Youth have political agency – sociopolitical learning spills over to activism - empirics

The argument for engaging young people as partners in public work, rather than objects of policy, is rooted in a set of normative values. Youth should not be treated as “citizens of the future”; they are citizens now who experience, interpret, and sometimes resist the policies that organize their everyday lives.11 They deserve to be heard about the institutions and policies that influence their lives, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.12 These values shaped my approach to this research. I acknowledge having an agenda in the sense that I want to highlight the conditions under which youth develop and exercise their collective political agency. I draw on the view of Paolo Freire and others in the community organizing tradition that people who experience the sharp edges of systemic failures ought to be leaders in collective efforts to understand and dismantle them. As a white male from an upper middle-class background, I acknowledge my outsider status in this struggle and engage in ongoing reflection about how my racial privilege shapes my approach to this work. I aspire to provide insight that comes from careful empirical analysis and solidarity with young people’s claims to voice and dignity. The empirical claims in this book draw on evidence from ten years of research in settings— both in and out of school— where youth of color interpreted and took action to solve complex problems ranging from inadequate schools to media bias to barriers to college. The book presents findings from three research studies carried out between 2003 and 2012.13 The first study, an ethnography of youth activism, focused on groups in the San Francisco Bay Area where high school youth worked with young adults to develop campaigns to address issues relevant to youths’ everyday experiences. One group was motivated by Oakland’s dropout rate and wanted to expand opportunities for student voice and leadership in the schools. Another organized a campaign— Don’t Believe the Hype— which called for West Oakland’s youth to be portrayed with dignity and accuracy by local media. The third organized a conference to educate young people about how the upcoming Iraq war (this was in 2003) would affect their Southeast San Francisco neighborhood. The second study, called Tracing Transitions, was a participatory action research project carried out with students whose high school had been shut down. Our goal was to document student perspectives about the closure and find out how displaced students fared in transitions to new schools. Because this was action research, when the study was over youth researchers shared their findings and recommendations with national and local policy makers, including testifying at a federal congressional hearing on urban education. The third study differed from the first two by focusing on school classrooms as contexts for young people to engage in critique and collective agency. The project, called Critical Civic Inquiry, co-led with Shelley Zion and Carlos Hipolito-Delgado, worked with secondary school teachers to provide opportunities for their students to discuss, investigate, and take action to dismantle educational barriers such as unsafe school climates or inadequate facilities. We investigated sociopolitical learning among students and the conditions in schools that supported or frustrated action civics projects.