From disenfranchisement to hope through youth-adult participatory action research

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.