Fri, May. 24, 2024 14:00:00 — 15:00:00 AEST
We invite all AARE members to two upcoming events discussing a new youth-adult partnership methodology that was piloted in an alternative learning setting.
We hope to see you there!
Heather, Melinda and Clara, with Aaron and Simon (SIG Convenors)
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Suggested reading: Howell, A. (2023). From disenfranchisement to hope through Youth-Adult Participatory Action Research. Australian Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00666-0 |
Title: From disenfranchisement to hope through Youth-Adult Participatory Action Research
Paper Abstract
This paper proposes dovetailing the concept of youth-adult partnership with youth participatory action research to generate a methodology of youth-adult participatory action research. Within contemporary education, deficit-oriented discourses of hopelessness and demoralisation among ‘at risk’ young people and their teachers, particularly those in marginalised and/or high poverty communities, pervade the literature. However, scholarship suggests that negative emotions do not tend to stem from a sense of hopelessness but one of uncertainty, which is typically caused by a lack of accurate information and thus provides a starting point for investigations through integrating reason and emotion. Embedded in Fraser’s conceptualisation of justice as parity of participation, coupled with Freire’s notion of intergenerational dialogue and a critical-democratic conceptualisation of engagement, youth-adult participatory action research seeks to generate communities of praxis in which students, teachers and researchers form explicit tripartite partnerships as co-investigators and co-learners. As they jointly explore their shared concerns, the members of the community mobilise their collective power and agency to co-design context-specific solutions and in so doing, transform the negative emotion and disenfranchisement stemming from uncertainty into a critical hope for more optimistic futures than those alluded to by the ‘at risk’ and ‘disengaged’ policy tags.
Brief Biography: Angelique Howell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership. She is particularly interested in addressing the issue of student disengagement through youth-adult partnerships, particularly in marginalised and/or high poverty communities