Engaging Youth in Critical Arts Pedagogies and Creative Research for Social Justice

Opportunities and Challenges of Arts-based Work and Research with Young People

Kristen P. Goessling, Dana E. Wright, Amanda C. Wager, Marit Dewhurst, Kristen P. Goessling, Dana E. Wright, Amanda C. Wager, Marit Dewhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367569532
• eBook ISBN: 9781000339451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Art

Originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, this volume explores how researchers, educators, artists, and scholars can collaborate with, and engage young people in art, creative practice, and research to work towards social justice and political engagement.

By critically interrogating the dominant discourses, cultural, and structural obstacles that we all face today, this volume explores the potential of critical arts pedagogies and community-based research projects to empower young people as agents of social change. Chapters offer nuanced analyses of the limits of arts-based social justice collaborations, and grapple with key ethical, practical, and methodological issues that can arise in creative approaches to youth participatory action research. Theoretical contributions are enhanced by Notes from the Field, which highlight prime examples of arts-based youth work occurring across North America. As a whole, the volume powerfully advocates for collaborative creative practices that facilitate young people to build power, hope, agency, and skills through creative social engagement.

This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, postgraduate students, and scholar-practitioners involved in community- and arts-based research and education, as well as those working with marginalized youth to improve their opportunities and access to a quality education and to deepen their political participation and engagement in intergenerational partnerships aiming to increase the conditions for social justice.

Art is a rigorous medium for analyzing, producing, and sharing knowledge

1 Countering Dominant Discourses about Youth

Critical Arts Approaches to Analyze Ideological and Institutional Oppressions

Dana E. Wright

Introduction

Research and practices aiming to support youth participation as producers of knowledge and change agents both within schools and within community-based educational spaces are shaped by the embedded assumptions of popular and academic systems of reasoning about youth. Current conceptualizations of youth impact the ways in which youth are understood and the policy solutions to address the challenges young people face. Examining the ways in which dominant constructions of youth contain fundamental problematic assumptions regarding youth deficiencies, this chapter argues that current conceptualizations of youth are limiting, inaccurate, and stigmatizing and have marginalized young people in terms of their knowledge production, systemic analysis, and transformative agency. This chapter explores the ways in which dominant notions of youth have marginalized young people’s knowledge production, systemic analysis, and “transformative agency” (Bajaj, 2018) within arts-based community change practices. Bajaj defines transformative agency as: (1) sustained across contexts over time; (2) relational and enacted in collaboration with others; (3) centering specific contexts of cultures, people, and histories; and (4) as strategic and intentional in the analysis of power, enduring consequences, and optimal forms of action.

This chapter reviews and applies concepts from critical youth studies (CYS) scholarship and a framework for social justice arts education to a research vignette of a participatory action research (PAR) project with youth that incorporates social justice art-making practices to present an example of a new way to counter dominant ways of thinking about youth. An analysis of the project reveals that the use of a critical arts pedagogy shows promise in supporting young people in producing knowledge by applying their systemic analysis and transformative agency through creating activist art. This chapter proposes a framework for researchers, scholars, and practitioners to examine curriculum and pedagogy that support youth knowledge production, systemic critique, and transformative agency. The following analytic questions guided the review of the literature and analysis of a research vignette:

1. In what ways might youth discourses that classify youth as categorically distinct from adults construct and marginalize young people’s knowledge production, systemic analysis, and transformative agency?
2. How can educators support approaches to advance young people’s learning in ways that blur the distinctions between adult and youth roles, disrupt asymmetrical power relations, and engage youth expertise and analysis to design research, shape curriculum design, produce knowledge and partner with adults on community action plans?
3. How can researchers, theorists, and educators support curriculum and pedagogical strategies to promote young people’s knowledge production, systemic analysis, and transformative agency to address and transform structural injustices?

This chapter begins with a review of the dominant discourses of youth, which often operate from a deficit orientation that assumes youth inadequacies and deficiencies. These pathologizing constructions of youth are limiting and inaccurate. In exploring these questions, this chapter highlights the ways in which deficit views of youth can limit young people’s transformative learning. A social justice arts-based PAR approach can offer a viable counter-approach to these limited views through transformative learning that supports young people’s knowledge production, systemic analysis, and transformative agency. This chapter distills and applies principles of CYS, PAR, and social justice arts frameworks to empirical research to illustrate the potential for these analytical frameworks in practice.

Critical Youth Studies (CYS)

Examining Pathologizing Youth Discourses

CYS scholars study youth discourses to understand the ways in which these systems of reasoning that operate across multiple sites influence how societies construct and frame youth as a social category. The field of CYS is largely composed of theory and research from sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies that focus on interpreting the sociopolitical and historical contexts that shape the concept of youth as a distinct social category. A key concept of CYS is that multiple conceptualizations of youth within both popular and professional arenas—youth discourses—frame how society views young people. Discourses are systems of reasoning that depend on patterns of repetitious ideas, language, moral frameworks, and narratives (Lesko, 2012). Underpinning complex social relations, popular and academic youth discourses can generate, legitimate, reproduce, and institutionalize certain arguments, concepts, institutional practices, and social structures while preventing and silencing others (Griffin 1993; Wr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Education for Liberation Timeline: By Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide
• Introduction: A Playlist for a Praxis of Possibilities: Reflecting on Creative and Critical Research with Young People
• Intergenerational Organizing for Movement Building in the Eastside of Los Angeles
• Part 1: Art is a rigorous medium for analyzing, producing, and sharing knowledge
• Part 2: Authentic and reciprocal relationships matter
• Part 3: Change can occur on multiple levels, oftentimes simultaneously
• Part 4: It is all about praxis and the process
• Index