Recognizing Young People’s Civic Engagement Practices: Rethinking Literacy Ontologies through Co-Production

Abstract

In this article I argue that it is important to find a language to describe youth engagement practices in informal settings. I argue that many young people do not have the resources to be heard on visible platforms, but their work, and meaning making practices might provide important information about their ideas and relay key concepts about how communicational practices are constructed. Drawing on embedded, ethnographic and artistically informed projects with young people in communities, I argue for a deeper kind of listening. Artistic forms such as poetry, visual art, dance and music are important modes of engagement. I draw on cultural practice theory together with theory from new literacy studies and media studies to explore four questions:
 
 How do you craft what you know?
 How do you speak/make what you feel?
 How do you transform practice?
 How do you articulate action?
 
 I see these as components of the process of producing relationally oriented modes of address that others can also engage with. Taken together, they suggest a language of description for the mode that is civic engagement communicational practice, that is, oriented beyond individual experience but drawing from experience to make change happen in relational ways.

Poetry as method – trying to see the world differently

“…We found that poetry was often a helpful medium of expression for them. While we recognize that not everyone sees 'poetry' as for them, our experience is that words, oral language, modes of expression, can offer ways in which young people can articulate their concerns, whether this be through rap, film, music, visual art or song poems (Pahl, 2019). Conceptualizations of literacy that see 'school literacy' as the only literacy practices that are important manage to elide young people's complex multimodal productions and do not recognize home literacy practices (Pahl, 2014).…”

Positioning self and other: building equity literacy in collaboration

“…This analysis stems from 10 years of informal sharing/thinking around issues in literacy collaboration; we have separately orchestrated collaborative literacy projects across neighbourhoods, schools, grade levels, expertise and cultures with teachers and youth (Rust and Ballard, 2019; Wessel‐Powell et al, 2021). Bolstered by a commitment to social justice, we imagine that fostering partnerships across a range of differences were everyday sites of civil engagement (Pahl, 2019). But in doing so, we became attuned to ways these literacy‐based collaborations across difference sometimes resulted in synergy and other times were fraught with unforeseen hiccups.…”

Posthuman co-production: becoming response-able with what matters

“…For us, co-productive research is art-as-way (Manning, 2020, p. 22), an artful praxis that enables what concerns young people to move into expression. It opens research to the more-than of life in its contingency, rupturing individualistic, linear and neo-liberal research and engagement impact agendas (Bell and Pahl, 2018;Facer and Pahl, 2017;Pahl, 2019;Taylor et al, 2020).…”