchers who show up to those sessions. Often times there are people we know when they're committed or excited about this work, but it feels like those presentations oftentimes start with a, Look how cute it is that these kids are doing this work in this adult space. And that's fine that it starts there, but it never ends there. Right. That there's always, at least that I've seen, there was always a turning point partway through where it's no longer listening to kids deliver something like a book report and now it is, it is seen as valid and equal in the eyes of an audience that aren't necessarily parts of this, this group. And I always feel like that is the dissemination of this realization of, of what's happened, like of, of that, of seen the work in action feels particularly real and relevant, and exciting.
Melanie: I think at AERA that happens. But sometimes, you know, in the, in the Council of Youth Research, I was often interviewing teachers who were in those presentations and stuff. And that's what I continued to do and, and where I am now. But, I feel like it does shift for some people. And then for some people they're just stuck.
Antero: Why do you think that happens?
Melanie: I don't know. Some people are defensive, some people don't take, don't see the research as credible.
Antero: Yeah.
Melanie: Well, and I think those intersect, you know, if the research is critiquing that person somehow, you know, if they're, if they're seeing it as in defensive,
Antero: As an attack…
Melanie: as an attack, then they of course they're more likely to see it as not credible.
Nicole: It takes a level of humility as educators to listen to the fact that something that you've dedicated your life to or the good intentions that you have could actually not be accomplishing what you intended or that you are. And all of us, I mean even those of us that do YPAR, we are all implicated as agents of the state and I am upholding institutions that I try to critique at the same time. And that can be really, easy to become defensive because it's, it takes a lot to recognize that you're part of that and to accept that humbly and not try to justify or make rationalizations for it. But if we can get to that place of kind of seeing the systems that we are complicit in and then understanding the agency that we have to do something about it, I think that's sort of the power can come from. And I think the idea of the marching orders has always been something that kind of has stayed with all of us through from the time we started with, Ernest Morrell would remind the young people when we were in those unity circles every time before we started presenting that, you know, our job is to shake people up. Our job is to make sure that no one leaves any of our presentations without marching orders, knowing that they have a particular job that they need to do. You aren't. Your job is not done as an adult when you listen to the young people's presentation. That is the beginning of your journey and it's their responsibility to take that up and for young people to clarify for them. So that's why their presentations would have like young people, here's what you can do, teachers, here's what you can do, administrators. Everyone has a job to do in this like ongoing struggle. I think that's the, the ultimate goal of dissemination is to move hearts and minds and to hopefully create some of that empathy that could help us to understand that we don't need to feel guilty or defensive or angry about white supremacy, the systems that we were a part of. You use that feeling to then like start dismantling them collaboratively. That's the goal.
Melanie: Yes.
Antero: Musical.
Nicole: No problem.
Melanie: Along similar lines, how would you make decisions or how do you make decisions about sharing youth knowledge? So if you could give a picture of decision-making processes, like walk us through perhaps an example of how a group has made a decision around the disseminations or opportunities or challenges.
Nicole: And I know this is separate from the Council, but so Antero and I are now working on another, I'm kind of trying to reimagine YPAR in different kind of like digital cross-country context through a project called the Digital Democratic Dialogue 3D Project. And actually when you asked that question, I thought about the presentations that we've been starting to do, initial presentations with some of the data that we're just kind of working through right now. Yeah. I don't know if you remember Antero, at the one of your presentations you were showing what a young person had said on Edmodo. So somebody that, this is a group where young people were.
Antero: Around gun violence?
Nicole: Yeah, there were, there was a topic around gun violence. So young people around the country who were in high school are communicating with each other using digital platforms about civic issues they care about. And we're allowing the dialogue to emerge organically based on their interests. And we saw young people beginning to talk about like what their opinions were about guns. And we had some young people living in communities where they felt strongly about gun rights. And other students who were much more concerned about gun violence and a student was sharing, like volunteered to share with other young people a personal experience with gun violence. And if you remember, I, I think you actually blocked out in your presentation. You covered and didn't let the audience see the actual details of our story.
Antero: Yeah, it is. It's very, you know, I would say most other journal articles, you would be like in the very much like a, as a news favour person I think leads a lead kind of thing. Yeah. Like this would be like the eye-catching quote that pulls people in and Oh, that's so painful. And it feels really invasive? Right? That one, you know, I think Nicole helped facilitate building these powerful relationships across these school sites over a year for the student to be willing to disclose this information with these other peers. It wasn't for us, right? And so,
Nicole: And the point can be made without the kind of like exposing young people's pain. Like I think too much still in academia or another in many parts of education. It's like leveraging young people's pain to gain attention or to gain views or to gain.
Antero: It's kinda, it's kinda like we never got past the, the applying for college. Right. You talk about, you know, I grew up in this community or my grandmother died and right. Like we start with the pain and when we exercise our pain in order to get entree into college or whatever it is, it seems like we still do that, right? We, we, we put this sad stuff on the page that we can get tenure. Is that what happens? Is that, is that the grossest thing? The second great.
Nicole: So that means it makes, it's not only about like lost us making choices about like how to disseminate and what to disseminate, but like thinking about like what do audiences deserve to see of other young people's humanity. Like, it's not, I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing some of that stuff because I don't think audiences would be able to, I mean, I have to do the work to contextualize it if I want them to see something in that, but I worry that that takes a lot of work that is often beyond the amount of attention most people will give to it. Then in that case, you don't really deserve to see this young person's full humanity because you're not prepared to be worthy of it. And so then we have to make those choices of, can the point be made without you having to see this like story of trauma or pain, when you're, people don't always get to make that choice for themselves of what gets shared with others. And so we also have to be very careful as researchers in the explaining how the academic process works. Like I've, you know, to do this bigger project and in the council we had to get, institutional approval from school districts and from the university, but we also had to have young people signing assent forms and their parents signing consent forms. And really trying to explain to them what those things mean. Being really transparent with them about like, what this industry is in which their voices are going to be currency, is much more than just asking them to like get this form signed and bring it back to me. That takes a lot of, like explicit conversation.
Melanie: Yes, definitely. Do you have any more, any more that you'd like to say about the 3D project or any other type of YPAR projects that you, either of you or both of you have going on?
Antero: No.
Nicole: And then the tape ends there. There we go. No, I think it's a really important project to be. I think it's important to be talking to folks like John Rogers and I, a few years ago,
Melanie: That’s a great piece.
Nicole: We integrated a bunch of, we interviewed like a 25 university faculty around the country who do YPAR to kind of tease out some of these tensions and I think again we're finding this, it’s a generative tension of like working within and without and preparing people to, for example, get into college and knowing that we are then like grooming them to keep participating in these systems that they are critiquing at the same time. But how to see that as a process of generation, as opposed to something that is like a giving in or negative or a sacrifice. Like I think that's, I'm just really fascinated in living in that tension. I think YPAR, because it creates conversations like this, that's what can make it so important to hopefully get to that point where we erase the Y the P and the A.
Melanie: I want to thank you so much, both so much for that. And it's been a lot of fun and yeah.
Antero: Thanks Mel.
Nicole: We love talking about this with you. UCLA forever.
Antero: Woo. UCLA is the best!
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Host: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the WhyPAR podcast. I learned so much from Nicole, Antero and Mel’s conversation. Some of the key takeaways that I’m still reflecting upon include seeing youth participation in systems they are critiquing as generative, rather than negative. How YPAR is about changing the world through critical consciousness and building processes of love and community with each other. And how YPAR requires adults being mindful of how they shape youth voice while also recognizing their role in supporting youth consciousness building.
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