From voicing your opinion to politicised voice: a youth-led social justice class at an urban continuation high school

This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethnography and education 2010-09, Vol.5 (3), p.245-260
Main Author: Nygreen, Kysa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action Research
California
Children & youth
Continuation Students
Course Descriptions
Education
Ethnography
Figurative Language
High School Students
Instructional Effectiveness
liberatory pedagogy
Metaphor
Political Attitudes
Social Change
Social Justice
social justice education
Student Attitudes
student voice
Teaching Methods
Urban areas
Urban Youth
youth participatory action research (YPAR)
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Summary:This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame teachers, schoolwork and coercion in opposition to students, voice and liberation. The article examines how the youths distinguished ordinary coercive teaching from their own liberatory teaching, creating a coercive/liberatory binary that served as metaphor for a series of binaries shaping their approach to social justice education: teacher/student, adult/youth and schoolwork/voice. It concludes that although the social justice class accomplished many important aims, the reconstruction of and reliance on a coercive/liberatory binary within the project ultimately limited its effectiveness as a social justice education effort.
ISSN:1745-7823
1745-7831
DOI:10.1080/17457823.2010.511324