December 14, 2024

Participatory Action Research, Youth Voices, and Civic Engagement

Kevin Burke; Stuart Greene

In what follows, we explore the question of what happens when teachers and students become researchers and the focus of inquiry is student generated and specific to students’ day-to-day lives. We do this by discussing two projects in two separate after-school programs in which we worked with youth using multiple artistic affordances to affect community change. These two projects resulted from a community–university partnership that sought to connect youth to their neighborhoods, to foster inter generational communication, and to encourage youth to speak up and out about the ways their neighborhoods could be more responsive to their needs.

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