Doing YPAR Badly

Let me just start by saying, there are a lot of things I need to be writing right now. In fact, I have a whole blog post that sits about 10 lines about the visit that our social justice book club had from Dr. Fournillier. Dr. Fournillier is an amazing research methodologist at Georgia State University. Writing about her visit should be easy. Writing should be a lot easier these days - I've done enough of it lately, right? 

I just finished my comprehensive exams last Sunday. This was the hardest writing task I've ever undertaken in my life. Grammarly, bless its heart, told me that I wrote more than 98% of all people using the damned program. 70 pages, and 20,000 words, I responded to three questions that I co-wrote with my dissertation chair. I should probably unpack this whole process at some point, in fact, one of my goals is to write regularly this semester (and probably for the rest of my life at this point). I will try to unpack those exams soon - but not tonight. Tonight, I want to write about a topic I want to publish on this semester: doing YPAR badly.

I'm not going to bother unpacking YPAR here in this post. The nice thing about this being my blog is I don't have to. If you're really curious, you can look back at previous posts and check out where I've explained it. I have to explain it many times in my academic future, and I feel like I've explained it so much recently, this is not the post for that either. In short, I want to use this space tonight to talk about something that has stopped me from writing a great deal about YPAR before now. I am fearful. 

As a white male-presenting person, fear is not something I often face in academic spaces. I have more than the confidence of an average white person in all things I do, not because I think I am better than everyone else--this is the misconception--but because I honestly don't think about the long-term consequences enough to be afraid. Mostly, this comes from a sense of passion. Toss in a bit of defiance of authority and social norms, and you have a recipe for why I approach most new things like Blippi to a new play space.

Okay, please let this be the last time I ever reference that horror in my writing again, but I hope the metaphor serves its purpose. I have been attempting YPAR through a pilot study with my students since August. I started a book club to frame the study; we are, however, so much more than just a book club. We are attempting to pull issues out of books, research those issues, and take action (in simple terms). The reality is far more complex. This complexity doesn't come from some kind of never-before-seen miracle work, in fact, most days I'm not even sure what is working at all. I'm not sure about the long-term effects or if there is an effect. The complexity comes from the ambiguity of learning as you go and from being really bad at something that you know is really important so you can't quit, but you have to try to figure it out anyway. I am really bad at YPAR. 

Am I worse than the average person who read a little about something new and then tried it bad? Is my bad as bad as the worst person who ever tried to do YPAR bad? Just how bad am I? Well, just as I have no idea what my impact is, I also have no idea how bad I am either. I just don't know. Part of what I'm hoping to accomplish with these posts and later with an article about "being bad at YPAR" is to figure out what the hell we've done so far. Part of why I haven't really written about this yet is because it is frigging intimidating! Literally, my favorite academics, people who I think are cooler than most movie stars, have been writing about YPAR for more than a decade. Their sauce is incredible! They have magic that burns like fire on the page. Hell, it was so good that it inspired me to do YPAR in the first place because I saw how POWERFUL IT CAN BE! People like Ernest Morrell (2008), Antero Garcia and Nicole Mirra (2016), and Julio Cammarota (2017) blow my mind with their studies and research. The work their students do shakes society and advocates for real change in their communities. A big part of my comprehensive exams was just writing about how great they are. Yet now half of a school year into my project, I feel lost. When I feel lost, I like to write to try to find the path again.

Now the good news is that I know where I've been. I've been faithfully collecting data. I started off with student pre-interviews, and I've been having them record everything in their research notebooks. I've been having them write and respond there during meetings. I've been collecting observational notes in our meetings, and I've been reflecting some in the process of it all. I've learned some stuff. Mostly, I've learned what not to do. The article that I want to write and publish this semester will be called "Being Bad at YPAR" and speak to these points:

- Use a single shared text or just a couple shared texts. This year I had students read about 10 different books in groups of 3 to 6 people. If those people rotated out or never came back, book groups were not effective. Also, with so many groups it was hard to talk about single issues.

- Focus on a single issue (this might even be selected by adult researchers). I know this might sound counterproductive, but both Cammarota (2017) and Mirra and Garcia (2016) discussed the need for adults to guide the study. They both featured studies in their books where the institute or group had an issue they were focusing on from the start. This year, we had so many issues it was hard to focus. Also, it was not always clear how students connected to their issues.

- Guide students more with research from the beginning, make this central to the meetings so not only are the books discussed, but also an article or several excerpts for students to explore later. This year, I tried to do everything in phases. First, we were to read, then we were to research, then we would move to action. The problem was our research got delayed so here we are nearly a month into the second semester and we haven't truly begun researching our issues, let alone planning and doing our projects. If we were to research the entire year we'd have the ability to build practices, shared knowledge, and I could teach skills. This could continue throughout the other steps in the process.

- Read the entire year. We're a book club, yet we only read the first two months. Reading YAL throughout the entire study would be useful to give students multiple examples and perspectives through their books, which was actually a foundational idea for the study. 

- Write the entire year. If we are reading the entire year it will be a lot easier to write about our reading more frequently. This will lead to stronger writing practices which will in turn help develop greater data for the study.

It's great that I have had the opportunity to do this pilot study. It is FAR from over. I actually have no idea how successful this project will ultimately be or even what makes a project successful. I would like to say success is completing projects and giving student researchers the opportunity to actually DO their action; this could be a presentation to the administration at our school, creating a podcast, making and distributing zines (miniature magazines), or even just displaying art meant to disrupt spaces and raise awareness (I'm hoping that Dr. Goss can help with this). I might be discovering just how much of a worrier or fatalist I am when it comes to sitting halfway through a project with an uncertain ending. YPAR always has uncertain endings. However, it is this "wobble" that I want to highlight the hardest in my would-be article. Wobbling is so important that one of my aforementioned heroes wrote a whole book about it. Antero Garcia, in Pose, Wobble, and Flow (2015) describes how teachers need to get comfortable with wobbling after taking new poses. YPAR and all that comes along with this new pose is very much something worth wobbling over and for. Wobbling, to summarize Garica, is the way we stand with an uncertain body when we try a new stance. Wobbling is not a state of falling or a state of standing strong. Wobbling is somewhere in between.

Wobbling is not something most people would want to do in front of others. We do not want to publically wobble for many reasons. We've learned that when we work with students wobbling can be even scarier than normal. We are conditioned through many different institutions that teachers should always have a sense of strength and authority. Garcia has advocated for wobbling as a stronger version of strength than just standing strong. In order to wobble you first have to have the strength to try a new pose. You then have to hold that pose, even when it gets scary. For the same reason, it is bad to only show students perfect and polished examples of writing, would-be practitioners of YPAR need more than established heroes, we need to see the wobble too.

References

Cammarota, J. (2017). Youth participatory action research: A pedagogy of transformational resistance for critical youth studies. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS), 15(2), 188-213. 

Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R., & Morrell, E. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. Peter Lang. Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip087/2007051208.html

Garcia, A., & O'Donnell-Allen, C. (2015). Pose, wobble, flow: A culturally proactive approach to literacy instruction. Teachers College Press.  

Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2016). Doing youth participatory action research: transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. Routledge.