According to the United States Department of State, 85,000 refugees were admitted to the U.S. in 2016, and 37,710 (44.4 percent) of those admitted were under the age of 18 (Department of Homeland Security, 2017). Resettled adolescent refugees face the challenges of adolescence while also navigating the loss of homeland, cultures, languages, and families. Research suggests that refugee youth desire the same ability to develop themselves and participate in school and community contexts as other youth, but they face consistent marginalization in their schools and communities (Hastings, 2012). To support marginalized groups, scholars and activists have promoted CC as a social-justice oriented construct that increases equity and access to resources through two main components: critical reflection and critical action (Diemer et al., 2017; Watts & Hipolito-Delgado, 2015). Youth Participatory Action Research (yPAR) offers a structured, empirically-supported model for engaging youth in social change (Ozer, 2017). yPAR methods guide youth through three research phases; (1) Introduction to research and identification of a problem, (2) Data collection and analysis, and (3) Action. The current study explored how the CC components of critical reflection and critical action developed among refugee youth participating in a community-based yPAR project in which they researched the issue of bullying in schools. Four primary research questions explored how the yPAR framework supported the development of specific CC aspects of identity, power, critical skills, and inequity. Ethnographic field notes were collected at all yPAR sessions by three nonparticipant observers and retrospectively by the facilitator as a participant observer. Field notes were analyzed using a modified analytic induction approach. This method generates empirically-based assertions that elucidate the connections between CC components and the three phases of yPAR. These assertions explain how the components of CC were developed within and across the yPAR phases.
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