Art Unbound: Youth Participatory Action Research as Pedagogy

This study engaged youth in a high school continuation program for students pushed out of traditional schools, in a yearlong arts-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) course aimed at enhancing their understanding of themselves as humans with enormous potential. The course allowed them to see how they already have the capacity and knowledge to act as artists, researchers, and even teachers. A major outcome of this study was to allow youth in the course to be seen, by their peers, by staff, and by the larger public in ways that that will empower them to remain engaged in their own learning with unbound potential. In direct correlation with the cutting of arts programming, schools have continued to have a rising number of students that they are failing. These students when pushed out end up in communities with very little opportunity and what hope there is left to uncover often goes hidden. These are the young people that Henry Giroux labels, “America’s disposable youth,” who are on the edge of disappearing into government supported and society-accepted school-to prison / deportation / hospitalization / low-wage earner pipeline(s). While we spend time in education practice speaking to the agency development of students, this study has implications for asking teachers to be reflective on their own pathways. The instructional strategies in this study were created with students, and the effectiveness of them is directly beholden to the students that worked to refine them. This study provides evidence that quality curriculum should be in a constant state of praxis; one must first implement their idea, take note of what happened, reflect on the impact, and adjust their curriculum to become more effective. This study discusses the intersection of institutional power vs individual oppression and asks the question, often never answered in poststructuralist theory, “So what?” It is not enough to name our oppression-analyses; we must also offer temporary relief from those patterns in hopes of generating new wealth in the shifting resistance. When we perform our research in the world, alongside diverse humans, we are allowed to bask in the opportunity to imagine things from another perspective, ask questions in a voice that is not ours, seek lines of inquiry that we cannot imagine, and we simultaneously, know and exceed our teachers. It is only through such engagements that insight truly emerges