Youth participatory action research: Agency and unsilence as anti-classist practice.

Abstract

Psychology's traditional medical-model approach to poverty has left the emotional impact of classism relatively unexplored. When classism and social exclusion become the focus, what options for intervention and service exist for applied psychologists? In this article, youth participatory action research (YPAR) is presented as growthful, anticlassist, community-based practice for psychologists. The authors suggest that YPAR collaborations comprise activities by which psychologists and trainees can partner with young people to refute the silencing and social exclusion that are among the defining elements of classism, and they illustrate this contention with a case example of a year-long, school-based YPAR project. What is the significance of this article for the general public?The harmful impact of poverty includes the impact of classist biases, which function to exclude and devalue the experiences of the poor. Youth participatory action research projects offer an opportunity for professionals and young people to work together to identify community needs and allow the voices of young people in poor communities to be heard.

Youth Participatory Action Research as School Counseling Praxis: A Scoping Review

“…With regard to school counseling practice, a total of five intervention studies described how YPAR can be used within classroom spaces to support students’ development. These included school elective classes (Ozer & Wright, 2012; Voight & Velez, 2018), school counselors joining teachers in classrooms for developmental lessons (Smith et al, 2018), or YPAR as teacher-led classroom pedagogy (Cammarota, 2017; Gonell et al, 2021). Each of the studies actively taught students to use YPAR as a methodology to identify and develop solutions to social injustices in their lives.…”

“…Six of the articles explored in this study posited that YPAR is an effective medium for aiding students' social/emotional development. Specifically, school counselors can apply YPAR to address race-related stressors inside and outside of school stressors (Edirmanasinghe et al, 2022;Williams et al, 2020) and poverty-related stressors (Smith et al, 2018); to promote emotional processing, well-being, and connectedness (Levy et al, 2018;Smith et al, 2010Smith et al, , 2012; and to decrease anxiety, stress, and/or depression symptoms (Levy & Travis, 2020). According to studies considering youth's college and career development (n = 4), school counselors can use YPAR to grow college-ready research skills and critical consciousness (Scott et al, 2015), career self-efficacy (Edirmanasinghe & Blaginin, 2019), and leadership skills (Ozer & Wright, 2012), and to explore issues of college access (Cook et al, 2019).…”

“Roses have thorns for a reason”: The promises and perils of critical youth participatory research with system‐impacted girls of Color

“…Our aims were to provide enough structure to build a collective identity as a research team and foster engagement, provide scaffolding and content knowledge to foster the ability to engage in secondary analysis on ROSES data, while also providing adequate flexibility to foster youth agency around democratically chosen goals and ideas. Informed by recommendations from other critical YPAR projects (Cahill, 2006; L. Smith et al, 2018), we drafted semistructured weekly agendas aimed at facilitating and generating initial conversations to codevelop RVSP goals, and share first‐ and secondhand knowledge of what it means to be girls/women of Color at the nexus of interlocking, oppressive structures as well as our collective motivations for joining RVSP. Each week's agenda was intended to respond to and build on the prior week, reflecting an iterative and cogenerative group process beginning with check‐ins (highs and lows, reading of each researcher's personal reflections/journals), followed by emergent group activities, and wrap‐up.…”

Bringing psychologists to the fight against deep poverty.

“…Repeated economic setbacks often strengthen perseverance, and political mobilization against class-based injustice can cultivate optimism that the future holds better outcomes. Research that centers the experience of those in poverty as a window to understanding their lives has highlighted some of these positive qualities (Baker Collins, 2005;Cohen & Wagner, 1992;Smith, Baranowski, Abdel-Salam, & McGinley, 2018). Yet many of the insights about the assets of those in deep poverty come from fields outside of psychology (Desmond, 2016;Edin & Shafer, 2015).…”