Our Programs

Past Programs

Proyecto Latinx

Proyecto Latinx was born from the desire of Latinx youth involved in the first phase of the project to continue doing research, this time following their own interests and working with a team of adult educators and researchers, while also earning a high school credit and getting paid as researchers for their work. Recognizing both our responsibility to Indigenous peoples in this territory as well as the fact that for thousands of years the peoples of Cemanahuac, or Abya-Yala, or the Americas (as Europeans named our land), over the last six years we have been working with and developing a collaborative relationship with TDSB’s Aboriginal Education Centre, which is now called the Urban Indigenous Education Centre. For the last two years, we have been working with separate groups of Latinx and urban Indigenous youth, and this year for the first time we are working with a group that brings together both groups, in what we envision as an echo of the beginning of the era of eagle and the condor, as prophesied by the Inca elder of Twantinsuyo. Youth Researchers earn a high school credit and receive an hourly-wage for their work as Researchers in this project. Every week we meet for three hours, we eat together, we hold circles together, we read together, and together we explore what it means to be in this territory, and what it means to be in relationship together.

UTS Youth PARTICIPATORY action research

UTS YPAR is an OISE and University of Toronto Schools project that engages the complexities of doing youth-led research and activism on social problems at in elite school environment, where social justice work takes on elitist meanings and where students enjoy relatively privileged educational opportunities. This year, UTS YPAR projects came together under the theme of community, exploring what it means to create more accountable  communities in elite contexts. Our student-researchers explored how intersectionality, colonialism and women of colour feminism impact how the student researchers think about and approach their research questions.  These frameworks informed their research methodologies, the manner in which they collect their data and how they approach and define their actions pieces. This year, the students explored critiques about difference within their school, how eliteness manages and appropriates social justice projects with particular motivations, and the complexity of action and research in elite schools. One of groups is interested in the culture of silence around issues of sexual harassment, another is critiquing images of voluntourism and the construction of eliteness in a global economy of “helping”. A third group is exploring barriers to mental health services as it relates to model minority racializations of Asian students at elite schools and their specific cultural and political challenges to dominant mental health paradigms. Another project explores Indigenous Solidarity in school contexts where there is a lack of Indigenous presence and aims to examine what solidarity means and could mean for non-Indigenous allies in those spaces. The last project speaks to the complex role of business in social activism and explores the ways in which elite school culture educates students on how to define “impact” and “success” in business. Our ever-growing yPAR community will continue to support the student-researcher-led journey of creating action that helps uncover and redefine how young people see/experience social justice and “impact”.