Knowledges from academic and professional research-based institutions have long been valued over the organic intellectualism of those who are most affected by educational and social inequities. In contrast, participatory action research (PAR) projects are collective investigations that rely on indigenous knowledge, combined with the desire to take individual and/or collective action. PAR with youth (YPAR) engages in rigorous research inquiries and represents a radical effort in education research to value the inquiry-based knowledge production of the youth who directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand. In this chapter, we outline the foundations of YPAR and examine the distinct epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical contributions of an interdisciplinary corpus of YPAR studies and scholarship. We outline the origins and disciplines of YPAR and make a case for its role in education research, discuss its contributions to the field and the tensions and possibilities of YPAR across disciplines, and close by proposing a YPAR critical-epistemological framework that centers youth and their communities, alongside practitioners, scholars, and researchers, as knowledge producers and change agents for social justice.

Discourses of achievement often overlook the interdependence of classroom contexts, students’ identities, and academic performance. This narrative analysis explores how high-achieving students of color construct identities-in-practice in a diverse urban middle school. By documenting explicit moments in which students construct identities-in-practice such as being “loud,” which are positioned as incompatible with “being smart,” I argue that high-achieving lower income students of color are disproportionately regulated by achievement discourses that position White middle-class norms as neutral. This article documents tensions between what it takes to achieve academically and students’ raced, classed, and gendered identities in order to reframe educational equity based on a theoretical framing of identities and academic achievement as interrelated and highly contextual.

Youth participatory action research is part of a revolutionary effort in educational research to take inquiry-based knowledge production out of the sole purview of academic institutions and include those who most directly experience the educational contexts that scholars endeavor to understand. Seeking to extend the robust legacy of participatory action research in schools and communities, in this article, we focus on the pedagogical contributions of youth participatory action research collaborations for the teaching of critical qualitative research. We discuss strategies developed and implemented in an after-school youth participatory action research seminar in order to highlight how collaborative educational spaces can contribute to teaching and engaging in critical qualitative research. We also reflect, in our role as educators and researchers, on the possibilities and limitations of teaching qualitative research critically and reflexively, particularly at the intersection of qualitative action research, critical literacies, and youth social action. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of collaborative inquiry for the teaching of qualitative research in education and beyond.

Students' academic experiences are often shaped by normalized conceptions of literacy that do not honor the interrelatedness of multiple identities, languages, and literacies. This qualitative case study in an urban middle school highlights students' critical meta-awareness of their identities-in-practice in the figured world of their classroom via a narrative analysis of students' writing, interviews, and focus group discussions. The author focuses on students' internalization and/or resistance of the curriculum as a basis for developing culturally sustaining stances toward curriculum, pedagogy, and research that actively disrupt cultural, ethnic, racial, and epistemological hierarchies of power in academic contexts and beyond.

We look forward to building on this notion of sustaining multingual literacies with scholars who consider restorative literacy classroom practices, issues affecting varied racial and ethnic communities, and notions of citizenship-all in diverse learning contexts.

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This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.