Rethinking Latin@ Student Engagement: Identification, Community Engagement, and Transformative Learning through Youth Participatory Action Research

My dissertation explores the ways in which youth participatory action research (YPAR) can provide students with the affective and the socio-educational experiences to become agents of personal, social, as well as educational change. My analysis is centred on a YPAR pilot study at Urban High School (pseudonym), a central Toronto secondary school with large numbers of students who self-identified as Latin@. This YPAR program, which was implemented as a Saturday senior social science credit course, involved 20 Latin@ students from diverse national, ethnic and academic backgrounds. Through a transnational Latin@ feminist lens and a methodological framework of YPAR, I examine how the students describe the processes of self-identification, community engagement, and transformative learning. While exploring the students' perspectives on their engagement and learning throughout the course, this dissertation problematizes conventional forms of schooling and argues for the necessity of shifting schooling towards more culturally relevant and student-centred pedagogies such as YPAR. The findings of this dissertation present YPAR as an alternative pedagogy that provides students with the opportunities to participate in collaborative learning environments through which they can develop knowledge as well as critically engage with issues that are relevant to them. In turn, this youth-centred pedagogy provides students with various forms of resources that create vast possibilities for transformative learning on individual and collective levels. Included in these possibilities is the building of relationships as well as critical dialogue on a variety of topics like power relations, gender, race, immigration, and schooling. The opportunities for such critical conversations cultivate a relevant context through which students can develop their research and inquiry skills and acquire a foundation through which to learn more about themselves and their social context. The dissertation concludes with an account of how this YPAR work has been expanded beyond the course and into further work with Latin@ and other groups of youth. This account points not only to the necessity of rethinking conventional forms of schooling, but also to the possibilities that YPAR yields for empowering youth to shift how they see themselves and engage with the world around them.Ph.D