Six Summers: Critical Research and Urban Youth
Morrell is currently analyzing data collected from six consecutive summer seminars where urban youth from Greater Los Angeles apprenticed as critical researchers of the conditions in urban schools and communities. Working in small research teams, these teens developed community-based critical research projects, wrote research papers, and delivered presentations to audiences of university faculty, community activists, and elected officials.
The Summer Seminar 1999-2004
Beginning in 1999, several colleagues at IDEA, including Morrell and Rogers, began convening a summer seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles. The seminar brought together students, teachers, and parents from urban schools and communities to design and carry out critical research projects on issues of immediate concern to these schools and communities. The students worked in groups of four or five on research teams led by teachers in the local schools. Throughout the five weeks of the seminar the students read seminal works in the sociology of education and critical methods of educational research; they developed research questions, read relevant literature, collected data, analyzed data and created research reports; and they presented these reports to university faculty, policymakers, and, on occasion to regional and national conferences of educational researchers and practitioners. Students also wrote individual papers where they contemplated the practical applications of their research to the issues in their own schools and communities.
There were multiple goals of the seminar, but two emerge as primary. We desired to use the seminar space to help students acquire the language and tools they need to function within the academy, what we have called academic literacy (Morrell, 2004). Customarily, the student populations that we worked with had not been well represented within colleges and universities throughout the state. We wanted to demonstrate to the schools and universities that dismissed these students that the students were indeed capable of college-level work. At the same time, we wanted to use the context of critical, community-based research to help the students gain the literacy tools they would need in order to be successful at these universities.
A second goal of the seminar relates to the research itself. We held the sincere belief that teachers, students, and parents were the most legitimate collaborators for the kind of community-based praxis-oriented research that we ourselves were interested in. In other words, the research studies were not merely a context for literacy learning; the products themselves were important to the struggle for educational justice within the teacher education program, with the local districts, the greater metropolitan area and even statewide. The student-participants and their work would influence policy and practice across all of these settings.
The seminar has met at UCLA for six summers in the Graduate School of Education and the Law School. The thirty or so student participants attended all day sessions for five weeks to earn a semester credit for a university course. As a part of the seminar, students are exposed to critical theory, cultural studies, educational sociology, legal history, social theory, and critical qualitative research methodology as they design and conduct research related to issues of equity and access in urban schools and communities. In this way, the seminar sought to address these issues of access both in terms of course content and desired outcomes for its students.
In the summer of 1999 the seminar focused on Language, Youth Culture, and Transformational Resistance in Urban Schools. The four research groups investigated: the potential of hip-hop music and culture to transform high school literacy curricula; the different manifestations of student resistance in urban schools; the impact of teachers' attitudes towards students' home languages on student achievement; and, differences between home and school attitudes of well-educated citizens in the African-American and Latino communities.
In the summer of 2000 the seminar focused on Youth Access and the Democratic National Convention (2000). As the Democratic National Convention was located in Los Angeles, the students had the opportunity to participate in the event as researchers and as interested community citizens. Students attended formal meetings and organized protests and met with elected officials and activists. The seminar probed the Democratic National Convention to explore provocative political, social, and educational issues around which students formulated research questions, collected and analyze data, and presented their findings to a panel of university faculty and community activists. In the context of the DNC, research teams investigated youth access across five domains; youth access to the media, youth access to a livable wage, youth access to community learning resources, youth access to learning resources in schools, and youth access to civic engagement.
In the summer of 2001, the seminar focused on an Educational Bill of Rights. The seminar theme was chosen in response to recent polls showing education remains the number one priority for most Californians. Regardless of political affiliation and belief, most citizens recognized the importance of a quality education to social, economic and political empowerment. That being said, most citizens, particularly those affiliated with the urban poor, realized that not all children in California have fair and equal access to a quality education. The research staff at IDEA understood that access is often determined by one's race, class and geography. Unfortunately, students whose families have the least financial resources, often receive the least educational resources. To examine and challenge these inequities, members of UCLA's Institute for Democracy Education and Access (IDEA), along with faculty in UCLA's Law School, legal advocates and community leaders, convened to articulate an Educational Bill of Rights that outlines the basic entitlements of all students in California. The students selected for this seminar, along with university faculty and community leaders, engaged in research that examined these rights in the context of urban schools across Los Angeles. The seminar sought to answer the following questions:
- What does every student in California deserve?
- What inequalities arise in the experiences of California's students?
- Why do these inequalities arise? (What is our explanation for the inequality?)
- What can youth do? How can they use research to play a part in legal advocacy?
The 2002 Summer Seminar focused on Equity and Access in California's Public Schools (2002), The central question of the seminar dealt with how students (and parents) could contribute information about school conditions to the state-mandated School Accountability Report Cards (SARCs)?1 This question embodies three sub-questions: a) What are the conditions of learning in urban schools across Los Angeles? b) How can students access and contribute information about these conditions? c) How can students, working in conjunction with parents and community advocates, pressure their schools and districts to include student-generated data in the official SARCs? The seminar divided students into four student research teams, each focused on one core condition of schooling-quality teachers, a rigorous curriculum, adequate learning materials, and a positive physical and social school environment.. Under the guidance of teachers, the research teams conducted field research in several Los Angeles area schools. The students explored various research and pedagogic tools (GIS mapping, audio tape recording, video and still digital photography, and theatre of the oppressed) for gathering and representing this data. The research teams were asked to report both results and methods so their example might guide other students and teachers. Throughout the five week seminar, the students also interviewed and met with educational researchers, community organizers, parent advocates, school administrators, civil rights attorneys, and elected officials to investigate how student research might become a standard part of the SARC process. On the final day of the seminar, the research teams presented their findings, methods, and analysis of the politics of implementation to a public audience of UCLA faculty, civil rights attorneys, educators, community advocates, and parents.
In the summer of 2003 the seminar focused on Oral Histories of the Educational Experiences in Post-Brown Los Angeles from 1954-2003. Young people who attend substandard schools for many years generally understand that they have been given a raw deal. They know that teachers are supposed to be well prepared and care for their students. They know that water fountains should work and bathrooms should be open and safe. They know that they should receive their textbooks when the semester begins. And they know that none of these conditions exists at their schools. Yet, because these students have not been educated about how these conditions have come into being, they don't have a language to explain why their schools are the way they are and how they might be different. Young people need a sense of history to understand that the present is not inevitable and the future is open to creation. Young people forge their deepest understandings through practice. When students make public history-conducting interviews, examining historical records, analyzing census data-they see what it means to construct an historical narrative. It lets them look at how the lived experience of everyday people is shaped by and in turn shapes structural conditions in the economy and legal system. As young people place themselves and their families in this historical narrative, they forge a deeper understanding of who they are and the society they live within. And when this history calls on them to study people like themselves who have joined the struggle for education on equal terms, they begin to imagine an identity as historical agents. By writing public history, young people come to see themselves as authors of the future. Each research team focused on one of the post-Brown decades in Los Angeles.
In the summer of 2004, the seminar focused on Urban Youth, Political Participation, and Educational Reform. Students explored: a) What it means for urban youth to participate powerfully in civic life; b) How urban youth can learn to participate in such ways; and c) What civic lessons young people now learn in and outside of urban schools. The students, who were placed into small research teams, talked with youth, educators, community leaders, and elected officials about: a) Issues facing young people in the local community; b) How young people should participate in civic life and what skills are needed for such participation. Each team conducted research at a high school site and a community center in a local neighborhood. The teams also developed research tools for examining civic education in a school. These tools included: survey instruments, interview and focus group questions (or protocols), and rubrics for examining books and other curricula.
In each seminar students produced individual texts and group texts. These texts ranged from standard written documents to iMovies and PowerPoint presentations. Individually, students produced 1500-2000 word essays dealing with their journeys to becoming critical researchers and the implications of their seminar work for engagement in their schools and communities. Student research teams produced PowerPoint presentations, research reports, and a public presentation which showcased the tools that they developed along with their research findings. Further, the students produced iMovie documentaries and materials for an electronic journal targeted toward urban teachers and parents. Student participants also presented their research conducted from the seminar to university faculty, local and state politicians, teachers, community members, and parents. Additionally, this research has been presented at regional and national conferences such as the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Sociology of Education Association. Finally, this work has been featured by local and national media, including CNN. |