MULTIMODAL STORIES TO TELL: FOSTERING COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE THROUGH CRITICAL EDUCATOR, YOUTH, AND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS By Rachel Leah Oviatt A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2023 ABSTRACT While there has been much work in the fields of multimodal literacies, youth leadership and organizing, and critical education, much of this research has overlooked the importance of identity and geography as being inherently connected to these various literacies. Even less work connected all three literacies as fundamental to coalition and civically engaged movement. This has resulted in a gap in the literature that focuses on the cross-collaborative work that has come from community and school partnerships working in coalition to resist institutional oppression, which has historically always been connected to the arts. This dissertation aims to bring together the fields of study of multimodal literacies, youth leadership and organizing, and the critical consciousness-building of preservice teachers who deemed themselves as “community engaged educators”. The purpose of this dissertation is to highlight the already-present community cultural wealth of youth organizing spaces, and the possibilities that exist for pre-service teachers who seek to leverage their resources to support these spaces when they return to the classroom. The dissertation is a critical participatory ethnography that asked: 1) In what ways and for what purposes do youth engage with participatory literacies and multimodal composing? a. What specific literacies are forwarded during collaborative and coalitional inquiry and action? b. In what ways are youth learning, asserting, or possibly reclaiming their civic identity across their literacies practice? 2) How do pre-service English teachers, who were adult facilitators in the YPAR space, provide opportunities for elements of YPAR in their teaching placements? This dissertation’s conceptual framework, Coalitional Civic Resistance, highlights the literacy practices that are necessary and vital to building critical and coalitional engagements across community and school spaces, whether taken up by youth or by educators. The dissertation draws on over four years of data, collected across five locations, and traverses two intersecting studies that resulted in over two hundred pages of field notes, over one hundred research memos, a myriad collection of youth literacies artifacts, several interviews from both community partners and pre-service teachers, and a focus on three pre-service teachers’ lesson plans and teaching artifacts. I argue that focusing on three cycles of Youth Participatory Action Research projects and the resultant three case studies that focus on participatory literacies in classroom spaces provide key insight into what youth organizers engaged in arts-based cultural work and coalitional action can teach pre-service teachers about participatory literacies and community engagement. However, this study also revealed that pre-service teachers, regardless of their intentions to facilitate liberatory practices, are constrained by the contexts of their classroom spaces, their mentors, their schools, and their school districts. Furthermore, this study reveals that the need to continue to build partnerships and opportunities to cultivate community-engaged mentor teachers, curriculum, and district leaders is greater than ever. Copyright by RACHEL LEAH OVIATT 2023 To mia famiglia, chosen and blood. You have taught me the power of refusing, rejecting, and remembering story and storying as central to humanizing literacies with and alongside. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~Anaïs Nin I begin with a quote from one of my favorite authors, whose words have spoken truth to me since first imagining myself as a writer. In this quote, Nin speaks to the essence of feminist research. Seeing things as “we” are is beyond the scope of this document. Yet, across this text I emphasize the necessity of doing “the work” with and alongside. I use the words “with” and “alongside” to attempt to succinctly share what is at the heart of the organizing/teaching/research that I have engaged in since my earliest teen years, solidarity. This text is an attempt to document five years of time informed, shaped, and molded with and alongside not only those people that have informed my very being, but those who informed the humanity of the many folx I have worked with over my five years in Lansing, Michigan. To those women who have inspired and challenged me, thank you does not do justice to the deep, heartfelt gratitude, and humility that I am more present to than ever. First, to blood and chosen mia famiglia, do benedizioni. Nonna, Madre, Zias Nancy, Irene, and Paula--I am because you are. Thank you for lighting the way with the ferocity of a long line of women in our family who have held their own despite patriarchal and hegemonic pressures to submit to the politics of niceness. Nonna Nunziata, who informed all of their experiences, and refused to give up your culture, language, or customs to assimilate into your new country, thank you for passing on your spirited, mischievous nature. Madre, madrina, mom. Your commitment to transformation has had an indelible impact on me. For my little sister, Ally, you and I have been on this strange adventure together since you came into this world. Your passion and purpose are a wonder to behold. For my chosen sisters, Taylor, Nandi, Kathrya, Lyssa, April, Xoe, Faith, Sam, Molly, Jen, and Sabrina, thank you for being examples of the complexity of women’s joy, strength, and vi worth. Julie, Kelly, Laura Lee, Nikki, Rachael, and Jessie, you have all provided me with examples of the kind of woman I hope to someday become, still working to make you all proud. For ALL of my Lansing Local Ladies, but especially Jessica, Amber, and Marie, I don’t know that I would have made it through this journey without your friendship, grace, and unwavering support. Amanda, losing you rocked my heart and my spirit. Rest In Peace, sister, you are missed. Thank you, all, for being my mirror, my complement, and my measuring stick. To the men who have challenged me, molded me, and shaped me--your energy has not gone unnoticed. Daddy, you will always be my best and brightest example of humor, gentle masculinity, and loyalty. With each passing year, you are missed and remembered, always. Bill, thank you for challenging me to become a healthier, more honest, and more connected human being. Zio Robert, your fierce passion and wonder for life is abundant and unerring, thank you for teaching me to pursue my dreams. J, without you, this last year wouldn’t have been manageable. Teamwork makes the dream work. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the village that shaped, supported, and held it down for and with me these last five years. Django Paris, thank you for supporting my early understanding of what it meant to engage humanizing scholarship with and alongside communities of Color in Lansing. You invited me into university spaces to take up research and teaching in solidarity. I hope to continue to make you proud. Terry Flennaugh and Vaughn Watson, you have become an academic family in ways that I never knew I needed. Your unending patience, unwavering support, and sharing of knowledge have molded me into the scholar that I am, today. I will always seek to pay forward what you freely gave me. Estrella Torrez, you taught me what it meant to engage work that is community-driven, additive, and sustainable. Thank you, also, for teaching me to seek ways that I can be relational, relevant, respectful, and reciprocal in all of my vii teaching and scholarship. Tamara Butler, you opened my eyes to the academic pivot. Thank you for both modeling and mentoring me to do “the work” and seek to support all of those who will come behind me--but never in ways that reinforce hierarchies of power. Thank you to the numerous faculty at Michigan State University who have supported my growth. Alyssa Dunn, your grace and unending energy to support scholars and teachers is never acknowledged enough. Thank you for providing me with an example of what it means to grow into a critical white scholar. Trixie Smith, you were always there to lift me up from the sidelines. Thank you for sharing your energy, time, and scholarship across my years in the Writing Center. Peter DeCosta, thank you for supporting my first attempt at a published manuscript, which without your input and guidance most likely wouldn’t have seen light. Dorinda Carter Andrews, Annelise Halverson, Avner Seagull, and Sandra Crespo: you are all appreciated for the boundless energy and support that you provide for so many faculty and “baby faculty” at Michigan State. To the many scholars, across the university, who have supported my growth and learning: Tonya Bartell, Candace Epps-Robertson, Elizabeth Heilman, Kyle White, April Baker-Bell, Jen VanDerHeide, Emery Petchauer, Erik Skogsberg, Patricia Edwards, Angie Calabrese-Barton, Laura Tortorelli, and Amelia Gotwals. I couldn’t have gotten through my time at MSU without the consistent support of Mama Terry (Edwards) and Ms. Amy (Peebles), thank you for being my TE Moms. As a community-engaged scholar, I have found my Lansing Locals to be invaluable to my experience in Michigan. However, no graduate completes their degree in a silo. Thank you to my collaborators, colleagues, and to those who helped me grow into the healing and learning I needed to do over these last five years: Effat, Cierra, Marcos, Laura, Hannah, Lindsay, Sam, Lance, and Amber. To the cohort of 2015, you are all brilliant scholars whose work will continue viii to shape the field of education. Thank you for challenging me to know better and do better. Max Monroy-Miller, your passing left a deep impression on all of our hearts. Your commitment to a more justice-centered and radical future for youth, especially youth of Color, held us all to a higher and more critical standard. However, it was our shared affliction which made your passing particularly hard for me, but also forced me to go deeper and to connect. Your legacy lives on in all of us you touched. Rest In Honor. Graduate students are told, across the field of education, that our work in grad school cannot be participatory, longitudinal, community-engaged, or sustainable. Mine was all of these. That would never have happened without Raven sending me a text for a summer bridge program looking for a Composition and Literature teacher. Thank you for planting the seed! Michelle, Sandy, Ms. Glenda, Heather, and Nicole, you all hold deep commitments to Lansing area youth. Thank you for welcoming me into your circle. Lux, you challenged me like no other young person has and having done so kept the momentum of the roots that grew into so much more. You are growing into a beautiful, loving, and deeply committed woman. I am so grateful to have shared space with you. Robin, Eric, Emily, but especially Maggie, thank you for your partnership and seeing my heart for youth as a benefit to your organization. These last five years grew into something that touched the lives of so many youth, and I am deeply humbled that they shared learning, research, and organizing space with me. Yet, none of that would have been possible without the commitment of the many adult facilitators and partners who came through to support a program where they saw the potential for youth empowerment through youth-envisioned and led participatory action research. Thank you to all of the pre-service English teachers who spent time with us from the 2017-2020 programming years, but especially to Taylor and Brandon, who continued to come back due to your stance-taking in solidarity. I am now and will always be ix forever grateful. Additionally, Cass, Saturn, and Lauren, thank you for being my examples of what is possible in the field of education when teacher-scholars seek to become community- engaged, anti-racist, and participatory in their teaching and learning spaces. Audrey, you continue to inspire me with your vision of justice-driven and community-engaged art. To our many organizational collaborators from across the city, too many to name, thank you for welcoming us in and sharing your resources! Special shout-outs go out to Lansing Public Media, the Lansing State Journal, and Gateway Youth and Family Services. Though I leave Lansing in my rearview mirror, I do so knowing that there are so many good folks holding it down for all of Lansing’s communities. x TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK—BUILDING COMMUNITIES OF ENGAGEMENT ...............................................................................................................25 CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW ......................................................................................45 CHAPTER 4: MODES OF INQUIRY .........................................................................................68 CHAPTER 5: FOSTERING & BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE WITH YOUTH IN PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH ............95 CHAPTER 6: PRE-SERVICE ENGLISH TEACHERS TAKE-UP AND WORK THROUGH STANCETAKINGS OF COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE ............157 CHAPTER 7: HUMANIZING LITERACY RESEARCH, TEACHING & YPAR AS COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE ........................................................................213 REFERENCES ...........................................................................................................................235 APPENDIX A: YOUTH COMMUNITY JOURNAL PROMPTS .............................................245 APPENDIX B: QUESTIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLABORATORS ..............................246 APPENDIX C: QUESTIONS FOR YOUTH MENTOR/ADULT CO-RESEARCHERS .........247 APPENDIX D: QUESTIONS FOR YOUTH CO-RESEARCHERS .........................................248 APPENDIX E: ENGLISH TEACHER PARTICIPATORY MULTIMODAL INQUIRY PROJECT.........................................................................................................................249 APPENDIX F: VENUS’S COMMUNITY ASSET MAP SURVEY .........................................255 xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Prologue Across the field of education research much has been written about “social justice”. Over the last twenty years, teaching for social justice has been an area of research that many scholars have taken up across broad understandings in order to introduce this idea (Ayers, Hunt & Quinn, 1998; Banks, 2004; Sleeter, 2013). Yet, the question that has continued to pursue the phrase “social justice” has been, just what do we mean when we use this phrase? More recently, the fields of education research and teacher education have benefited greatly from scholars who have taken up topics such as abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019), culturally responsive and culturally historic education (Muhammad, 2020), and even examining beneficial and harmful practices of white instructors teaching across communities of Color (Emdin, 2016; Johnson, 2017; Martinez, 2017). In the field of literacies research, more work has continued to be provided by white literacy scholars hoping to reach the 80% white teaching demographic that currently makes up our teaching force across the U.S. Teacher-friendly books have hit the market with invitations for white teachers to join in anti-racist action in secondary literacy spaces (Borsheim-Black & Sariganades, 2019; Boyd, 2017). Yet, far less has been said about what possibilities are forwarded when inviting our majority white teachers, and youth and communities they serve, to engage in multimodal literacies and abolitionist teaching, or anti-racist teaching, or even “social justice” literacies. Over the last few years, I have found myself complicating “social justice” and centering practices that speak more specifically to how the Black and Brown youth and their families with whom I have worked across the last 15 years define what, for them, is justice. As a woman with a love for writing and composition, I am powerfully moved to working with youth in supporting 1 them in cultivating their own authentic literary practices, particularly in the context of furthering justice and equity. My foremost intention with the following study was to foreground youth’s literacy practices while working alongside and facilitating youth participatory action research (YPAR). According to the University of California Berkeley’s YPAR Hub (http://yparhub.berkeley.edu/): YPAR (Youth-led Participatory Action Research) is an innovative approach to positive youth and community development based in social justice principles in which young people are trained to conduct systematic research to improve their lives, their communities, and the institutions intended to serve them. Further, I have responded to youth and community requests across community-school- university spaces in this critical ethnographic study. My initial responsiveness was due to one of my former students asking a very simple question at a very contentious time, “What’s next?” (Adrianna, in communication, 2016). Adrianna posed this question as a way to hold me and her peers accountable for taking our action out of school boundaries and into the community. That summer of 2016, Adrianna’s peers and I shared a learning community where we engaged in a six week summer literature and composition course. In this course, I was asked to focus on memoir and personal narrative writing in order to support the rising high school seniors who would go on to write college essay letters that fall. The summer we lost Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, youth and I were about half-way through our reading of Coates’s Between the World and Me. I had just completed my first year of doctoral studies and was excited to engage with youth across a text that I felt was necessary to conversations that would lead to critically deep communication through essay writing and multimodal assemblages. That summer also shaped what was to become a line of inquiry and a partnership that is continuing in its fourth, final, and virtual YPAR engagement. My research has always been guided by my lived experiences. Critical feminist scholars reject notions of objectivity as even a 2 desire in our research (Pillow & May, 2007). Rather, it becomes far more necessary to understand our research as an act of justice with and alongside those with whom we do the work, whether in YPAR or as critical ethnographers. Thus, it was due to experiences like these that I spent over 15 years of teaching high school English and engaging in learning cultures across school and community spaces. Further, this commitment to communities and community literacies led to my deep curiosity of youth’s purpose for engagement of multimodal curating and composing in a YPAR project. Much has been written to define multimodal literacies (Cloonan, 2008; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Sanders & Albers, 2010). Across multimodal literacies scholarship, scholars have forwarded understanding regarding the process of multimodal curation and composition (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Jewitt, 2013; Serafini, 2014). Yet, far less research has taken up critical perspectives on the affordances of multimodal literacies to provide access to storying that centers historically marginalized youth voices (for one notable exception see Jocson, 2018). In the design of this study, the aim of seeking to understand the purpose for multimodal engagements, particularly among youth of Color in urban contexts, four years of ongoing collection led to a highlighting of three YPAR projects in which youth’s deep commitments to their own causes forwarded their participatory cultures enactment and action. More recent turns in literacies scholarship have attended to the possibility of participatory literacies to inform our understanding of multimodality (both digital and arts-based) literacies (Jocson, 2018; Mirra & Garcia, 2020). Returning to Adrianna’s question, “What’s next?” meant extending learning spaces past classroom walls as a commitment to situating learning inside of youth’s communities. Therefore, in the design of this study, I brought a fresh perspective to each “season” (Spring, youth co-researcher, in communication, 2018) seeking to always be relevant and only follow where youth would lead. 3 Every step of this project, from first being challenged by youth to respond to injustice to supporting pre-service English teachers in implementing community-engaged literacies pedagogy, has forwarded possibilities to further highlight the literacies of relationality and the practices of solidarity that drive our work and collective action. Thus, I responded to the invitation to engage in social justice through multimodal and participatory literacies as engaged and enacted with and alongside youth of Color and their white peers in the urban-characteristic context of a place I refer to as Littleton, across this study. Moreover, this response rooted in relevance and relationality was further taken up by two cohorts of preservice English teachers, that acted as mentors in the community space, who practiced a variety of multimodal and critical participatory literacies that centered justice and collective action as led by youth in the community center. Further findings come from the classroom spaces in which the second cohort of preservice teachers took up their own facilitation with youth of multimodal and participatory literacies that center youth’s understandings of social justice. I begin by situating this research at the intersections of biographical, epistemological, and axiological contexts. My commitments to possibilities for educational opportunity, and racial justice with youth in urban, multicultural, and multilingual spaces shape this study. In short, I situate this work as necessarily anti-racist in its taking up of theory, literacies, and pedagogy. When I began my teaching career in 2005, my understanding of my own complicit bias and my own implications in a system of racism became a moment of tension while serving communities on Atlanta’s near northwest side. The traumas incurred due to the multiple and intersecting layers of institutional racism leveled against the Latinx families with which I shared learning communities troubled my former missteps in essentializing all Latinx communities as somehow the same. At first, I had sought out the position at this particular school as a direct means to 4 working with and living in a Latinx community not unlike my old Augusta Boulevard neighborhood in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. In many ways, there was a comfort in returning to spaces that felt more like home. Ladson-Billings (2016) refers to essentialism as, “a belief that all people perceived to be in a single group think, act, and believe the same things in the same ways” (p.350). Yet, I was not aware of the essentializing that I was enacting when making broad comparisons between my childhood Puerto Rican friends to youth and families I served. The comparisons were surface-level and allowed me to not have to take a deeper critical look at myself. The majority Latinx ethnicity of the many families with which I lived alongside as a young girl growing up on Chicago’s west side were primarily Puerto Rican. In many ways, these families were not unlike my Nonna’s (grandmother) own home, in which I spent the majority of my younger days. We shared familial traditions, like gathering for Sunday dinner as an extended family--cousins screaming through the house as my Nonna and Zias (aunts) and my own mother prepared the Sunday afternoon feast. We did so after having attended the same neighborhood Catholic church, where services were conducted in Latin, Spanish, and English (at different hours of the day). We shared feast days and festivals, and we shared the privilege of documentation--a privilege that I would not come soon to understand. More than a decade later, I came to work on Atlanta’s near northwest side with many undocumented Latinx families. It was there that I began to understand the heterogeneity of the Latinx community. For example, the “routine traffic stops” that were set up as a documentation trap well before the broad reach of ICE was being publicized across national media outlets resulted in our welcoming youth being dropped off to school riding in the back of police cars, sobbing. At the time, I was working as a paraprofessional in a school that supported my need to 5 be in classwork to one day become a classroom teacher. Yet, neither the classroom spaces I supported nor the university classroom spaces I inhabited prepared me in how to critically analyze or appropriately respond while working in schools with majority youth of Color. I lacked language for the various forms of institutional oppression that I had witnessed growing up, that had pushed my family out of Chicago, experiences that were nuanced in very different ways in the predominantly Black working-poor neighborhood we moved to and where my mom and her husband still live. Not only did I lack language, but I lacked the emotional literacy skills necessary to process what I was witnessing. For someone who grew up alongside and went into teaching to stand in solidarity with (QT)IBPOC, I was still missing necessary anti-racist healing (Love, 2019). Yet, I continued to push forward, always with the intention to bring to tomorrow what I lacked the day before. In part, I did so due to the fact that I had always hated school. Though it would take more critical reading of the history of U.S. education and some necessary healing work for me to come to appreciate learning in school spaces, I had always positioned myself as a voracious reader and a life-long learner. Attending school, I found myself uninterested in the basal textbooks, the dry math curriculum void of what felt like any real practicality, and only the most white-washed versions of very few Black historical figures. Yet, it was at kitchen tables of neighborhood friends where I sat thirsty for orange drink, hip hop music, and Black histories with which we were all denied in schools. I learned to hate school, but also became clear that I loved stories--the telling, listening, and sharing of stories. With no expectation of college, for no one in my family had pursued a college degree nor did we have the money to do so, it became clear that I would need to seek other spaces for sharing of stories. This love of literacies--stories shared in music, art, literature--was driven by a fierce devotion to the people who I had been raised alongside, and 6 a radical notion that there could be a different world imagined. I found myself, a non-traditional student, making my way to what was then a commuter college in a nearby Atlanta suburb. I sought space for the coming together of both justice and literacies. In 2013, I became a mentor and began supporting student teachers in my classroom, and in doing so came to find out how much more work needed to be done. No longer was it enough to center anti-bias teaching in my own lessons, I felt compelled to further my service by obtaining an advanced degree in literacy teacher education. I sought opportunities to learn and to heal with the National Writing Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Library of Congress. Less and less essentialism occurred over my years of teaching and experiences supporting youth of Color who held identities that were as nuanced by race as they were by place. For example, my experiences teaching Black youth displaced after Hurricane Katrina on Atlanta’s southside, or supporting the learning and language needs of Burmese refugee youth cast out of their home country due to religious persecution, continued to support my seeking outside guidance for professional development. Again, I knew that I wasn’t getting from my schools the language, knowledge, and tools I needed to provide better support for youth. These sought-out opportunities expanded the ways in which I was in dialogue, and more importantly they expanded my relationships. Social Justice: Early Lessons in Youth Activist Literacies Walking down the cold city street amidst a buzzing crowd of young people who may not have known each other prior to that afternoon, I found myself chanting in chorus. Our voices raised in unison as we made our way towards the capitol on that blustery fall day, we found ourselves only a small part of a larger crowd that had gathered. From somewhere to my right I was handed a small poster board to hold high in the air. My young adolescent hands raised that 7 sign and my voice with all of our collective might that day, “Hey hey, ho ho, this president has got to go!”. An era of growing political unrest, the early 1990s were a changing tide in sociopolitical development for many young people due to: the economic fallout of the 1970s and the 1980s; the continued assault on Black young men at the hands of police force across the U.S.; a coming together of the third wave of feminism which was young, punk, queer, and unfortunately still majority white; and, a youth media and political movement fueled by the mainstream popularity of MTV and some of its more diverse programming. Additionally, the years leading up to the early 1990s had left many people of Color and working class white folks displaced, and unemployed or underemployed (Semuels, 2018). Increasingly, the U.S. sought foreign territories to exploit for resources, and the growing turbulence in the Middle East became an area of deep concern for many young people who saw the very real possibility of a looming draft. This marked a time, for myself, that I started to become aware of my values and my own social justice orientation. My first march, from my inner city middle school to the state capitol, just a few miles away, marked the beginning of my involvement in movements bigger than myself and an early orientation to activism. This early development of a social consciousness was taken up, again, as many of my LGBTQIA+ friends found themselves displaced and homeless upon coming out to their families. At 16, I organized my first event, an all-ages punk night at a local club benefiting the homeless shelter that were taking in queer youth who found themselves displaced. Yet, my time as an organizer and social activist would take a back seat for many years as I worked to survive my disease of addiction, my own bouts with homelessness, and many personal losses—including my 8 father. It would take many years for me to put back together the pieces that had originally sustained that spirit of change-making within me. I had given up on school due to lack of funding, and absence of family precedence in higher education, and a general sense of alterity in educational spaces for reasons that I could not verbalize at the time. Yet, those early activist literacies reemerged in my early twenties and would sustain me through many bumps and turns in the road, such as financial instability, a toxic marriage, and the loss of our daughter late in my pregnancy, as I made my way towards a degree in English Education. It is with this expanded understanding of achievement that my social justice positionality was forwarded as I moved closer to finishing my master’s degree and continued to pursue further opportunities to connect with organizations outside of my school district, such as a summer institute with the National Endowment for the Humanities, teacher training with the Library of Congress, and an urban sites network conference with the National Writing Project. Moreover, I found myself drawn back into opportunities to be of service outside of my teaching career, as I took up service with the Peace Learning Center in Indianapolis. The subsequent forwarding of my career and education through to an advanced doctoral degree pushes against any dominant understanding of high achievement, as I continued to navigate the challenges that life held for me from finally getting sober to finding myself unimpressed with a new to me middle-class income and the trappings of consumption and consumerism that came with the new income bracket. Malagon and Alavarez (2010) call for an expanded definition of high achieving “to include the personal qualities of students as they confront challenges and barriers along their educational trajectory” (p.148). My own experience of what qualifies as both success and purpose are supported by this statement. I decided to leave that middle-class income aside in order to pursue opportunities to be of further service to the communities that I was raised 9 alongside, by seeking out opportunities to inform public education from the ground up--in the pursuit of a PhD in Teacher Education. Yet, leaving the beloved community with which I was in service was no easy task, and I found myself quickly needing to connect back to spaces with youth in communities grappling with systemic issues similar to those I had grown up with myself. Ledesma and Solorzano (2013) address the need for teachers with a social justice lens to enter and be sustained in continuing work in urban classrooms. Specifically, the authors point to three salient issues that must be addressed by these teachers: 1) understanding the persistent role of race and racism in education and more broadly in society; 2) acknowledging and confirming the pervasive nature of racial microaggressions; and 3) offering and enacting support of students and teachers of Color’s resistance to microaggressions. These three points made by the authors make clear that I had more work to do, and I sought out spaces in classrooms and communities across Michigan State University’s campus and Lansing in order to continue the work. My experiences both growing up and teaching in “majority-minority” (Pew Research Center, 2014) schools and neighborhoods is reflected by the context of this study. Yet, racial and ethnic diversity among voters has grown steadily over the last thirty years (Pew Research Center, 2018). This demographic shift is markedly situated in public schools where less fiscal resources leads to a lack of highly qualified teachers, outdated curricula, and less access to technology. The school system where this inquiry is situated is in a district with 75% reported “minority” (Michigan Department of Education, 2018) students. The lack of digital resources in high- poverty schools is well documented (Herold, 2017). Notable to this line of inquiry is the lack of access to civic involvement in multimodal spaces (Pew Research Center, 2013). Moreover, with a lack of access to the media stream of civic education happening in online spaces, youth and families with a lack of access to technology are left behind in this increasing social-civic 10 literacies age. If a lack of access to technology is consistently an issue, then a question of how and in what ways civic conversations are happening is raised. With civic education being cut from many schools (Litvinov, 2017), a needed turn toward grassroots civic organizing must continue to be of importance Further, this youth and community engagement holds possibilities for both furthered civic involvement and multimodal literacy development through community and university partnerships. Youth Organizing Eight of us are crammed around the little table, working in small groups. Under the sharp glare of fluorescent lighting we are diligently toiling together to craft our proposal for a conference and a contest. I am working with Nyla, her tight black curls tucked up under her hoodie, her voice soft, she turns to me, “Wait, they have rules about what we can put into our movie?” She and I are working on an application for a short film contest for the video that the group has been working to design and produce. My brow crinkled, I turn to her, “Yeah. It’s their contest they get to make the rules. Why do you ask?” She scowls, “Uh-uh,” she declares, “I don’t like it.” I attempt to hide the humor in my eyes and fix my face, but this is the most resistant I have seen her and I suspect I know what she doesn’t like, because it is the same problem I have with the contest. She continues, “This is our group,” she motions to the other youth and adult facilitators around the room, “y’all don’t even tell us what to do. We’re not putting their stuff into our movie.” In contextualizing this study of exploring youth’s engagement and purpose for multimodal composing in a youth participatory action research project, I turn to Littleton Youth Voices1 (LYV) which began in 2016 as a collective of youth and community activists who 1 Pseudonyms used for organizations, locations, and participants across this work 11 sought to stand with local organizations committed to supporting and lifting up our underrepresented populations. LYV is a collective of artists, makers, and tinkers who seek to compose and collect civic stories through spoken word, oral histories, audio narratives, photography, digital arts, visual arts, and short film. Members of LYV understand that there is a long history of organizations and community partners supporting local underserved communities. Our (the collective of adult facilitators and myself) commitment is to work with youth and community activists to provide space and host events that can offer further opportunities for connections within the greater Littleton area. Our mission is developing the combination of knowledge, skills, and motivation with young people in Littleton who hold a commitment to coalitional civic resistance. LYV’s first event, “Unhushed Lips: An Intersectional Feminist Healing Circle for Sharing Our Stories of Assault, Survival, and Thriving” sought to collect and curate community stories of healing from survivors of assault, friends, and service providers. On July 30, 2017 we partnered with Collision99 FM, Archway Youth Services, Urban Outreach, Child and Family Charities, LADY (Lasting Affect with Diverse Youth), the nearby university’s Sexual Assault Program, and The Illumination Incorporation to provide a responsible healing space where we sought to eradicate stigma, further love, and connect communities of healing through entertainment and art. Our small group collected oral histories from those in attendance and through our community partnership with Collision 99FM. We were supported in creating a podcast which was featured on the August 26, 2017 episode of The CrossCurrent, which focused completely on an earlier formation of LYV (previously named Breaking SIlence). The group consisted of myself, undergraduate preservice English teachers, the former station manager from Collision99FM, our community partner Marnie (the director of adolescent 12 services and offerings in Littleton’s Parks and Recreation network), and young people (the youth change depending on the season and attendance). Youth are the visionaries who chose our research topics, the manner in which we collected our stories, and the ways in which we shared and approached reporting out the work. In every season that the work continues at the nearby community center under Marnie’s supervision, youth learn to move past collecting data from the internet and professional publications based upon their overarching questions, to writing interview protocols, learning how to work with the audio collecting equipment, digital cameras, City Public Media Center’s studio backpack (which consists of professional recording cameras, as well as sound and editing equipment), creating podcasts, short documentaries, and public presentations that have been shared with community organizations, neighborhood families, and the city’s largest school district’s board of directors. We all learn collectively what it means to be led by youth’s vision for composing and creating. In these spaces we tend to think beyond the classroom, to envision youth participation and leadership in community engagement and activism, and to do so through creative understandings of composing through writing, art, storytelling, and researching with youth about issues that matter to them. Further, preservice English teachers who have worked as facilitators in these spaces have gone on to position themselves as community-engaged teachers who provide numerous opportunities for participatory literacies and youth activism in their classroom spaces in various districts across the state. Statement of Desire Over the last twenty years, there has been a furthered understanding and emphasis placed on broader definitions of literacy. Scholars and community literacy advocates have turned the lens of literacy to understanding the authentic practices and lived realities of youth and communities, 13 especially communities of Color. Advancements in multiliteracies (Baker-Bell, et al, 2017; Patterson, Howard, & Kinloch, 2016), redefining what literacy is and where it exists (Mahiri, 2004; Martinez, 2017; Canagarajah, 2013), and for what purposes literacies are taken up (Sealey- Ruiz & Greene, 2011) have all changed the landscape of literacy research and education. Moreover, coming to understand youth’s existing literacy practices and what they can teach educators and researchers has been an area of focus that has continued to gain momentum (Talib, 2018; Vasudevan, 2010). As we have come to understand youth literacy practices, specifically for the purposes of informing their larger worlds, we have done far less work in situating the affordances of making space for teachers’ facilitation of participatory literacies (Mirra & Garcia, 2020). In their classroom spaces, preservice teachers across a year-long student teaching engagement provided opportunities for youth to engage in topics that they had previously expressed a desire in which to research and compose. These composing engagements took up multimodal literacies in multiple artistic forms that expanded the affordances of digital-only making in multimodal compositions. A growing subset of literacy research has focused on multimodal composing (Cornell & Kessi, 2016; Rios, 2017). Yet, far less has focused on the purposes of this multimodal composing (Kinloch, 2010; Watson, 2016; Winn, 2011). This research seeks to bridge the divide between youth’s understanding of community engagement and multimodal composing for the purpose of solidarity. This study does so by examining those multimodal literacy practices taken up in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project that is community engaged and enacted by the community for the community. YPAR has been found to further youth agency and action while further developing their literacy practices (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Mirra, Morrell & Filipiak, 2018). Understanding multimodal composing for solidarity through the lens of YPAR 14 supports further knowledge about what it means for youth and community to take up research, action, and literacies that they desire. Coming to know a broadened definition of literacy/ies has given rise to inquiries regarding youth’s living literacy practices and the purpose behind these practices. The attention paid to these lived realities and authentic literacies has more recently turned to inquiries about youth’s civic involvement (Burke & Greene, 2015; DeJaynes, 2015; Greene, Burke & McKenna, 2013; Hobbs, Donnelly, Friesem & Moen, 2013). Complicating notions of who is included in civic movements, further work has been developed that seeks to know in what ways youth are moving to resist systemic injustice and address transforming systems (Lee & Soep, 2016; Vasudevan, 2014; Wilson, Dasho, Martin, Wallerstein, Wang & Minkler, 2007). Yet, far less of this research has addressed the literacies enacted when youth work with/in communities for community coalition building and collective action. Thus, this study investigates the literacy practices present when youth and adults work alongside one another in solidarity. Further, this research understands and attends to the importance of composing across modes, or multimodal composing. Statement of Purpose & Research Questions This study seeks to examine youth’s and preservice English teachers' engagement and purpose for multimodal composing in a youth participatory action research project. The youth and community collaborative project, now entering its fifth summer has found a sustainable foothold as Littleton Youth Voices (LYV) with the Parks and Rec Teen Director, Marie, as the lead adult facilitator. Moreover, this line of inquiry seeks to understand the building of relationships and collective learning of a youth inquiry group led by youth’s vision for composing and creating coalitional work. Thinking beyond the classroom, this research 15 envisions youth participation and leadership in civic engagement and activism. Further, our collective does so through creative understandings of composing through writing, art, storytelling, and research with youth working alongside underrepresented populations in their community. Over the last few years, as an adult facilitator and organizer for LYV, I argue that the LYV space is one in which multimodal composing is enacted across various forms of commitment based on both youth’s relationship to the topic and their desire to work with other community organizations across coalitional collaborations that move from civic expansion, or at other times as coalitional civic resistance, and finally sometimes as coalitional civic resistance theory. Further opportunities to study preservice English teachers’ stancetakings of solidarity appeared as the former adult facilitators moved into their student teaching engagements. This movement to participatory literacies was, as one student teacher noted, “not quite YPAR” (from personal communication, 2019). However, making space for activist literacies that engaged the outside world provided space for these participatory literacies engagements to position youth as potential change-makers. This work was distinct from what many preservice teachers had done before, and though I would agree that this is not quite YPAR, it was clear that it had been informed by their community engagements. This multiple methods study utilizes ethnographic study of a larger youth participatory action research (YPAR) study, ethnographic case study of three preservice teachers implementing participatory literacies in their student teaching placements, as well as narrative inquiry methodologies to explore the following questions: 1. In what ways and for what purposes do youth engage with participatory literacies and multimodal composing? 16 a. What specific literacies are forwarded during collaborative and coalitional inquiry and action? b. In what ways are youth learning, asserting, or possibly reclaiming their civic identity across their literacies practice? 2. How do preservice English teachers, who were adult facilitators in the YPAR space, provide opportunities for elements of YPAR in their teaching placements? Engaging ethnographic methods (Anderson, 1989; Paris, 2011) since 2016 building with LYV, I have collected over two hundred pages of field notes, developed over one hundred research memos, collected youth literacies artifacts, gathered lesson plans and teaching artifacts from three preservice teachers in their student teaching placements, and engaged interviews from both community partners and preservice teachers. Data analysis covered a spectrum of collected data from lesson plans, interviews, and youth literacy artifacts. In order to analyze this larger spectrum of data, I engaged across such modes of analysis as value coding and narrative coding. Findings in this study focus primarily on an ethnographic case study (Bhatt, de Roock & Adams, 2015; Prins, 2017; Yin, 2013) in which I intend to draw on community partner interviews, youth journal entries, and youth’s multimodal storytelling artifacts. YPAR has been found to develop youth’s civic literacy identities (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Mirra, Morrell & Filipiak, 2018). This study seeks to extend understandings of solidarity work conducted with youth, adult facilitators, and community partners. Since the beginning of this collective research and action, we have collected survey data, oral histories, interviews, and visual artifacts within our various YPAR projects. Our data collection is led by youth inquiry, vision, and desire. Ethnography and YPAR hold powerful possibilities of sharing the data that I have and will collect for this study. Yet, it is the unfolding of moments of relationality that are best told through narrative moments. Narrative 17 inquiry captures moments of relationality and deep connection in methods that are best shared through storytelling (Ochs & Capps, 2001; Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011). This storytelling, of moments in which collective action and collaboration happen organically across the study, provides further depth to the sharing of research. Further, moments for youth to engage with elements of YPAR in classroom spaces taken up by three preservice English teachers highlighted in the ethnographic case study provide key insight into the stancetakings of solidarity taken by teachers in literacy spaces. Framework for Inquiry Scholars have long held the terms civic engagement and civic participation up as descriptive of individuals’ involvement in their communities and local governments (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). More recently, others have expanded these terms to look at youth’s civic innovation (Mirra & Garcia, 2017). However, this study seeks to move past conventional understandings of citizenship, which are complicated by youth’s lack of voting rights and often documentation. Furthermore, this inquiry understands the need to attend to youth’s determination of their own participation (Black Liberation Collective, 2015; March For Our Lives, 2018; Unidos Tucson, 2013). Building on scholarship from civic engagement to solidarity, this line of inquiry begins by examining useful frameworks for civic identity (Nasir & Kirshner, 2003) and civic expansion. Additionally, scholarship that reflects on positioning youth as knowledge holders through critical civic engagement (Shiller, 2013), and advancing ideas of “critical civic praxis” (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007), further problematizes civic notions by problematizing the lack of civic opportunity (Lo, YEAR), especially for youth of Color. Moreover, educational scholars who critically engage across community spaces (Kinloch, Larson, Orellana & Lewis, 18 2016) have necessarily begun investigating frameworks more appropriate to the diverse communities of Color that they serve. Moving away from the often limiting notions of civic identity, educational researchers have used words such as “transformational”, “transformative”, or have spoken more to transforming systems. Scholars’ methods and frameworks share understandings of cultivating critical consciousness among youth for the purposes of social action and systems change (Calderon, 2004; Mirra, Filipiak & Garcia, 2015; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Much of the research has considered youth resistance theories and pedagogical practices that forward justice and transform systems (Goulding, 2015; Lee & Soep, 2015; Noguera, Tuck, and Yang, 2013). Moreover, educational researchers have moved toward understandings of solidarity across language, pedagogy, and culture (Martinez, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2017; Sealey-Ruiz & Greene, 2011). Much can be learned from long existing and more recently examined practices of youth and community coalition building. In particular, this study seeks to highlight the various possibilities of youth forwarding coalitional civic resistance through embracing both their relationality to the topics they take up and collaborations with pre-existing local organizations addressing these issues. This study examines a move toward coalitional civic resistance theory by building on a body of research that includes youth participatory action research (Akom, Ginwright & Cammarota, 2008; Irizarry, 2009; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015). Additionally, critical pedagogy and critical literacy provide a further understanding of literacy and pedagogical practices that move against systems of power (de los Rios, Lopez & Morrell, 2015; Freire, 1970). Yet, the work of feminist theorists (Pillow & Mayo, 2007; Reinharz & Davidman, 1992), specifically women-scholars of Color (Anzaldua, 1987; Amoah, 1997; King, 1988), provides the 19 necessary grounding in solidarity. Particularly, solidarity found in moments of transformative ruptures (Delgado Bernal & Aleman, 2017) which occur for those who too often reproduce the violence and harm of cishetpatriarchal systems---even while being an effect of it themselves. This framework, of coalitional civic resistance theory, calls for the paradigm shift of working alongside youth, at the interstices of multiple identities, in coalitional and collaborative youth participatory action research (YPAR) as epistemology and action. At the foundation of this study and work with youth, developing critical consciousness for systems change is a key consideration to critical pedagogues (de los Rios, Lopez & Morrell, 2015; Freire, 1970). Extending on Freire’s (1970) necessary and important contribution of critical pedagogy, de los Rios, Lopez, and Morrell (2015) have explored a critical pedagogy of race. Considerations of systems of power must be built from a place of deeply recognizing the long and historical racial struggles that this country was built on and continues to perpetuate. In order to deeply consider issues of race and of central concern in a framework of coalitional civic resistance theory is the practice and purpose of critical literacies (Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Leent & Mills, 2018; Morrell, 2006). For instance, teachers wanting to take up understandings of coalitional civic resistance theory in their own teaching practices might find that even implementing more critical literacies is a struggle, given our current prescriptive system of education. Envisioned broadly across this study, critical literacies are literacy moments and artifacts that occur both on and off the digital or printed page. Thus, it becomes necessary for teachers to be prepared to position themselves as community-engaged, civically expansive, and valuing participatory literacies that forward youth’s own understanding of criticality. Considerations of gender require a turn toward feminist theorists who have long understood the need for mutual pursuit of social justice by both communities where research is 20 situated and the researcher (Pillow & Mayo, 2011; Reinharz & Davidman, 1992). Situating a feminist theory that deeply considers race, Lugones’s (2003) forwarding of a pluralistic and coalitional feminism supports a necessarily nuanced feminist framework at the intersections of race and gender, across which coalitional civic resistance theory must be built. It is at the interstices of the weaving together of YPAR as epistemology, critical pedagogy and critical literacy, and coalitional feminist theory that provide a filter through which the collaborative work of this research is considered. Organization of Dissertation This line of inquiry is rooted in designs for coalitional civic resistance theory while focusing on the multimodal literacy practices of youth, adult facilitators, and community partners. Chapter 1: An Introduction focuses on setting the context and purpose of this study. Additionally, I draw on my own experience with both teaching and solidarity work, tracing the early roots of my experience working alongside as early as 13, and organizing at the age of 16. By doing this, I position myself and other youth activists and organizers as exhibiting identities rooted in justice from an early age. Next, I present my frameworks for inquiry as necessary forward movement in educational research and learning communities for those who seek to work in solidarity to take up. This framework of coalitional civic resistance theory as being threaded together and forwarded by a further need for coalitional positionalities that could be taken up by white teachers and youth workers working in solidarity with youth of Color, specifically in urban spaces. Chapter 2: Framework for Inquiry delves into the nuances of multilogical epistemologies (Kincheloe & Steinburg, 2008, p.153) being brought together to provide a new framework for coalitional civic resistance theory. Through this building and braiding together of epistemologies, this research hopes to shed light on the ways in which literacy research, 21 education, and youth organizing could be taken up with and alongside youth in powerful ways that forwards their desires for inquiry and action. In Chapter 3: A Review of the Literature, a variety of engagement is forwarded across the existing literature in multimodal and participatory literacies. However, as participatory literacies is an emerging line of scholarship (rooted in cultural community knowledge that is timeless), the focus of this review of the literature is primarily on how multimodal literacies traverse across civic engagement, transformational stancetakings, and solidarity. Finally, I bring in literature that echoes what is needed in considering multimodal and participatory literacies, humanizing research. Chapter 4: Modes of Inquiry presents multiple methods of inquiry that are rooted in critical ethnography (including ethnographic case study), narrative inquiry, and YPAR. The weaving across these multiple methods provides opportunities to examine the larger critical ethnographic stud y and its effect on both youth coalitional civic resistance and preservice English teachers' stancetaking of solidarity, while rooting the inquiry in multimodal and participatory literacies and storytelling. The scope of this critical ethnographic project requires an expanded understanding of both methods and analysis that supports a fuller picture of the literacies, research, and action taken up in this collaborative. This study has been, at every turn, a response to those who I am in relationship with, and seek to be of service alongside. For instance, in response to youth I worked with in summer 2016, asking the question, “So what now?” I sought out opportunities to provide a home for coalitional civic resistance work through YPAR in the greater Littleton area. Further, this study highlights the relational pathways taken up by both youth and teachers. At its core, this study is anti-colonial (Dei 2000), anti-racist (Baker-Bell, Paris & Jackson, 2017), and anti- oppressive (Kumashiro, 2000) at every turn. Thus, value coding became necessary to understand youth and preservice English teachers’ work across data. In each of these two sections of data 22 analysis, value coding afforded me opportunities to more deeply understand the conceptual framework. Through curating a conceptual framework of coalitional civic resistance, the use of what I refer to as multi-relational became a lens of analysis with which to make sense of the varied relatedness of youth to their inquiry questions, their research methods, their collaborations and coalitions within their communities. Further, value coding (Saldana, 2016) became a way to understand the teacher-research of three preservice English teachers, especially as their literacies engagements provided opportunities for their own axiology as “community-engaged teachers” (preservice teacher in personal communication, 2020). In Chapter 5: Fostering & Building for Sustainable Coalitional Civic Resistance with Youth in Participatory Action Research, focuses on three seasons of YPAR that reached public audiences. Specifically, I focus on the first project taken up by youth in service to their desire to bring the community together to address women’s stories of healing from domestic violence (2017). Moreover, I go on to highlight two more seasons of building coalitional youth programming with Littleton’s Parks and Recreation across two “seasons” (as named by Spring, a youth participant, 2017) of YPAR. This chapter details and provides a multi-relational analysis of the next public YPAR project of youth speaking back and out with and alongside a LGBTQ+ youth group to address the lack of policy protecting queer youth (2018). Finally, the last project highlighted is included to provide evidence of youth working with their local newspaper to co-host an evening of community storytelling focused on “Growing Pains”, which youth interpreted as stories connected to and rising from bullying (2019). Taken together, these three cases provide various examples of youth working with multimodal literacies to provide a platform for various audiences around topics of their choosing. As the program grew, so did the need for adult facilitators. At the request of our community partners, the local Parks and Recreation department, we invited two cohorts of preservice 23 English teachers who provided one-on-one mentoring for youth in the program. In Chapter 6: Preservice English Teachers Take-up and Work through Stancetakings of Coalitional Civic Resistance, I highlight the effect that this work had on PSTs’ commitments to community engagement. Specifically, the work of three preservice English teachers provide opportunities for a variety of student engagement through participatory literacies is foregrounded . These three case studies focus on the preservice teachers weaving in elements of YPAR across their work. By doing so, they highlight the existing activist literacies of youth they share learning space alongside. Finally, Chapter 9: Humanizing Literacy Research, Teaching & YPAR, provides a coming together across the data and centers the important next steps to be taken based upon the findings from this study. The implications for youth workers, teachers, and educational researchers highlight attending to relationality, reciprocity, respect, and relevance in our work. Thus, drawing deeply on Indigenous research to build an argument for a humanizing framework in the work I detail across this study. Concluding with a call to action, I look at where we have yet to go in educational research, and where I intend to take the work next. 24 CHAPTER 2: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK—BUILDING COMMUNITIES OF ENGAGEMENT The five of us spread out at the back table of this little coffee house, music softly playing in the background. I have been trying to explain to youth that this project is something different than what we have done before. This shift, from teacher to facilitator (for me) and from student to youth activist (for them), is taking both of us some time to settle into, as I continue to repeat myself. “Wait,” Lysa her round cheeks framed by thick-framed, black glasses and a cascade of tight blond curls, her brow crinkled, “what do you mean there is no curriculum?” I sigh, this is only the third time that I have attempted to explain to the crew that this isn’t like the English classroom space we shared the previous summer. “Well, this isn’t school” I start, “this project is yours, your vision, your action, I am just here to support whatever it is that you want to do.” Lysa’s brows burrow further behind her glasses and she looks at me with a hint of disbelief, if not distrust. Adrianna, in her black t-shirt with the neck cut out and her black hair billowing behind her shoulders, “Mira (look),” she turns to Lysa,” she means that we can focus on whatever we want, do whatever we want. That’s what we are here to discuss. Right?” Adrianna turns back to me. “Exactly!” I exclaim. Adrianna continues, “So, say if we wanted to focus on domestic violence and sexual assault, we could do that?” I shift uncomfortably in my chair. This is the last topic I was expecting, but Adrianna had already challenged me and what I was comfortable with on many occasions before this moment at the coffee shop. What does it mean to name the pain? And how do we turn toward desire? Working with youth, especially youth who have so many stories to tell, means often sitting in uncomfortable conversations like the one I narrated above. Conversations which bring up questions for me about IRB, questions about what to really include in the research that we 25 report on, and questions about whether starting with the pain will ever get us to the desire with which Tuck (2009) speaks so eloquently about a needed to turn toward. Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” (2009), has had an indelible effect on how I approach working with and alongside youth and community partners. The author notes, “For many of us, the research on our communities has historically been damage centered, intent on portraying our neighborhoods and tribes as defeated and broken.” (p. 412). Though to be certain, this community with which I am currently working is not the community in which I grew up, it bears definite parallels. No. Not parallels, exactly. I know now that the parallels I once thought I understood, between communities of Color and working-poor communities across geographic spaces, are the shadows of institutions. Systems that were meant to keep these communities in check, restrained, organized by the ever white, and ever colonizing eye of those that control/led the shaping of this (dis)eased nation-state. That, in fact the joy is different, because the histories that have indelibly imprinted themselves into these various communities are so very geographic in nature, both global and national, but also very local. This is not the community that I came from, no. Instead, this is a community of youth and community partners that have invited me in, and to which I feel a responsibility to highlight strengths and assets. Tuck goes on to note that desire-based frameworks, “are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (p. 416). I’ve learned, and have really been taught, to take my time and allow for the narrative to play out, to witness the stories, and to listen deeply to what is being shared in truth and vulnerability. After which, I always ask what is wanted. What is the story we wish to tell? What is the intended outcome? Often it is there that we find the desire which Tuck names. 26 At various points across the last five years of this project, I have found myself in conversation with youth and community partners asking again, what is wanted? Listening deeply has become a core practice of the work that I enact with youth and community members. At times, this research and action has resembled civic engagement. For example, working with a group of youth and preservice English teachers to host a civically engaged Twitter chat about the government and our current administration. In other work we have taken up, this work has been transformative, calling into question the lack of protection for LGBTQ+ youth in the area schools, collecting surveys, and working to put together a presentation for Littleton’s school board with the local Queer youth group’s policy recommendations. At points, our group has taken up community engaged storytelling regarding bullying in schools and the peace-making efforts of local organizations whose work seeks to address these issues. Yet, some of the most deeply community-engaged work we have done has also been some of the most sensitive, taken up with great risk and intensely personal solidarity. For example, our collection of oral histories led to editing a podcast of domestic violence and sexual assault stories. This collection of stories was taken up at a multimodal (arts-based) community outreach day, which meant vulnerable and responsible centering of folx with their own stories to tell. This work, also, brought together over six local organizations that support women and youth with stories of their own, as well as four counselors who were on hand to respectfully listen to anyone who was triggered by the event or sharing of their own story. All of these projects demanded a stance-taking of solidarity on my part. Beginning with being invited in, first by youth, and then by community members, most notably the administration of the local Parks and Recreation, I found myself listening deeply to youth and the community leaders who held a desire for youth to engage as leaders. In positioning youth as 27 leaders, the gathering collective learned to listen deeply to young folx’s concerns, and follow through with connecting to community members who could further support youth in enacting their visions. Bearing the privilege that comes with my attachments to a large nearby university, meant that I had opportunities to bring in two cohorts of preservice English teachers in need of community connections. My bringing in the first cohort happened with the advent of a new partnership with Littleton’s Parks and Recreation’s Youth Director. After our first season with five adult facilitators, two stayed on not to make any further “community-engagement” hours but rather because they believed in the project and were energized by the possibilities. The next fall came with requests from the assistant director of the city’s Parks and Recreation to bring back another cohort of mentors. However, what I had learned with the previous cohort gave me pause to consider a bit more training with the new cohort. Preservice teachers only have their own experience in traditional classrooms to go on when considering youth participation. Our youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects really flipped the idea of youth participation on its head and made room for something that needed space and time to be messy, organic, humanizing. At times, these projects took us only weeks from first inquiry to final action, at other times the projects took the entire school year to truly come to fruition. The variation in timelines has not been led by funding (as the majority of the work has been taken up without funding), and it has not been led by the demands of scholarship that are so present in the academy (and in fact could be seen as painfully slow for many who are accustomed to finishing their fieldwork in a matter of weeks). Rather, this work has been envisioned and led by youth, on their timeline, and with their passion driving our projects and research. Whether we have worked in civic engagement, to transform systems, or truly in solidarity with our community partners has been 28 led by how much youth have been willing to risk and invest in their projects. For myself and another of our adult facilitators, this research and our projects with youth have been at cost, cost of both money (of which a graduate student and preservice teacher have little) and time (see earlier statement). We have put ourselves on the line to follow where youth have led us, learning to step up or step back as they need us to do. Though there are many solid frameworks for educational justice that this theoretical framework is built upon, such as anti-racist literacy pedagogy (Baker-Bell, 2020), anti-colonial pedagogy (Dei, 2008), culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2009), and abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019), this theoretical framework is built to be taken up by youth workers and teachers working with and alongside youth with a multitude of identities, across a variety of contexts, and always along pathways of solidarity that have not been forwarded. Currently, there is not a framework for understanding this work I refer to as Coalitional Civic Resistance theory which adequately encompasses the collaborative solidarity with which this research has been taken up. With the intention of both understanding youth and adult engagement in this research and action, Coalitional Civic Resistance (CCR) builds off of existing frameworks for understanding, and extends the current frameworks along trajectories that draw inspiration but do not appropriate research, learning, and teaching specifically designed by Indigenous, Black, and POC scholars. Drawing on extant literature referred to as civically engaged, transformational, and frameworks for solidarity, necessarily and importantly paves a path on which this theoretical framework builds and extends. I draw on my academic elders whose research has historically moved us all closer to educational justice, and has done so that we may all have models of what it means to continue toward furthering justice in our current moments of desire. In order to pay respect to the research which this theoretical framework and the studies that follow seek to extend for a new 29 audience in a new era, the following sections note key scholarship that has made the biggest impact on the building of CCR. Civically Engaged Extant theoretical research has established the educational research community’s understanding of youth civic participation (Banks, 2008; Hart & Atkins, 2002; Levinson, 2007; Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan & Nichols, 2015). More recently scholars have extended conversations about youth’s civic participation to include an interrogation of lack of access to voter registration, the limitations of representatives that reflect both the identities and the ideals of voters in urban centers, and issues of pathways to citizenship (Kirshner, 2009; Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007; Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Moreover, scholars’ understandings of types of civic participation are continuously expanding, and thus moving away from the long-held belief that voting was the best and most important form of civic engagement (Mirra & Garcia, 2017; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Furthermore, youth’s determination of their own civic participation must be taken into consideration (Black Liberation Collective, 2015; March For Our Lives, 2018; Unidos Tucson, 2013). Mirra and Garcia (2017) explore possibilities of civic interrogation and innovation. The authors assert that, “the future of civic education must engage more forcefully with youth agency, critical perspectives, and digital forms of expression” (p.138) For instance, Black youth taking to college campuses across the U.S. to demand their safety, civil rights, representation in faculty and curriculum, and furthered presence across campuses is only one such example of youth organizing for change (Black Liberation Collective, 2015). Furthering knowledge about youths’ lived civic experiences, scholars have argued for various models of participation both in and out of the classroom, such as positioning youth as co-researchers to examine the injustice in 30 their own educational institutions (Kirshner, 2009; Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza & Ford, 2013; Rubin, Abu El-Haj, Graham & Clay, 2016). Yet, some scholars challenge the idea of civic participation due to complicated issues of citizenship and state violence toward undocumented and historically marginalized communities. Whether forwarding understanding of moral and civic identity (Nasir & Kirshner, 2003), positioning youth as knowledge holders through critical civic engagement (Shiller, 2013), or advancing ideas of “critical civic praxis” (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007), educational scholars who critically engage across community spaces (Kinloch, Larson, Orellana & Lewis, 2016) have necessarily begun investigating frameworks more appropriate to the diverse communities of Color that they serve. The importance placed on various models of civic participation by these scholars created pathways for further building toward a CCR framework. Moving forward toward understandings of justice means not only critically critiquing systems that reproduce injustice, but also developing a continuously deepening critical consciousness. Ginwright and Cammarota’s (2007) “critical civic praxis” holds the following tenets: cultivating ties with community, enabling growth by challenging deficit concepts about youth of Color in public policy, and sustaining collective interest through critical consciousness among urban youth. The authors draw on evidence across geographical locations (on the west coast and in the southwest) and across communities of Color (both Black youth and Latinx youth). This important turn toward theorizing an iterative civic engagement and critical consciousness development provided for keen insight into the possibilities of civic engagement. Participatory Culture Emerging from this line of research is a turn toward participatory culture (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison & Weigel, 2006; Jocson, 2008; Kahne & Bowyer, 2019; Kwon & 31 de los Rios, 2019; Mirra & Garcia, 2020). Participatory culture comes from a broader understanding of participatory politics which takes up a more timely, relevant, and culturally situated understanding of what sociocultural theorists have been asserting for the last 30 years. Participatory culture has been defined by Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, and Weigel (2006) through the following five tenets: 1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement 2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others 3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices 4. Where members believe that their contributions matter 5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Noting the importance of “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement” (Jenkins, et al., 2006, p.7), the authors position underserved communities as somehow possessing a participation gap. However, the language and the meaning often ascribed to these gaps positions the problem as being situated within the community itself. Drawing on Ladson-Billings (2007) and Lo (2019), I assert that underserved communities are at the effect of the patialist nation-state that has resource-guarded democratic engagements to only those with financial access, and often white privilege. When looking across the last 15 years of participatory politics, it becomes clear that though there may be a lack of access to technology. Yet, I would argue that communities, especially communities of Color, have always led the movement for civic identity as necessarily connected to human worth (Love, 2019). In her book, We Want to Do More Than Survive, Love calls for freedom dreaming which can be defined as: 32 imagining worlds that are just, representing people’s full humanity, centering people left on the edges, thriving in solidarity with folx with different identities who have struggled together for justice, and knowing that dreams are just around the corner with the might of people power (Love, 2019, p. 103) Love calls us into action to collective work in collaboration that foregrounds justice. In doing so, she asks us to not only attend to the historical and continuous wounds that institutions have inflicted, but also to move past the wounds to imagining more critically loving futures. In order for this shift to occur, we must freedom dream together. Thus, freedom dreaming necessarily results in transformation. Transformational Across educational research, various words have been used to describe what I am referring to here as transformational. Whether scholars use words such as “transformational”, “transformative”, or speak more to transforming systems, their methods and the goals share understandings of cultivating critical consciousness among youth for the purposes of social action and systems change (Calderon, 2004; Mirra, Filipiak & Garcia, 2015; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Solorzano and Delgado Bernal (2001) construct a framework for what they refer to as transformational resistance. The authors argue for Transformational Resistance Theory (Solórzano & Bernal, 2001) and specifically outline four types of resistance: “(a) reactionary behavior (b) self-defeating resistance (c) conformist resistance, and (d) transformational resistance” (p.316). In transformational resistance, youth combine a critical understanding of systemic injustice with an action-oriented perspective of service specific to their own communities. Adding to the work of systems change are theories of resistance. Many scholars have taken up resistance theories and pedagogical practices for the purpose of forwarding justice and transforming systems (Goulding, 2015; Lee & Soep, 2015; Noguera, Tuck, & Yang, 2013). 33 Goulding (2015) explores zines with Asian-American “riot grrls” as resistance pedagogy. In the author’s exploration of multimodal remixing of zines, she finds that the composing and publishing of resistance stories that challenge “normalizing racial and gender discourses” (p.164) with narratives authored by young Asian-American women who identify across the gender and sexuality spectrum. These riot grrls, a term that the author borrows from the third wave queer punk feminist movement, challenge the Asian model minority myths that exist for them both inside their own culture and through the white gaze. Systems of oppression function in very similar ways across spaces, and educational researchers and teachers can learn from appreciating each other’s research and teaching. Yet, I would assert that resistance is always context dependent. Solidarity Scholars who have moved toward understandings of solidarity have done so with an eye on language, pedagogy, and culture (Martinez, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2017; Sealey-Ruiz & Greene, 2011). In doing so, they have provided key insight for educational researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to take up in research and teaching. Paris and Alim (2017) note that their work is intended to “support and sustain what we know are remarkable ways with language, literacy, and cultural practice, while at the same time opening up spaces for students themselves” (p.11) to examine and interrogate how these practices may or may not be further marginalizing members of communities of Color. Moreover, much can be learned from the movement toward solidarity made through the work of scholars and teachers working alongside youth and communities for desire-based learning and research practices (Combahee River Collective, 2014; Guishard, 2009). For instance, working in solidarity within a collective of Black feminist intellectuals from various 34 social and academic backgrounds, the Combahee River Collective has found that “work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products” (p. 5). Thus, possibilities exist across research and teaching spaces for those who work with and alongside youth and communities toward the vision and goals of those with which we work. Martinez (2017) argues that a language of solidarity highlights three assets: 1) building and developing pride in youth’s home languages, 2) building youth critical consciousness of the historical, political, and social background of their languages, 3) engaging youth in literacy activities supporting youth sense-making of the linguistic and physical violence that they encounter, and moving toward a language of solidarity across communities of Color’s languages and experiences. He envisions a humanizing English curriculum that highlights youth solidarity and displaces the white gaze. These frameworks of solidarity across Paris and Alim’s (2017) edited volume of culturally sustaining pedagogies, the Combahee River Collective’s manifesto, and Martinez’s linguistic solidarity framework both root deep knowledge in the communities of Color from which these authors draw, while also providing necessary and important opportunities for us all to work collectively against oppression. Coalitional Civic Resistance A movement toward radical solidarity builds on a collection of work that includes critical pedagogy (de los Rios, Lopez & Morrell, 2015; Freire, 1970), scholarship in youth participatory action research (YPAR) (Akom, Ginwright & Cammarota, 2008; Irizarry, 2009; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015), and is inspired by feminist theorists (Pillow & Mayo, 2007; Reinharz & Davidman, 1992), specifically women-scholars of Color (Anzaldua, 1987; Amoah, 1997; King, 1988). The braiding together of these three epistemic areas forwards a framework that works with youth as change agents in consideration of gender (and gender identity), sexual orientation, 35 race, class, ability, and religion. It does not ignore important identities of youth, but rather seeks to consider how these identities are related to the issues and topics of which youth choose to inquire. CCR begins by drawing on three well established epistemological areas while moving in a new direction. This new direction considers the need for transformational resistance (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) to be taken up by teachers and youth workers. Moments of transformative ruptures (Delgado Bernal & Aleman, 2017) occur for those who too often perpetuate the violence and harm of dominant, heteronormative, cispatriarchal society---even while being at the effect of it themselves. This research seeks to challenge teachers and youth workers, particularly benefitting from systems of whiteness, to move further away from those privileges and to be willing to risk that privilege for the sake of liberation. The challenge is provided through the forging of a new conceptual framework that respects the scholarship of the long struggle, while considering the need for forward movement that invites a letting go of often unexamined and most certainly unearned power. The building of critical consciousness is of central concern to critical pedagogues (de los Rios, Lopez & Morrell, 2015; Freire, 1970). Many scholars have extended Freire’s (1970) landmark contribution of critical pedagogy. Most recently de los Rios, Lopez, and Morrell (2015) have explored a critical pedagogy of race. The authors note that the field of ethnic studies has notably “both academic involvement and civic engagement” (p.84). Of central concern in a framework of CCR is the enactment and purpose of critical literacies (Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Leent & Mills, 2018; Morrell, 2006). Critical literacies are envisioned broadly across this work as literacies moments that occur both on and off the digital or printed page. Specifically, this study foregrounds multimodal literacies, both curation and composition, and participatory literacies. I build on these ideas of the power of complex literacies, while also 36 envisioning opportunities for coalitional culture building. This collaborative work is necessary for coalitional civic resistance. It must be that we are all free. Engaging in critical literacies is a necessary first step in working with youth across classroom and community literacy spaces for grounding of youth’s inquiry in a critical analysis of the systems that have set the issue in place. This critical analysis of systems when beginning a research study with the problem statement sheds light on where the problem truly exists; not in youth’s communities but in the system. Yet, maneuvering away from problem and toward desire, especially as a white-presenting woman, is precarious and carefully-entered work. Across my years in co-constructing YPAR, I have found that the desire-based framework emerges most authentically when we inquire into what action we are hoping to see as the result of this collaboration. Working with youth in coalitional youth participatory action research (YPAR) and forwarding opportunities in classroom spaces for participatory literacies is a necessary element to this framework. YPAR as epistemology is necessary to include in the building of CCR. Scholars assert that YPAR as epistemology builds youth’s capacity as change agents (Akom, Ginwright & Cammarota, 2008; Irizarry & Butler, 2014; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015). YPAR provides a structure for supporting youth’s transformational resistance (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Solorzano and Delgado Bernal (2001) noted that the intersection of youth’s critical consciousness and need for change within the systems of oppression bring about critical social justice action that is in service to their communities. Feminist theorists have long understood the need for a dramatic shift in power that provides liberatory opportunities for social justice (Pillow & Mayo; 2007, Reinharz & Davidman, 1992). Pillow and Mayo argue that feminist research is “committed to social change” (p.190). Further, women of Color feminist theorists have envisioned a truly liberatory praxis that 37 sets gender free while attending to the intersections of race (Amoah, 1997; Anzaldua, 1987; King, 1988). Though it is necessary to note that though this framework is informed and inspired by women of Color, there is a necessary caution in choosing to forward knowledge of which I myself have no lived experience. In doing so, I seek to honor the wisdom of those who have come before me, while insisting that critical white (white-presenting) scholars must do the work of inviting youth workers and teachers into conversations of liberation and justice. I find that Lugones’s (2003) understanding of a pluralistic and coalitional feminism provides a theoretical framework through which this conceptual framework, Coalitional Civic Resistance, must be built. Lugones suggests that through critique and love of oneself, solidarity can be built by radically loving one another, particularly amongst women and across race. Thus, it is with this coalitional understanding of feminism that a collective that includes critical white women can be taken up. Further, I would suggest that it is crucial that this perspective be taken up carefully so as not to over-inflate the importance of white women in the space, but rather to acknowledge that there must be more work that considers the possibility of collective action that includes those that are currently and overwhelmingly in classroom and community literacy spaces. Figure 1. Coalitional Civic Resistance 38 Table 1. Epistemological Frameworks Epistemological Framework(s) Noted Authors What knowledge coalitional civic resistance theory builds on For youth in solidarity work seeking to build toward coalitional civic resistance theory Critical Pedagogy de los Rios, Lopez & Morrell, 2015; Freire, 1970; Freire & Macedo, 1990 Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Leent & Mills, 2018; Morrell, 2006 - critical pedagogy of race - “reading the word and the world” with a critical eye as to whose stories are being told and whose voices are missing - literacies that provide emancipatory potential for youth, especially youth of Color - the power of complex literacies both on and off the (digital) page - recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship - seeking out existing data on questions that youth pose for inquiry with an eye for having a variety of primary sources - examining who is contributing to the conversation and who may be missing - digging deeper to understand who is funding the information being distributed - collecting a variety of resources for understanding complex issues before problem posing (news 39 For youth workers & teachers in solidarity work seeking to build toward coalitional civic resistance - recognizing one’s own relationship and background knowledge of the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship -always positioning ourselves as learners alongside, not the authority - providing a variety of resources and time for youth to bring in their own resources - honoring (and not just including) a diverse variety of authors/artists/his tories/perspective s to the conversation to provide a model (minimizing white-resourced Table 1 (cont’d) YPAR sources, social media, music, art, etc…) whatever youth find compelling to creating a more complex understanding of the topic - recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship - identifying whose perspectives are missing from the conversation - seeking to work collaboratively with others who may have lived experience with the topic of inquiry - strengthens youth’s community relationships as collaborations are forwarded toward coalitional research and action - authoring data collection protocol specific material, especially as youth get this everywhere else in school spaces) -providing a model of how to trace where information is coming from and who is funding that information - recognizing one’s own relationship and background knowledge of the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship - positioning ourselves as learners, as well as facilitators of the inquiry process alongside youth, not the authority - leveraging one’s position and community relations to connect youth to a variety of resources - inviting a diverse variety of authors/artists/his torians/organizers that both reflect youth and can connect youth to Akom, Ginwright & Cammarota, 2008; Irizarry & Butler, 2014; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001 - builds youth’s capacity as change agents - creates research, learning, and teaching based on youth interest and desire - building of critical civic praxis - youth become agents of change in issues of social injustice - provides structure for youth’s engagement with transformational resistance - provides pathways to youth agency in addressing social injustice that directly affects youth and their environments 40 Table 1 (cont’d) (Endarkened) Feminist Epistemologies Amoah, 1997; Anzaldua, 1987; King, 1988; Lugones, 2003; Pillow & Mayo; 2007, Reinharz & Davidman, 1992 - committed to social change - addresses intersections of systems and social constructs and their effect on people (i.e. race and gender) - values the power of storying and storytelling to confront dominant ideologies 41 to the information gathered from critical analysis of existing data on questions forwarded by youth - collecting a variety of data sources for understanding complex issues to address youth inquiry - envisioning and enacting action that youth feel addresses the topic of inquiry in whatever way youth find compelling to creating a more complex understanding of the topic for the identified audience - recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship through self- storying - seeking to stand alongside in powerful coalition with other communities/ organization who deeper understanding of inquiry and action around youth chosen topic -providing suggested models of how to address key audience members based on possible community connections or currently held community relationships that could be highlighted to more specifically and publicly address youth’s chosen audience - leveraging one’s position and community relations to connect youth to a variety of resources -providing suggested models for continuing to get the word out regarding youth research and action that reaches broader Table 1 (cont’d) - provides pathway both to constructive self- criticism and self- love - lays foundation for radically loving our communities - models coalitional movement to address structural inequity audiences, while attending to reciprocity of relations across the work have been addressing the topic - strengthens youth’s community relationships as collaborations are forwarded toward coalitional action - creating a variety of multimodal (both digital and arts based) products for a variety of specific audiences based on data collection - sharing a variety of data collection for understanding complex issues to address youth inquiry - envisioning and enacting action that youth feel addresses the topic of inquiry in whatever way youth find compelling to creating a more complex understanding of the topic for the identified audience - enrolling already existing communities/orga nizations in collaboration to both leverage a 42 Table 1 (cont’d) larger platform for youth action and working alongside to consciously engage in youth action that cares for community and cultivates further relationship building The weaving together of critical pedagogy, YPAR, and coalitional feminist theory works to provide a filter through which the collaborative work of this study can be better understood. Providing a conceptual framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance through which to understand the cooperative nature of this participatory research and action becomes not only an epistemological exercise, but an ontological and axiological shift in literacy research, learning, and teaching. This paradigm shift toward CCR provides for a niche in the research that this study seeks to address. More specifically, Coalitional Civic Resistance is intended to be taken up by researchers, youth workers, teachers, and youth who attend to the following criteria: 1. Positioning youth as leaders, thought partners, and expert knowledge holders 2. Coming in with humility, when invited, and being willing to do the deep work of unpacking the inherent biases that have been unknowingly imprinted by a system that privileges white, cis, straight, middle class, able, and Christian identities 3. Developing community connections and furthering reciprocal relationships 4. Listening deeply to stories being shared/modeling listening deeply with respect 5. Refusing the limitations of the academy/schools when providing time and space for Coalitional Civic Resistance 43 6. Letting go of the facade of control and seeking only to facilitate participatory learning, research, and action It is important to note that this is not to suggest that everyone should take up the work of Coalitional Civic Resistance in their classrooms or community spaces. However, in Chapter 6: Preservice English Teachers Take-up and Work through Stancetakings of Coalitional Civic Resistance three student teachers, across a year-long student teaching placement, provide models of forwarding multimodal and participatory literacies rooted in Coalitional Civic Resistance across three different communities that come with their own affordances and constraints. Furthermore, Chapter 5: Fostering & Building for Sustainable Coalitional Civic Resistance with Youth in Participatory Action Research, focuses on three seasons of YPAR. These seasons describe three different projects taken up by youth in service to to their desire to bring community together to address stories of healing from intimate partner and domestic violence (2017), straight/cis youth (mostly of Color) working with and alongside a LGBTQ+ youth group to address the lack of school policy protecting queer and trans youth (2018), and a diverse group of youth working with a long-standing organizer of a local storyteller’s night to co-host “Growing Pains”, which youth interpreted as stories connected to and rising from bullying (2019). Taken together, these three cases provide various examples of youth working with multimodal literacies to provide a platform for various audiences around topics of their choosing, rooted in Coalitional Civic Resistance. Any one of these three seasons could have solely been this dissertation study. However, that would have meant not responding to youth and community’s question, “What’s next?” (Adrianna, youth participant turned adult facilitator, in personal communication, 2016/2017/2018). It means being willing to take up work that is slower, deeper, and ultimately more humanizing. 44 CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW Across the historically long and continuous Civil Rights movement, youth have continued to be at the forefront of decades of activist and organizing efforts. From the fight for Mexican American Studies in Arizona (Unidos Youth Coalition, 2013) to Black und ergraduate youth movements across the country (Black Liberation Collective, 2015) and more recently Parkland, Florida youth taking to the road to organize a national young people’s movement for gun control (March For Our Lives, 2018), youth have engaged across social-civic literacies to organize collective movements of community coalition building. Recognizing wide-ranging concepts of literacy, “social-civic literacies” (Watson, Knight, & Taylor Jaffee, 2014, p. 44) highlight critical-literacy practices as “emerging and complicating spaces of political literacy, civic identity constructions, and formal/informal citizenship teaching and learning opportunities”. Social-civic literacies practices involve both reading and writing, or composing, across modes. These literacy practices, often referred to as multiliteracy or multimodal, have increasingly become more complicated and necessary to be understood due to advances in schools, the workplace, and across social networks. In Serafini’s (2014) book Reading the Visual, the author defines mode and multimodal as: A mode is a system of visual and verbal entities created within or across various cultures to represent or express meanings. Photography, sculpture, painting, mathematics, music, and written language are examples of different modes. Every mode has a different potential for expressing and communicating meaning and was created to serve a particular purpose within a culture. Therefore, a multimodal ensemble is a text composed of more than one mode. (p.12) Across this review of the literature, I refer to multimodal composing to describe a set of literacy practices wherein one writes, or composes, across one or more modes of understanding. I consider not only the how of composing, multimodal, but also the purpose of the composition, as it pertains to youth and community organizing and activism. Beginning with a brief history and 45 exploration of multiliteracies and multimodal literacies, literacy studies both theoretical and empirical, across school and community learning spaces, are briefly reviewed. The findings from my review of the literature focuses on multimodal composing that is civically engaged, transformational, and in solidarity. Furthermore, this study extends these conversations in new ways for youth work and in community-engaged preservice teacher education. Envisioning Multiliteracies in Learning Spaces in & out of Schools Building on scholarship across learning spaces, research on multiliteracy learning and teaching has developed into various fields. From new media literacy (Baker-Bell, et al, 2017; Patterson, Howard, & Kinloch, 2016) to multilingual (Martinez, 2017; Canagarajah, 2013) and multiliterate practices of youth in schools (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009) and communities (Mahiri, 2004), the literacy research communities’ conception of literacy has grown from once colonizing practices to shifting the narrative toward literacies of collective and cultural liberation (Sealey- Ruiz & Greene, 2011), and an extended history of those various literacies practices (Haas, 2007; Muhammad, 2019). This envisioning of an extended understanding of literacy practices that youth, particularly Indigenous, Black and youth of Color, have always engaged both in and out of schools attends to youth’s literate identities as a living practice. Further, this review of the literature highlights the cultivating of new literacies practices with youth that has yet to be done or acknowledged by scholars and teachers invested in dominant literacy spaces. Conceiving of Multimodal Composing Across Learning Spaces Over twenty years have passed since the New London Group’s (1996) significant contribution to multiliteracies. Since that time, many studies have explored the ways in which youth have practiced multimodal literacies (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Serafini, 2010; Talib, 2018; Vasudevan, 2010). Some researchers across both the fields of education (Muhammad, 2019) and 46 rhetorics (Haas, 2007) have turned back to the history and living traditions of their communities to highlight the dynamic cultural and literacy practices that have been overlooked by dominant academic spaces. Fewer studies have sought to understand the purposes for youth’s use of multimodal literacies (DeJaynes, 2015; Rios, 2017). This study seeks to understand not only the purposes for youth’s multimodal composing, but the coalitional impact of these practices. Moving away from binary understandings of literacy as consuming or producing, The New London Group (1996) sought to forward a theory of new media literacy engagement that took into consideration not only the multilingual, but also the multimodal. The authors envisioned multimodal as moving across and between six different modes of meaning, which they refer to as “design elements” (p.65). These design elements span across the visual, linguistic, audio, spatial, and gestural, while multimodal is the process of making meaning across two or more of these elements. Framing considerations of multimodal composing across this review of the literature, meant considering scholarship both in (Serafini, 2014; Talib, 2018) and out of schools (Vasudevan, 2010), and across academic classroom and community literacy spaces. Vasudevan (2010) notes that “whereas digital literacies are multimodal, literacy practices that are multimodal need not be digital” (p. 44). Expanding the literacy research community’s understanding of multimodal literacies as not confined to the digital realm is incredibly important for moving away from any classist understandings of multimodal literacy as only for those who have access to digital production. Haas argues that although “the World Wide Web is touted for its democratizing effects on communication, there is still a digital divide between the haves and have-nots, whereas shared responsibility is what links wampum beads” (2007, p. 93). In Hass’s illuminating essay about wampum as hypertext and multimodal communication, the 47 author brilliantly speaks to and back to rhetoric scholars claims to the origins of the field’s hypertextual studies. Instead, Haas notes that “wampum is multimodal in its meaning-making” (p. 91) tracing the history of the wampum and the cultural context of the multimodality of the messages laid in wampum by those that created and those that received. In her essay, Haas makes clear where we have next to go in the research around multimodal composing, and that the study of wampum provides a vision for the future of multimodality “as more civically responsible” (p. 93). In an era where civic responsibility is needed more than ever, it is vital that the literacy research community attend to the purpose for youth multimodal literacy engagement. Completing this study in an unprecedented era of a global pandemic and uprisings for Black Lives, only highlights the structural and systemic inequity that has from the first colonization of this country been its brutal and bloody past and present for IBPOC communities. Further, at a time of political and social turmoil cresting across the U.S., the effect on various communities of Color, calls into question this country’s long history of racism and oppression. Yet, this only furthers opportunities for collective action that is vital for teachers, youth organizers, and the research community to engage with alongside and in solidarity with communities most affected. Youth in larger numbers than this country has seen since the 1950s and 1960s are cultivating their sociopolitical activist orientations and joining uprisings around the country (Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2017), if not authoring those movements themselves. Thus, turning to scholarship that highlights youth and community action that is civically engaged, transformational, and in solidarity is necessarily integral to this study of youth’s purposes for multimodal composing. 48 Civic Engagement, Participatory Culture, Transformation, & Solidarity In my own learning and unlearning, that is a constant process of study and practice, I have gone back and forth with whether civic engagement is something that I value. Over the last few years of this study, I have deeply considered the history and nomenclature of “civic”. My earliest studies into the history of youth organizing and solidarity work began with a deep dive into the Highlander Folk School, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Citizenship Schools that collectively fought hard for Black communities to be counted as part of the civic voice that steers this country through voting. Yet, my questions of where the vote had gotten any of us remained. Our voting will not lead to the revolution that many I work alongside and have deep respect for engage in research and action toward. No. Yet, the studies continued. In reading and reflecting on Bettina Love’s 2018 book, We Want to Do More than Survive, I found myself questioning the position of privilege that I was taking up in even considering refusing civic as a term to engage. After reflecting, I could not refuse that the very fight for civic engagement was a fight for personhood. Thus, this review of the literature includes civic engagement, participatory literacies (which extends civic identity in multiple ways that engage youth), transformational work, work with and alongside communities in solidarity, and finally how this work can be humanizing for all that participate with youth across community and classrooms spaces. Building toward engagement that is rooted in both youth vision and leadership, the articles reviewed below highlight a variety of youth engagement in both community organizing and classroom social-civic practices of multimodal curation, participatory literacies, and multimodal composing. The purpose of this review is to highlight the possibilities for addressing systemic inequity and injustice when centering youth epistemologies and experiences. With this 49 goal in mind, this review synthesizes current research across critical youth studies, social studies, civic education, new media literacies, digital literacies, multiliteracies, and multimodal literacies. Guiding my analysis of the literature reviewed, I asked the following questions: 1. In what ways are educational researchers engaging with and alongside youth in civic, organizing, and activist literacies? 2. How are literacy researchers engaging multiliteracies, and more specifically multimodal composing, with youth in liberatory practices that address inequity and injustice? 3. Are literacy researchers and English Education teachers learning from youth epistemologies and experiences regarding their own social-civic literacy practices in and out of school? The studies reviewed in this essay were retrieved across academic databases (EBSCO, ERIC, Google Scholar, JSTOR, ProQuest, and Web of Science) for peer-reviewed journal articles using keywords related to youth’s multimodal composing practices across a spectrum of engagement (e.g., youth, adolescents, civic engagement, transformation, resistance, solidarity, multiliteracies, and multimodal literacies). Due to the rapid advances in social-civic literacies I limited my search to the last 20 years, with a couple of exceptions made for articles which were pivotal to multiliteracy studies. This data was combined with manual searches of books and edited volumes which have informed the field of new literacy studies for social justice or resistance. Thus, while I sought to be as comprehensive as possible, I acknowledge one limitation of this study is that I could not have possibly included the extant literature which may be found in multiliteracy studies or civic literacy studies. My analysis was guided by my three questions into the existing literature, which I used to code the articles. Articles were coded and recoded two more times. Five larger themes emerged: 50 civic engagement and multimodal curation and composing; participatory cultures and multimodal curation and composing; transformation across multimodal and participatory literacies; solidarity in multimodal and participatory literacies; and, humanizing in multimodal and participatory literacies. Refining my analysis in my third round of coding provided a further filtering of codes within solidarity and multimodal composing. Specifically, I found that solidarity could be further coded as relational, specifically across four codes: 1) solidarity as relational and geographical 2) solidarity as relational within racial affinity groups 2) solidarity as relational across racial affinity groups 3) solidarity as relational, an intercultural perspective. Multimodal Curation & Composing Across Modes of Engagement In the following pages, I outline the spectrum of civic engagement and multimodal literacies across school spaces. Moreover, I don’t limit the vision of civic as being only for those whom it was historically built. In broadening the spectrum of civic engagement to encompass participatory cultures and multimodal literacies, I examine the affordances and limitations of learning and leveraging youth voice for community leadership in and out of schools. Further, I highlight the work that has come before which has transformed community spaces as platforms for youth community leadership through multimodal literacies. The work that has come before has laid the foundation for the final section of this review of the literature--solidarity and multimodal literacies. Much of the literature in multimodal literacies has not attended to the importance of identity as being deeply connected to literature, the arts, and youth organizing. Therefore, I call on the work in multilingual and multimodal literacies that has been deeply invested in solidarity. Though it is beyond the scope of this review to note the expanse of work that could be included in this last section or to know what the scholars and their participants had intended to relay through their work, I have made an attempt to capture the essence of how I see 51 the work. That is to say, I have coded the last section in four ways, but most importantly as deeply relational. Civic Engagement & Multimodal Literacies in Schools Across school spaces, many educational researchers have taken up scholarship at the intersections of civic engagement and multimodal composing (Burke & Greene, 2015; DeJaynes, 2015; Greene, Burke & McKenna, 2013; Hobbs, Donnelly, Friesem & Moen, 2013). In two articles coming out of a university and school partnership, an after-school program was developed across two school sites that positioned youth as participatory action researchers for civic engagement and community change (Burke & Greene, 2008; Greene, Burke & McKenna, 2013). Drawing across youth’s drawings of community maps, oral accounts of the issues that their communities face, photographs and photovoice narratives, the authors work across modes to both highlight youth’s perspectives on community issues and also seek to center youth voice. Greene, Burke, and McKenna (2013) assert that “youth need opportunities to tell their stories in ways that enable them to express their ideas across time and space through different modes of inquiry and presentation” (p. 329). Positioning youth as community engaged storytellers through photovoice holds powerful possibilities. According to Wang (2006), the purpose of photovoice is for participants to be able to chronicle their lived realities, bolster conscientization through authentic and personal dialogic practices, and foster critical conversations between historically marginalized communities and policy makers. Photovoice research has placed cameras in the hands of participant-researchers in health (Gubrium & Torres, 2013), environmental action research (Fresque-Baxter, 2013), and community-change initiatives (McIntyre, 2003). A smaller number of studies have used photovoice with youth in extracurricular and in-school spaces (Adams & Brooks, 2014; Ohmer 52 & Owens, 2013). Contrary to these possibilities, recent scholarship interrogates photovoice practices in research as functioning to highlight pain and further damage-based narratives, especially in communities of Color (Prins, 2010). The emphasis on civic engagement, in many photovoice and other multimodal research, may limit the scope of what can be learned from this type of participation as necessarily highlighting challenge and damage. Yet, a few exceptions exist that highlight multimodal literacy and photovoice within Ethnic Studies (Cornell & Kessi, 2016; Rios, 2017). Rooted in the knowledges of communities of Color and working within these knowledges to interrogate systems of oppression, photovoice has been placed in the hands of those committed to systems change with their cameras pointed toward the institution itself. Further, without considering networks of community dialogue taking place across spaces such as churches, bodegas, barber shops, and community centers, literacy and education researchers may miss the many opportunities that youth have for being informed about their local contexts. Participatory Cultures & Multimodal Literacies Across School & Community Spaces In coming together to engage in more democratizing and humanizing politics (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison & Weigel, 2006), the literacies practices found in participatory cultures (Jocson, 2008; Kahne & Bowyer, 2019) are referred to as participatory literacies (Kwon & de los Rios, 2019; Mirra & Garcia, 2020). Often the focus of participatory literacies foregrounds networked approaches to civic participation and literacies as being solely grounded in digital literacies. I would assert that what Jenkins, et al. imagine as a “participation gap” (p. 12) lacks a nuanced understanding of historical and current racist structures that reinforce the damage narrative as situated in communities of Color. Instead, I argue that when we understand community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) as being intimately connected to the plethora of 53 strengths present for people of Color and their communities, we are better able to take a critical eye to the racist institutions that are withholding access in pursuit of furthering a capitalist- settler-colonial-nation-state. Assuming that there hasn’t always been a strong sense of participatory culture situated in communities that seek to move past liberation and begin to thrive is dangerous, at worst. At best, to not to take a critical eye toward the racist institutions which so many of us are now a part of, is to miss the importance of what we demand of youth and teachers across community and classroom spaces. One study, for example, situates the possibility of ethnic studies to forward civic interrogation and critical digital literacies in deeply contextual ways that necessarily attend to identity (Kwon & de los Rios, 2019). In their study, the authors engage teacher research to support a greater understanding of youth’s social-civic literacies as a lived-literacy experience. Kwon and de los Rios share that: Digital tools remain central to the lived political and civic realities of young people. However, teachers simply incorporating students’ social media practices, photography, and digital apps in the classroom will not automatically lead to social transformation. Without an acute lens of systemic racial inequity and the honing of students’ critical digital literacies, these classroom projects can easily reproduce harm and “damage- centered” narratives (Tuck, 2009) in historically marginalized communities. (p. 10) Kwon and de los Rios’s argument bears deep consideration when reflecting on youth’s practices in LYV and pre-service teachers forwarding of participatory literacies across the three case studies. Questions arise which have troubled this study and the data analysis in significant ways (see Chapter 5 & 6). In particular, what does it mean to move forward with youth at the helm across community and classroom spaces? Transformation & Multimodal Literacies in Community Learning Spaces Outside of schools and across community learning spaces, youth organizers and community engaged researchers have explored the possibilities of multimodal composing for 54 systems change (Lee & Soep, 2016; Vasudevan, 2014; Wilson, Dasho, Martin, Wallerstein, Wang & Minkler, 2007). In a five year long ethnographic study of an alternative program for court-appointed youth, Vasudevan (2014) engages multimodal cosmopolitanism as both an analytical lens and theoretical framework to “attend to the micro-moments of meaning making across differences to be found in embodied forms of interaction such as laughter, physicality, and physical proximity as well as in the composing of more ephemeral texts such as singing or improvised dialogue” (p.50). The author explicates cosmopolitanism as not bound by nation- state borders, but highlights youth participation in community that transcends both spatial boundaries and digital boundaries, enacted through multimodal composing. The diversity of data collected over this five-year span came from: participant observation, field notes, interviews, documents, literacy artifacts; and, multimodal sources such as photography, audio recordings, and performances. Moving further toward multimodal composing rooted in digital literacies, Lee and Soep (2016) take an interdisciplinary approach to youth’s multimodal composing and transformation of both learning spaces and challenge perspectives on progress and gentrification in their West Oakland neighborhood. The authors forward the concept of what they refer to as Critical Computational Literacy (CCL). They emphasize CCL “provides a way to create and theorize conditions for the potent learning that can take place at the intersection of engineering and computational thinking on the one hand, and narrative production and critical pedagogy on the other” (p.481). Focused on youth and adults sharing experience in transmedia storytelling across Youth Radio Interactives, the project itself highlights an interactive by youth about gentrification in their neighborhood. Working across visual, digital, audio, and remixed forms of multimodal composing, their website West Side Stories, center’s youth of Color’s experiences of their West 55 Oakland neighborhood’s gentrification and challenges deficit perspectives that are currently being used to justify the area’s gentrifying. The authors argue that to truly be free of oppression “we must reimagine, reengineer, and reconstruct the content and the vehicles from which we receive knowledge for ourselves and through which we engage others” (p.90). This brilliant movement, however, is hardly something most youth and teachers have access to within their community resources. Yet, there is much to be learned from the possibilities of engaging with local web designers in the various locations across the country where more of this dynamic work is needed. Solidarity & Multimodal Composing in & out of Schools Far less research and teaching of multimodal composing for solidarity across community (Torre, 2009) and school spaces (Jocson, 2013) has been conducted. Torre (2009) extends the work of multimodal composing to solidarity through a case study of YPAR work enacted with youth from New Jersey and New York at CUNY. This multi-year participatory action research project utilized Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) idea of “nos-ostras” to note that we are all implicated in each other’s lives and in each other’s freedom. Working across diverse modes in both the digital and performing arts and scholarship created opportunities for the co-researching space to become a place of nos-ostras in that youth co-researchers were supported in examining their own positions and implications as a collective. Youth co-researchers noted that they came from “particular communities with our own relationships to research and power; that each of us carry interests and social justice agendas; that we are each differently situated and that we each have varying relationships (to) power and privilege” (p.117). Finally, the team created Echoes, “a performance of poetry and movement based on social justice research” (p.110). Torre’s article is a powerful example to what is possible and what working across both modes and identities for 56 justice makes possible. Across this inquiry with youth and adult co-researchers, I sought to understand how individuals exhibit agency as active and fully participating community members and organizers. Solidarity as Relational By situating our research as secondary to our relationships upon which the work is built, we begin to move in ways that necessarily require us to both look at ourselves with a critical understanding and to reflect on the systems of power with which we are both resisting and are implicated within through a critical lens. The deep histories and geolocal experiences of where we do the work is a necessary step toward understanding the systems of power with which we are contending. Therefore, the work that is taken up that considers these deep histories necessarily situates solidarity as relational and geographical. Among youth and across social-civic literacy practices, which constitute the literacy activities that youth enact in and out of school spaces and across technologies while honoring youth’s linguistic and cultural assets, youth engage in expanded networks of relationality. Fullam (2017) theorizes what he refers to as relational agency. According to the author, “relational agency is belief in the effectiveness of collective action as means to address oppressive conditions; it is an understanding of how ‘people power’ can impact change even when individuals feel powerless alone” (p.409). Taking up this understanding of relational agency and further complicating the idea by identifying the power of relational agency to impact solidarity among racial affinity groups, across racial affinity groups, and interculturally, the following studies further an understanding of reciprocal relationships as being central to solidarity, and collective action through multimodal composing. 57 Solidarity as Relational & Geographical Literacy research and participatory learning environments outside of schools have focused on frameworks of spatial relationships in solidarity (Kinloch, 2010; Watson, 2016; Winn, 2011). Articles and books, such as Kinloch’s (2010) Harlem on our minds: Place, race, and the literacies of urban youth, have focused on the lived realities and literate identities of youth sharing neighborhoods and the variety of relationships to those spaces. Kinloch’s research highlights a community and youth literacy project. In her research youth ethnographers of Color used a variety of collection tools to discuss gentrification of Harlem. Moving across modes such as writing, research memos, and video media collection Kinloch (2010) and the youth ethnographers examine the effects of a rapidly gentrifying Harlem, from youth’s perspectives. Similarly engaging youth in a variety of literacy practices, Watson (2016) works with youth of Color through the focal lens of composing multimodal songs across lyrical and sound literacies with youth in a community music program. This article focuses on what teachers can learn from these community learning spaces. Working in small groups, youth composers work collaboratively to draft, record, and remix their original lyric and sound compositions. Focusing through the lens of spatial relationships, one group referred to as The Detroiters “demonstrate deft and simultaneous uses of both academic literacies and those drawn from their lived experiences, pointedly extending narratives of possibilities within and across their community” (p.59). Both highlighting the struggle and the success of their community and the community members that they share space with, The Detroiters at one point make clear to Watson that they “don’t want to say bad things about Detroit” (p. 59). Their words reflect a noting of the impact of a national deficit-based conversation about Detroit, and a collective need to reject that deficit- 58 based conversation. The author concludes with recommendations from both the work he has engaged in the community music program and from his time as a teacher. These spatial understandings of solidarity are incredibly important in considering the need for a framework of youth literacy participation that is simultaneously local and holds possibility of informing larger literacy research, teaching and learning practices. This requires researchers and teachers positioning themselves in spaces where “relationships are developed, local knowledges are shared, and collective solutions are enacted” (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017, p. 14). In order to enact a lived reality of solidarity, those invited into communities must both become local to where they have been invited, but also take on positions of learners rather than authoritarians or leaders. Solidarity as Relational Among Youth in Racial Affinity Groups Cultivating spaces of solidarity, both within and outside of schools, is sorely needed during this politically violent era. Our current moment may be a continuation of this nation’s long history of settler-colonial violence, but it is one that must be disrupted. Central in this struggle are the fraught race relations that are the bedrock of this country’s foundation and dysfunction. Often, scholars engaging youth in literacy practices reify the dysfunction. Whether intentional or not, this harm must be disrupted. Disrupting race-based violence not only in this country, but globally requires moving toward a framework of solidarity. Much can be learned from working within a framework of solidarity as relational among youth in racial affinity groups. Yet, working with youth who may find themselves in their own racial affinity groups does not allow those of us who may benefit from a system of whiteness from interrogating our own identities constantly and consistently. 59 For example, Butler’s (2016) research, which engages with youth in narrative and arts- based multimodal composing and research, benefits from racial solidarity. Butler, a Black woman scholar, works with a small group of young Black women employing critical feminist methodology working alongside youth to design a collective biography. Butler asserts that working with youth who share her interstitial identity supports a research space where “black girls create texts that rewrite themselves and make sense of their lived experiences, they simultaneously unveil, name and dismantle oppressive structures that have impacted their identities, lived experiences, and ways of being in the world” (p.316). While working to collect data as a critical narrative scholar in this community and arts-based project for “actionist” work centered on youth’s concern with sex trafficking, Baker also navigated her various roles of liaison, participant, and researcher. She concludes with recommendations for teachers, community youth organizers, and researchers. According to the author, more spaces across communities and schools are needed “for young people to develop their own actionist stances, and working alongside youth, as they compose collective biographies to incite social change” (p.328). Butler’s insistence on youth developing their own actionist stances is a departure from scholars who seek to cultivate civic engagement and transformation (or resistance). This is a necessary turn in understanding work with and alongside youth as facilitation of youth vision, participation, and leadership, rather than imposing our own understanding of critical consciousness, as scholars and teachers. Solidarity as Relational Across Racial Affinity Groups Community solidarity is certainly not a new idea. Across news media and social-civic literacies much has been recorded in both popular media (Hijazi, 2018) and educational research (Cammarota & Romero, 2006) about the inherent strength of community coalition building 60 (Yull, Blitz, Thompson & Murray, 2014) and collaboration (Guishard, 2009). Stories of youth and community members of Color and white teachers and administrators coming together for educational justice or focused on community coalition building across Black and Latin communities are more commonly highlighted. Little research, however, has centered the experiences of community coalition building across Indigenous and Latinx communities. One notable exception to this lack of literature, Torrez, Ramos, Gonzales, Del Hierro, and Cuevas’s (2017) collaborative storytelling project and research pushes against the digital prevalence of multimodal composition through engaging a collective of storytellers across print and hand-drawn visual and text modes. The collective, Nuestros Cuentos, consists of four disparate groups: undergraduates from a residential college, undergraduates supported by the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at a large Midwestern land grant university, elementary students from a nearby school district, and youth and community organizers from the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program (IYEP). Nuestros Cuentos has published four illustrated anthologies of children’s stories, four mini-documentaries, produced over 100 pieces of accompanying artwork, and organized several community events. Many of the stories that Nuestros Cuentos have published not only represent the diversity of Latinx youth, but also share their bilingual assets. Further evidence of engaging in multimodal literacies is seen through the authors’ arguments regarding listening, “listening, as described by Indigenous, Feminist and women of color, is a practice of critically analyzing the information, representations and/or knowledges we are hearing and not hearing.” (p.103). Depth of listening is central to the relationships built in this project. Rooted in the work of Indigenous women scholars (Archibald, 2008; Steinhauer, 2002), listening is not only central to relationality, but also respect. According to Steinhauer (2002), “respect means you listen intently to others’ ideas, that you do not insist 61 that your idea prevails” (p.73). Much can be learned from the Indigenous understanding and respect for deep listening, as teachers, students, researchers, youth, and collaborating community members create multimodal compositions toward solidarity. Solidarity as Relational, an Intercultural Perspective Moving across racial and cultural identities, Sobré-Denton’s (2016) cross-case study takes up a theory of “virtual cosmopolitanism” in multimodal literacies and composing. The author asserts that, “cosmopolitanism, global/local identities, and civic activism do not necessarily or automatically result from the mere presence of technology and the capability to connect with physically and culturally distant” (p.1718) people across social-civic literacy platforms. Sobré-Denton analyzes virtual cosmopolitan practices of youth across modes in three different cases. Exploring how virtual cosmopolitanism may already exist and be enacted by youth as a means of “trans-local and transnational community coalition building” (p.1716), the author concludes with implications for grassroots organizational work and virtual cosmopolitanism. Further, bridge building must be highlighted as part of continuing education for teachers, especially teachers of English Language Arts. Thus, far more research is needed that speaks to intercultural bridge building across modes and lived realities. Discussion: Research Recommendations for Multimodal Composing in Solidarity Across this critical review of the literature, I have sought to understand and catalog some of the ways in which educational researchers engage with and alongside youth in civic, organizing, and activist literacies, particularly in new literacy studies. Building with various modes of engagement, the multimodal composing literature reviewed was often most humanizing when working with and alongside youth in participatory learning and action. Inquiring about liberatory practices that teachers and researchers engage with youth to address 62 inequity and injustice through multimodal composing, it is located in studies situated in community learning spaces from which much can be learned for dominant schooling spaces that seek to work with youth in more equitable practice. Further, considering how English Education teachers and literacy researchers are learning from youth epistemologies and experiences regarding their own social-civic literacy practices raised more questions than answers. Much work is needed that not only theorizes, but also enacts practices that highlight social-civic multimodal composing in and out of school. Overall, much more work is needed to understand solidarity practices for literacy researchers and teachers that center solidarity and youth epistemologies as foundational. Bringing together a theoretical framework of multiliteracy and coalitional civic resistance creates possibilities for disrupting the “patriarchal, cisheteronormative, English-monolingual, ableist, classist, xenophobic, Judeo-Christian” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p.2) and white gaze that literacy research and English teaching curricula continues to reproduce. It means working from within communities, schools, and universities with which we have access to make change. Not that change envisioned solely by the educational research community. Rather, change envisioned by youth and communities with which we all owe such a debt—for raising us or employing us, for the many resources that continue to be extracted in the name of progress, and for the Indigenous and communities of Color cultural knowledges and practices which are woven across all our worlds. Further, building towards a literacy research, teaching, and learning framework of participatory multimodal composing for solidarity supports creating possibilities of bridges across communities, into classrooms, and beyond. 63 Humanizing Multiliteracies Work in YPAR Recent turns in humanization have shed light on ways of knowing that provide hope, connection, relationship, and respect to a long history of work that has been far too intrusive and harmful—education research. Paris (2013) and Winn and Ubiles (2011) provide a foundation for entering work where the researcher must “respect the humanity of the people who invite us into their worlds and help us answer questions about educational, social, and cultural justice” (Paris & Winn, 2013, p. xv). Paris and Winn touch on the care that is necessary to begin the work from a place of centering humanity and lived experiences of our community partners, collaborators, and conspirators—as well as ourselves. One such possibility for this is offered through “worthy witnessing” (Winn & Ubiles, 2011, p.294), which forwards the notion of a four-phase progression in building relationship that centers our collaborators’ voices: admission, declaration, revelation, and confidentiality. The first phase, admission, is a multilayered process of beginning relationship building that requires both care and time. This notion of time is possibly one of the most problematic when thinking of the interventions that usually come quickly in classroom or learning spaces in which researchers swiftly enter and just as quickly leave. What does it mean to enter community work and how is it done? Considerations of care and time are necessary, but what does it mean to care? Lamont Hill (2009), Tuck (2008), and Diaz-Strong, Duarte, Gomez, and Meiners (2013) reflect care-filled considerations of co-creating the work. Lamont Hill (2009) notes the tensions and necessary role switching when “negotiating the complex relationships between the researcher and the multiple roles and contexts in which they operate in order to resist the practice of ‘othering’ research participants” (p.131). Turning back to the idea of admission (Winn & Ubiles, 2011), I contemplate how we begin to construct 64 these complex relationships wherein we note the privileging of our participants vision and voice, while also negotiating with/in systems that may or may not share our stance-taking of what it means to work with and alongside communities? Constructing the work in desire-centered (Tuck, 2008) practices that convey broad entries into work with/in systems is a negotiation that I am mindful of entering as cautiously as possible. Through working collectively new understandings of ways of knowing can prove to yield rich collaborations wherein the work I do is accountable to those with whom I work. Moving from theorizing work with youth to engaging work alongside young people requires invitation. This final phase of admission, “admission into individual students’ lives” (Winn & Ubiles, 2011, p.301), left me most anxious when thinking through the inception of this work. During planning for the first semester at the community center, I found connections to a variety of teaching artists willing to spend their time with “the kids”, undergraduate preservice teachers who would act as mentors and facilitators with a desire to work in the community, and collaborations with the youth director. This stance-taking may have led youth to what I understood to be feelings of excitement. As one young woman shared, “I’ma need some more of these”, referring to the flyers advertising our fall lineup. My experience has taught me that this quick switch from what I perceived to be guarded curiosity to excitement, is a genuine response and an invitation, of sorts. What moves were made? A conversation was had the first season we partnered with Littleton Parks and Recreation, with youth, that included their thoughts about what the work would encompass. According to Bucholtz, Casillas, and Lee (2017), “If a CSP (culturally sustaining pedagogies) approach truly sustains the language and culture of youth of color, and these in turn sustain young people’s identities, then the impact of CSP should be evident not only 65 in specific vivid moments…but also over longer periods of time” (p.53). In seeking to implement a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project that is culturally sustaining, it becomes necessary for me to deeply consider and constantly check-in with youth, mentors, community members, and culture workers. In deeply reflecting and building with youth and community in ways that honors their cultural knowledge and practices, I consider the notion of coming into the work with the communities of Color local to where I find myself. What does it mean to engage in community work in culturally sustaining ways? As I engaged the process of entering into a community partnership with Littleton Parks and Recreation, this question has been at the forefront of my mind. The invitation to come through and work with the teen director in building free teen nights at Littleton’s westside community center felt like a probationary invitation. An invitation into the community, as a “vested outsider” (McCarty, Wyman & Nicholas, 2014, p. 55), is not to be taken lightly. It was not an invitation that I expected to receive and I am aware, due to other discussions with Tyrell, that it is not something that happens often. For me, community-engaged work demands consistently showing up and not asking for anything more than that invitation in return, but rather to look for every opportunity to reciprocate that partnership with whatever I possibly can. Tuck and Yang (2014) note the need for researchers to begin “resisting the draw to traffic theories that cast communities as in need of salvation” and I am reminded of the necessity to refuse my own initial thinking. Who am I to attempt to organize collaborations across spaces that may not be desired by the teen director himself? Remembering my role, as a “vested outsider”, means stopping myself short, humbly questioning, communicating, listening deeply, clarifying, and connecting the dots if that is called for by both the teen director and the community. 66 In my commitments to the community space, I would come to learn what it meant to balance my commitments across communities. First and foremost, came my commitment to Littleton’s youth. From 2017 through 2020, this youth participatory action research program would grow to become Littleton’s first and only free structured youth program during my time as program director of what became Littleton Youth Voices (formerly Breaking Silence). As an adult facilitator and organizer for LYV over the past five years, I argue that the LYV space is one in which youth’s multimodal composing is enacted from civic engagement to radical solidarity. Additionally, this study examines the ways in which youth work collectively toward coalitional organizing action with collaborating community organizations. Furthermore, attending to building sustainable and reciprocal relationships meant increased opportunities to engage with preservice English teachers across their student teaching year. Thus, the findings from this study not only illuminate the purposes for youth multimodal composing in community literacy spaces, but also in classroom spaces. 67 CHAPTER 4: MODES OF INQUIRY “Finally there is gratitude, the need to be thankful for the work of research as spiritual methodology, as a healing process for ourselves and others. Gratitude here means the quality or feeling of being grateful, of being aware and present to the deep and abiding love of Spirit, whether called God, Goddess, Allah, Buddha, or Divine Energy. It is the acknowledgement of service to ‘something bigger’ that guides the very purposes of our research.” ~ Dillard (2008, p. 289) Abolitionist movements have long been rooted in spiritual principles. The necessary characteristics one must possess to stay rooted in the work of solidarity must come from a humble desire to be of service. This spirit-led work, for which I am deeply grateful, comes from a willingness and tenacity to stay rooted in solidarity work, not due to the recent popularity of “social justice”, some warped desire to save, and certainly not to a misled belief that any issues exist in the communities or youth of Color with which I seek to stand alongside. Originally, the purpose of this study was to explore youth’s engagement and purpose for multimodal composing in a youth participatory action research project. Building of this research project, and especially the relational building, began in 2015 when I first began my graduate work at the university. Though, an argument could be made that the development of this study began much earlier in my life. This not to center myself in the work, but rather to explain how I have come to develop this hybrid space in the research. I have come with the knowledges and stories that have been shared with me, and I have come to understand that the purpose in the invitations of the spaces I have been welcomed into has been grounded in the possibilities of sharing a model (certainly not, the model) of how this work can be taken up both by (white) teachers and youth workers. Thus, the purpose of this study has become to build on the knowledge of youth, communities, and scholars of Color to provide a bridge for majority teachers (see Chapter 1) to develop praxis that works to push back against the “patriarchal, cisheteronormative, English-monolingual, ableist, classist, 68 xenophobic, Judeo-Christian” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p.2), or as I have come to embrace it--to train agitators. Coming to understand that my solidarity is rooted in my experiences in education (both my own and in teaching), and my feelings of indebtedness to whose kitchen tables I was raised at (namely the Latinx and Black families in our neighborhoods who took me in when things were too chaotic in my own home) has become important self-work in my own anti-racist healing. This, for me, has created what scholars in critical race theory sometimes refer to as interest convergence (Milner, 2008). Thus, it becomes important to establish my positionality. In doing so, it is not my desire to convince anyone of why I should be working alongside youth of Color, but rather to describe what experiences and commitments have converged to make the work I do particularly suited for me. That is, my working with and alongside youth of Color to support (white) teachers in classroom spaces across the U.S. to take up the work of what I refer to as coalitional civic resistance. Researcher Positionality Through an analysis of my identities as both raced and racialized, it is necessary to unpack the privileges of how I am read. As white-presenting, the privileges that my white skin affords me provides me with benefits that are based on my skin tone—not shared by all of the members of my family. Both my grandfather and my mother share stories that I have heard, but never experienced. Stories of racial slurs connected to their features when racialized as “Other” (Harris, 1993, p.285), stories of doors closed and boundaries impossible to cross which prevented my grandfather and my mother from ever fully opting into whiteness. My racialization, as white, comes with social advantages that have benefited me in education. The many Black and Brown neighborhoods that I both grew up in and have lived in across my life in 69 working-poor areas of metro Chicago, Indianapolis, and Atlanta have left me with further feelings of alterity in majority white communities. However, how I am read by the world has provided me access and has continued to mark me as not a threat or cause for concern by administrators, authority, and government agents whose existence seems to hinge on reifying white racial dominance. Lacking access to proper healthcare, further educational attainment after high school, and without support for social mobility, an analysis of my identity based upon how one is reading me lacks necessary intersectionality. Crenshaw (1991) suggests that an intersectional analysis is necessary as: The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. (p.1252) As a working-poor, second generation U.S. citizen, and first-generation scholar, my own K12 schooling experiences had been marked by a distinct lack of success for many reasons. Though I received a high school diploma, my culminating grade point average was only a 1.4 out of 4. My early understanding of who schools were and were not for had been shaped in part by family discourse, in part by educational tracking not preparing me for entry into college, and in part by my overall feeling of rejection inside of a raceclassist system (Leonardo, 2013). My entry into higher education was an economic struggle at the time, as I worked days and went to school nights and weekends over a period of about seven years to attain my degree. Entering the small commuter campus just north of Atlanta in the early 2000s, I understood my desire to go into education to be of service to kids “like me”. Yet, the question that seemed to follow me like a shadow, was what did “like me” even mean? 70 Feelings of alterity have haunted me across my life. These feelings have existed among other young people who shared my geographic location, whether real (urban contexts) or imagined (suburbs that I am typically assumed to be from). Often finding myself least comfortable in majority white spaces, but altogether and increasingly aware of the spaces I have and continue to take up in communities of Color. Additionally, regardless of my debt to income ratio (due to pursuit of education) or the working-poor neighborhood in which my mother and her husband still reside, I have continually been mistaken for middle class or more due to educational attainment. These feelings of alterity were further fueled by my early identification as queer. However, even in the queer community, my dating across or outside of the gender binary often makes me an outsider. Somehow not queer enough to fully be recognized by the LGBTQ+ community, while also not being straight. Queer women of Color have long theorized the liminal space that is held by those of us in the Queer community who hold other marginalized identities (Anzaldua, 1998). It is important to note these liminal spaces in which I will always find myself, as it makes me an outsider no matter where I find myself. However, it also provides pathways of making me incredibly useful in research and teaching. I regard the space that I take up in the research and teaching as a sort of hybrid space. Moving across communities, in liminal space, with which I seem to have had a lifetime of preparation and a spirit-led desire to be of maximum usefulness to my spirits and my fellows, led to finding my way into community-engaged work with youth in urban contexts, predominantly youth of Color. Recognizing the assets of the invitations that I receive across communities, but also the responsibility has meant not only finding the places where my spirit is fed, community- engaged work, but also where I can be most useful. Namely, this usefulness brought me back out of the community and into higher education spaces where I could support the predominantly 71 white teachers I have worked with over the last five years into interrogating their own commitments. This has led to supporting preservice teachers in critical community-engaged participatory literacies, which in turn has broadened my original research questions for this study. Seeking to be of service, both in the work that I have taken up with mostly youth of Color across the last five years, and to the “future agitators” (as I have come to lovingly refer to the preservice English teachers) that the extended inquiry has been taken up with across the last three years. The limitations of this study are solely my own. I have made certain to “member check” with those whom I am still in relationship, such as Adrianna (pseudonym) who went from youth participant to mentor/adult facilitator, Marie (pseudonym) who has extended the work that I began at the westside community center, Venus (pseudonym) who was an early mentor and a preservice teacher in the community space while also appearing again later in the case study of three student teachers, and Edie (pseudonym) whose involvement in the research began with the YPAR practicum and extended into the case study of three student teachers. I am responsible, as well, to the many youth who have come and gone in these YPAR projects from 2017-2019. However, their desire to read the chapters in which our projects are included was very little, as they saw the completion of their chosen action projects as sufficient. So, I move through the following findings chapters centering all of my various communities’ words and work as unfiltered as possible. Yet, I have come to trouble analysis as a hindrance or an opportunity to highlight. It is my deepest desire that the work I put forth that shares our stories over the years serves only to highlight their brilliance, creativity, and commitment to coalitional civic resistance. 72 Opening & Relevant Research Questions In the very beginning of this study, it was my intention to focus solely on Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) with youth of (mostly) Color in urban contexts in a community learning and literacy space. I sought to understand the following research questions: 1. In what ways and for what purposes do youth engage with multimodal composing? 2. What are the specific literacies enacted by youth, adult facilitators, and community partners during collaborative and coalitional action? In the summer of 2016, this course of inquiry seemed to be the center of my attention for a few reasons. First, I had experience and history teaching and learning with youth of Color in urban contexts. Though I engaged in both participatory literacies and multimodalism, I didn’t yet have the language to understand that was what I had been doing. Instead, I knew that leaving the community, families, and especially youth with which I had been last teaching and learning and moving out of state to pursue a doctoral degree was a tougher transition than I had anticipated. Additionally, I knew that working with first generation, working-poor, and (majority) youth of Color in urban contexts was an anchor for me in navigating my experiences across the decade of teaching and learning experiences that lay behind me. Furthermore, I understood that spending weekly time (at the least) with youth who identified in the ways listed above was something that I needed to get back to in order to achieve some semblance of my normal. Second, I was curious about a wider (and I would argue deeper) understanding of adolescent youth’s (multi)literacies. Though I had always taught arts-informed English, I wasn't yet familiar with the encompassing nature of multimodalism (both digital and arts-based). For me, a large part of this arts-informed orientation came from my own cultural background. I had been raised with my mother’s family who are all singers, musicians, dancers, and artists. I began 73 sketching and painting (and dancing) before I could walk, and certainly before I could write or read. As I began to find my way to the language and scholarship of multimodalism, I was dismayed to first find that much of this work was rooted in a very scientific understanding of literacies. There was, at least to my early understanding, far less work that centered how and for what purposes youth utilized these literacies to not just read the word and the world, but more importantly (to me) to inform and shape their understanding of the world. Additionally, I had a long history of attending to and sharing stories as a way to build relationship with the many communities that I moved in and out of as I moved across the U.S., and eventually the world. This relationship building is informed both by having grown up with my mother’s parents (whose home I would come to live in at various points across my youth and into my late adolescence) who never knew a stranger, and as a way to build relationship in the various communities (especially communities of Color) that I have shared space with across my lifetime. As someone who found myself rejecting and refusing what I was coming to understand as education research early in my graduate studies, I sought time with folks in my department and across campus who attended to relationships both in ways that felt more familiar and in the many ways with which I continue to learn. I found myself drawn to scholars who were doing work that I felt a deep respect for, which led me to learning Indigenous (and decolonizing), Black, and Latinx ways of being and valuing research. Whereas my teacher education department was constructed to have me learn from majority white and traditional scholarship, I found myself far more drawn to interdisciplinary scholarship that was rooted in what I would come to understand as humanizing education and research. 74 Building out both relationships and research across the span of my five years in graduate school supported a shift in my questions, while also supporting my coming to understand my usefulness in the work. As I grew and learned from both being mentored in the work across spaces of Indigenous and Black scholarship, so too did my questions change. I came to see the utility in training “future agitators” who had their own commitments to educational justice. Furthermore, I had the opportunity (thanks to strong mentorship) to develop a second line of inquiry that would overlap with my original desire to work with and alongside youth in urban contexts, as opposed to unnecessarily turning my white (presenting) gaze to examining them. As such, the following questions encompass both a revisioning of my initial questions, while also bringing together a second study that would support my building toward confluence in my work. Thus, these questions became: 1. In what ways and for what purposes do youth engage with participatory literacies and multimodal composing? a. What specific literacies are forwarded during collaborative and coalitional inquiry and action? b. In what ways are youth learning, asserting, or possibly reclaiming their civic identity across their literacies practice? 2. How do preservice English teachers, who were adult facilitators in the YPAR space, provide opportunities for elements of YPAR in their teaching placements? This list of questions is meant to illuminate how I am currently coming to understand the research that I am engaged in across communities. However, in coming to this point of revisioning these questions, I come to understand that I must always position myself as a learner who only seeks to honor the communities along which I learn. As such, I expect that as I 75 continue to learn, grow, and change--so, too, will my research questions. This multiple methods study utilizes ethnographic case study of three youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects, case studies from three pre-service teachers, and narrative inquiry derived from building moments and the research memos written from those moments. Data Collection & Modes of Inquiry In order to better understand the multiplicity of relationships (or as I refer to it, multirelational), the various purposes of literacies and multimodalism engaged, and the possibilities for humanizing YPAR, I have arrived at a need for a multiple and mixed methods study. This study is the amalgam of YPAR (Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015), ethnography (Paris, 2011), and case study (Yin, 2011). When engaging in this multiple and mixed methods study, it is important to gather from multiple sources to better understand the variety of research questions I am posing. In order to better understand these units of study, I collected a variety of data sources such from both the YPAR cases, focusing on the 2017 pilot study, the 2018 collaborative, and the 2019 summer program. There is a variety of data that was collected comes from youth’s multimodal artifacts, co-constructed research protocol, participant research memos, my own research reflections as I built our collaboration with Littleton’s Parks and Recreation, fieldnotes, interviews with adult facilitators, and youth storytelling. In the overlapping and additional study of community-engaged preservice English teachers, the data gathered comes from PSTs’ field notes (as well as my own), PSTs’ research memos, PSTs’ response to an assignment that was collected in 2019 during their year-long student teaching placements, PSTs’ teacher-collected data, PSTs’ (and youth’s) Community Asset Maps, and PSTs’ lesson plans for their design of lessons informed by their own values as critical, multimodal, and participatory teaching methods (as they have envisioned and enacted) as they developed their Teacher Inquiry 76 assignment. The variety of data taken up across the work provides opportunities for what we refer to as triangulation (Yin, 2006, p. 115). Further centering relationships in all of my work, I shared pieces of the written analysis of research with Adrianna (youth co-researcher and later adult facilitator of YPAR), the Teen Director that I came to work most closely with in the community literacy space (Marie), and two of the PSTs whose year-long student teaching placements into which I was able to follow. In an effort to be as accountable as possible to my various communities and continue caring for those relationships, I requested that each of these individuals provide me with a written response as to the accuracy of my analysis. In research, we refer to this as “member checking” (Peltier, 2018). Finally, since so much of relational work is understood through stories, I worked to infuse narrative memos across this study crafted from fieldnotes that I took up across the years 2016-2020. Ethnography Ethnographic methods allow for a comprehensive understanding of youth’s community and coalitional engagement over a period of years. Further, by engaging ethnographic methods I have had the unique opportunity to trouble the role of the participant-observer, often maneuvering from facilitator to mentor and back to observer. Employing ethnographic methods (Anderson, 1989; Bhatt, de Roock & Adams, 2015; Paris, 2011; Prins, 2017; Yin, 2013) over the since 2016 in building and working with LYV, I have collected field notes, research memos, youth literacy and multimodal artifacts, and interviews with the Teen Director, Marie. For this ethnography, I further build on community partner interviews, youth journal entries, and youth’s co-construction and collection of data collection from their YPAR projects. Drawing on youth’s mutlimodal literacies (arts-based and digital), as well as co-constructed protocol and data collection across YPAR projects, provided opportunities to highlight youth’s commitments to 77 coalitional civic resistance. To further contextualize the building of a sustainable YPAR program with Littleton Parks and Recreation, I have drawn on research reflections that were constructed during the building out of the first season of the YPAR project as I began building relationship with various members of the community, including youth. The inclusion of these research reflections supports understanding the critical reading and thinking that I was engaged in during this time. Though at first this study was focused on YPAR, opportunities availed themselves to bring in two cohorts of preservice English teachers into YPAR. In the beginning, this was due to community-engaged connections that I hold across spaces and at the request of my community partners to provide more mentoring in the community center. During this first season of engaging PSTs in the YPAR space at the community center, I collected data across fieldnotes, research memos, and exit interviews with those mentors. Reflecting on our first cohort of preservice teachers in the YPAR space, it was clear that further preparation of PSTs would be necessary to support their understanding of both YPAR and the humanizing spaces that we were working to construct with and alongside youth, which did not look like the classroom spaces with which PSTs were more familiar. This understanding came from both my fieldnotes of various instances of PSTs trying to “maintain classroom control” and from exit interviews with the PSTs themselves. Further opportunities availed themselves of creating bridges between English and Teacher Education at the university, which led to further involvement with my teaching a YPAR English Education practicum the following year. The YPAR English Education practicum provided a grounding in YPAR research literature, as well as engaging PSTs in co-researching in their own YPAR project, based at the university. This fall practicum led to a spring participation with PSTs in community-engaged work across YPAR projects with 78 youth. Across this collection, data gathered come from PSTs’: co-constructed fieldnotes, research memos, and final reflections of their engagement across the year. Finally, forwarding deeper understandings of community-engaged PSTs and their highlighting of multimodal literacies, critical literacy, and participatory literacies were examined through my co-teaching of their year-long student teaching placements. Of these PSTs, I was able to follow two into their classroom engagements. As such, the dearth of my data collection comes from their Teacher Inquiry assignment (Appendix 5), which provided ample opportunity for PSTs to forward their values through a participatory evaluation, which was meant to model the possibilities of participatory literacies through scaffolding engagement with their students, as well as their construction of a Community Asset Map. Further, PSTs’ written reflections of their data collection, mapping, lesson planning, and instruction led to the final piece of collection for this assignment. Youth Participatory Action Research Over the past four years, youth in LYV have collected survey data, oral histories, interviews, and visual artifacts within our various YPAR projects. The data collection has been driven by youth inquiry, vision, and desire for more information---and in particular the type of information that youth have an interest in collecting. While data collection methods in YPAR projects have always been chosen by youth, the range of data has included survey data, interviews, oral histories, collages, and multimodal assemblages driven by youth-guided prompts. Though youth have collected a wide variety of data across the years of YPAR projects and have advanced their inquiry into a variety of action, in this study I focus on two of these projects. The first, a YPAR project from 2017 was the pilot for YPAR inquiry. Across this 79 research, data collection was gathered from fieldnotes, agenda minutes, research memos, co- constructed protocol for both multimodal assemblages and oral histories, photostories, multimodal assemblages, audio collection came from oral histories, and the pod cast served to become the first public piece of action from across YPAR engagements. In the second YPAR project highlighted in this inquiry, data was compiled from fieldnotes, research memos, co-constructed protocol for both multimodal collages and interviews, surveys, recommendations gathered during our collaborative meeting with a local LGBTQ+ youth group, and the presentation for Littleton’s school board was designed as the second public piece of action from across YPAR engagements. The third case, 2019 YPAR provides evidence of further and ongoing building for sustainability with Littleton Parks and Recreation. Across the third YPAR case, fieldnotes, audio from YPAR meetings, research memos, co-researcher journals, co-constructed protocol for the surveys and interviews, survey data, multimodal assemblages, photographs of collaborative meeting posters, and the third public piece of action, an arts and storytelling night was presented in collaboration with a local media’s storytelling night. Narrative Inquiry Though both ethnography and YPAR are capable of deeply capturing the data that I have and will collect for this study, I believe that there would be something missing from the telling of this particular study if I did not include narratives. Narrative inquiry holds possibilities for sharing the unfolding and connective moments of relationality (Ochs & Capps, 2001; Schaafsma & Vinz, 2011). These narratives were crafted from field notes and research memos, in order to honor the larger telling of the relational actions taken up across the larger study. Sharing stories of the various moments in which collaboration and collective action are enacted provides further 80 depth to the telling of this study. Whether these moments be with community partners, between community-engaged PSTs and youth, or youth’s sharing of their own stories, the various narrative excerpts have been included to share the depth of relational moments that ethnography and YPAR data was built upon. Context of the Inquiry In the summer of 2015, I moved from Indianapolis to Littleton. At the time, I recall that I thought I was going from one “small city” to...well...a large town. The large, northern midwestern, land-grab university is located in a place I refer to as East Littleton. East Littleton is a large university-centered suburb that borders Littleton (pseudonym). There was much that I didn’t quite understand about Littleton. Its long history as a space that was colonized to make room for industry, the car manufacturing industry that would go bust sometime in the late 80s and again in the 90s which would give way to what is often referred to as white flight, and the resulting economic disparity between East Littleton and Littleton. I would come to understand that Littleton, as the capital city of the state, was largely divested from by governing bodies who had reaped the benefits of industry, only to divert funding for the city’s infrastructure and schools into bailing out large companies, instead. Yet, what I came to learn at the deepest level was the strength of its people, the refusal of so many to go quietly, and the love folks who stayed had cultivated to continue to grow their communities. I came to appreciate Littleton’s grassroot spirit, and to share heart-held commitments with communities across the city. In short, Littleton became one of my hometowns. Littleton Youth Voices In summer of 2017, I organized and facilitated the first cohort group of Littleton Youth Voices (LYV), a community-based civic youth inquiry group. As an organizer and facilitator for 81 the community-based civic youth inquiry group, Littleton Youth Voices (LYV) holds a central tenet, we believe in the power of youth’s coalitional organizing to leverage their collective vision for social justice. Youth visionaries work in cohort groups across an academic semester (which became referred to as “seasons”) or a multi-week summer experience. Youth collaborate to choose research topics, select data collection methods, the manner in which we collect our data, what stories we gather from that data collection, and the ways in which these stories are publicly shared as the action approach to reporting out the research findings. Youth learn through powerful collaboration to design inquiry, co-construct data collection protocol, and multimodal composing through which to share their work, such as podcasts. Table 2. YPAR Co-Researching Participants 2017 YPAR Year Age Gender Identity Race Adrianna 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 Ella Marianna Bella Bridgette Lysa Angie Lexi Participants 18 18 18 18 18 18 24 29 ciswoman ciswoman ciswoman ciswoman ciswoman ciswoman ciswoman Mixed (Latinx/white) Black Latinx white white white Mixed (Black/white) ciswoman white The VolunTeen program participants will meet weekly with me, for two hours to conduct an inquiry into a topic of their choosing. Each of the five campsites takes on a maximum of 3 VolunTeens, ranging in age from 13-17 years old. Historically, the VolunTeens have been a 82 fairly accurate sample of the population in the greater area of this mid -size Midwestern city. A mix of both racial and gender identities, but primarily from working-poor families. Participants will be recruited through the Parks and Rec’s summer VolunTeen program, which historically has been situated to support the department’s youth camp. Applications for the program are managed through the summer season brochure for the department that is sent out to the city’s residents. Table 3. YPAR Co-Researching Participants 2018 YPAR Year Age Gender Identity Race Drew Malik Shelly Spring Adrianna 2018 2018 2018 2018 Venus 2018 Bradley 2018 13 13 16 13 19 26 26 cisman cisman ciswoman ciswoman ciswoman white Black white white Mixed (Latinx/white) Gender non- binary Mixed (Black/white) cisman white Table 4. YPAR Co-Researching Participants 2019 YPAR Year Age Gender Identity Race Shiloh Christopher Damon Shaun Shyvonne Yulia 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 2019 cisman cisman cisman cisman ciswoman Black Black white white Black ciswoman Latinx 15 15 15 15 15 15 83 Table 4 (cont’d) Kris Allycia Marie 2019 2019 2019 15 15 25 Gender non- conforming ciswoman ciswoman white Black white Table 5. Preservice English Teachers 2018-2020 Cohort Year Age Gender Identity Race Venus 2019/2020 Lisa Edie 2019/2020 2019/2020 26 22 22 Gender non- binary Mixed (Black/white) ciswoman Gender non- binary white white There are folks to whom I am indebted, with whom I have built relationships, and who are mentioned in the chapters across this work. However, these are not people who were co- researching or are featured in significant ways that demand the kind of introduction that I believe illustrates the importance of their identities to the work. Tyrell (the original Teen Director with whom I began relationship building), Wren (who first invited me to submit an application to Littleton Parks and Recreation and who made sure that application ended up in the right hands), Julie (the Assistant Director of Littleton Parks and Recreation, who I continue to build with), and others who are not mentioned in name more than once, but who supported my building of connected relationship building across Littleton. I am deeply grateful for all of these relationships and for the trust that so many folks put in me. 84 Data Analysis & Coding Across the greater breadth of this ethnography, various methods of data collection were taken up. For the YPAR projects, I sought to understand what relational moves youth made across their inquiry to action process. In order to understand these relational moves, I sought a form of analysis that would support my coming to know the ways in which youth enacted kinship, both in their collaborative teams and across coalitions. As I responded to community partners’ requests, this study expanded out to a broader study of preservice teachers’ engagement with coalitional civic resistance in their classroom spaces. Coming to understand the commitments that PSTs held in their envisioning and enacting of instruction brought me to engage in value coding (Saldana, 2016), especially as these enactments related to what PSTs valued in the work. In order to more fully understand the work that youth and I have done over the last several years of YPAR engagement, an analysis that would highlight the mutli-relational work youth have conducted seemed a necessary framework of analysis. This multi-relational analysis was embedded to make sense of youth’s purposes for engaging multimodal and participatory literacies as part of the value coding that was done for this chapter. This provided opportunities to highlight the ways in which youth engaged in creating a space of sincerity in their building of relationships with each other, with and alongside other community members and organizations, and in the work. This process of analysis has been laid out, below: 85 Table 6. Coalitional Civic Resistance For youth in solidarity work seeking to build toward coalitional civic resistance (Co)Relational Problem Posing Critical Literacy Development Engaging YPAR as a pedagogical space - recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship through self-storying - recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship - recognizing one’s own relationship to both the topic and the group, and the benefits or limitations of that relationship - seeking to work collaboratively with others who may have lived experience with the topic of inquiry - identifying whose perspectives are missing from the conversation - seeking out existing data on questions that youth pose for inquiry with an eye for having a variety of primary sources - collecting a variety of resources for understanding complex issues before problem posing (news sources, social media, music, art, etc…) whatever youth find compelling to creating a more complex understanding of the topic Civic - strengthens youth’s community relationships as collaborations are forwarded toward coalitional research - authoring data collection protocol specific to the information gathered from critical analysis of existing data on questions forwarded - creating a variety of multimodal (both digital and arts based) products for a variety of specific audiences based on data collection 86 Table 6 (cont’d) Resistance - enrolling already existing communities/organi zations in collaboration to both leverage a larger platform for youth action and working alongside to consciously engage in youth action that cares for community and cultivates further relationship building - seeking to stand alongside in powerful coalition with other communities/ organizations who have been addressing the topic - strengthens youth’s community relationships as collaborations are forwarded toward coalitional action by youth - collecting a variety of data sources for understanding complex issues to address youth inquiry - digging deeper to understand who is funding the information being distributed - examining who is contributing to the conversation and who may be missing - envisioning and enacting action that youth feel addresses the topic of inquiry in whatever way youth find compelling to creating a more complex understanding of the topic for the identified audience To summarize, nine codes emerged from this multi-relational analysis of youth in YPAR projects. Further, this multi-relational analysis builds out the conceptual framework of coalitional civic resistance, these codes are in bold (above) and have been included in this list: ● As related to (co)relational: ○ recognizing one’s own relationship through self-storying (self-work/relational) 87 ○ seeking to work collaboratively with others who may have lived experience (collaborative/relational) ○ recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations (self-work/relational) ○ identifying whose perspectives are missing (coalitional/relational) ○ recognizing one’s own relationship to both the topic of inquiry and the group (collaborative/relational) ○ seeking out existing data on questions in a variety of primary sources (collaborative/relational) ○ collecting a variety of resources for understanding complex issues; whatever youth find compelling to creating a more complex understanding of the topic (collaborative/relational) ● As related to Civic: ○ strengthens youth’s community relationships toward coalitional research (coalitional communication/reciprocal relationships) ○ enrolling already existing communities/organizations in collaboration and consciously engage in youth action that cares for community and cultivates further relationship building (coalitional engagement/reciprocal relationships) ○ authoring data collection protocol (collaborative communication/reciprocal relationships) ○ collecting a variety of data sources for understanding complex issues (collaborative engagement/reciprocal relationships) 88 ○ creating a variety of multimodal (both digital and arts based) products based on data collection (relevant communication/reciprocal relationships) ● As related to resistance: ○ seeking to stand alongside in powerful coalition with other communities/organizations (relevant collaborations/respectful relationships) ○ strengthens youth’s community relationships toward coalitional action (coalitional collaborations/respectful relationships) ○ digging deeper to understand who is funding the information (relevant awareness- building/respectful relationships) ○ examining who is contributing to the conversation (relevant awareness building/respectful relationships) ○ envisioning and enacting action that youth feel addresses the topic of inquiry toward creating a more complex understanding of the topic (relevant collaborations/respectful relationships) Grounded in anti-racist action (Baker-Bell, 2020), decolonial methodologies (Patel, 2016), and community-based participatory action research (Guishard, 2009), three tenets undergird the larger themes that emerged: Building Toward Collaboration as Self -Work & Peer Work (which highlights multimodal curating); Collaborative Communication & Relevant Awareness-Building (which forwards participatory literacies); and, Reaching Collaboration & Coalitional Collectives in Action (which forwards multimodal composing as participatory literacies). Connections begin to be highlighted as youth forward movements in YPAR toward coalitional civic resistance. This can be seen from initial inquiry, through protocol design, to data collection, and finally action. As seen through their design and implementation of YPAR 89 projects with and alongside relevant communities, youth exhibit widely varied understanding of relationship that no current system of analysis could have quite captured. For the purpose of highlighting these nine codes, I move to an analysis of three YPAR projects with youth that all forward action in their engagement with YPAR (see Chapters 5). This piece of the analysis felt necessary, as youth research happens in classrooms as seen through participatory literacies (see Chapter 6), but the action piece is necessary to engage with youth in order for young people to begin to understand the power of collective civic movement. These three YPAR projects all included a variety of youth, as such, I story through some of the connections and individuals who stayed connected to the work in order to better understand how this became a longer ethnographic study of youth participatory action research. Returning to an analysis of the work taken up with PSTs, I engaged value coding to analyze across data collection taken up from interviews, field notes, research memos, teacher collected data, Community Asset Maps, and PSTs’ rationale for design. Value cod ing is a top- down method of analysis, which I cautiously employed. The propensity for any analysis that comes from the top-down holds precarious possibilities for over-interpretation and potentially further colonization of participants’ knowledge. As such, I sought to balance this out by collecting research reflections from PSTs with whom I engaged the work. This provided an opportunity to conduct valuable member checking that kept me from over-interpreting PSTs’ work. In the following value coding analysis, I constructed the framework to support how PSTs were providing opportunities for youth to take up what I refer to as coalitional civic resistance. However, as I did not have access to their students’ work, I sought to examine the instructional moves that PSTs made and the language that they used when employing instruction and reflection on their instruction and instructional outcomes. The table, below, centers the tenets of 90 youth workers and teachers in solidarity work seeking to build toward coalitional civic resistance: Table 7. Build Toward Coalitional Civic Resistance Relational Decentering whiteness Problem-posing Refusal of institutional restraints on learning For youth workers & teachers in solidarity work seeking to build toward coalitional civic resistance Critical Pedagogy - recognizing one’s own relationship and background knowledge of the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship YPAR - leveraging one’s position and community relations to connect youth to a variety of resources - providing a variety of resources and time for youth to bring in their own resources -always positioning ourselves as learners alongside, not the authority - positioning ourselves as learners, as well as facilitators of the inquiry process alongside youth, not the authority -providing suggested models of how to address key audience members based on possible community connections or currently held community relationships that could be - honoring (and not just including) a diverse variety of authors/artists/hi stories/perspecti ves to the conversation to provide a model (minimizing white-resourced material, especially as youth get this everywhere else in school spaces) - inviting in a diverse variety of authors/artists/ historians/ organizers that both reflect youth and can connect youth to deeper understanding of inquiry and action around 91 Table 7 (cont’d) (Endarkened) Feminist Epistemologies - leveraging one’s position and community relations to connect youth to a variety of resources as a platform for action - positioning ourselves as learners of youth knowledge and action highlighted to more specifically and publicly address youth’s chosen audience -providing suggested models for continuing to get the word out regarding youth research and action that reaches broader audiences, while attending to reciprocity of relations across the work youth chosen topic - asking youth to invite in a diverse variety of youth authors/artists/ organizers that both youth are connected to themselves and can connect youth peers to deeper understanding of inquiry and action around youth chosen topic To summarize, twelve codes emerged from this analysis of the conceptual framework of coalitional civic resistance, these codes are in bold (above) and have been included in this list: ● As related to critical pedagogy: ○ Recognizing one’s own relationship (self-work/relational) ○ Minimizing white-resourced material (anti-racist action) ○ Youth bringing in their own resources (participatory literacies) ○ Learner alongside, not the authority (problematizing power structures) ● As related to YPAR: ○ Leveraging community relations to connect youth (relational) 92 ○ Inviting in relations who reflect youth and can connect youth to deeper understanding of inquiry and action (anti-racist action) ○ Providing models suggested to address key audience members (participatory literacies) ○ Facilitators of the learning process alongside youth (problematizing power structures) ● (Endarkened) Feminist Epistemologies: ○ Variety of resources as a platform for action (relational) ○ Inviting youth in who youth in the learning space are connected to themselves and can connect youth peers to deeper understanding of inquiry and action (anti-racist action) ○ continuing to get the word out regarding youth research and action that reaches broader audiences (participatory literacies) ○ Learners of youth knowledge and action (problematizing power structures) In all, the original twelve codes could be collapsed into four more specific codes: 1) relational; 2) anti-racist action; 3) participatory literacies; and 4) problematizing power structures. Starting with these four major codes, connections begin to be highlighted as to PSTs own values, as seen through their design and implementation of the larger teacher inquiry project. For the purpose of highlighting these codes, I move to an analysis of three PSTs who all spent time in YPAR spaces. These three PSTs brought with them three different backgrounds, a variety of experiences, and diverse commitments. All the methods and analysis employed across the years and various phases of this study, such as the blending of ethnography, YPAR, the case studies of PSTs informed by YPAR spaces 93 combined with multi-relational analysis, value coding, and research memos as storying by engaging narrative inquiry adds to what we currently know about humanizing education research. In the following two chapters, I highlight the relational aspects that provide a foundation for solidarity. Further, I forward the powerful potential of coalitional civic resistance as well as the benefits and limitations of engaging this framework in community learning spaces and dominant classroom settings. 94 CHAPTER 5: FOSTERING & BUILDING SUSTAINABLE COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE WITH YOUTH IN PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH It was a blustery late fall day in the northern midwest, as soft rain pelted the window in the little office in which I sat. The cloudy gray skies muted the brilliant reds and oranges of the large maple trees that dotted the slowly rusting brown of the grass across campus. The smell of palo santo and Meyer’s spray enveloped the room in which I sat, across from one of my heros. I was tense, in truth I was always a little tense around him, always seeking approval that deep down I didn’t think I deserved. Afraid that at any moment he would realize that he had made a mistake inviting me to join his academic family, and that I would be asked to return from where I came. This time, however, it was me questioning if I even wanted to be there at all. “I think I’ve made a mistake,” I started. He looked at my quizzically, a look of possible concern and maybe a little bemusement in his eyes. I conjectured. “What do you mean?” he asked. I took a deep breath before continuing, “I don’t think I want to have anything to do with research. It just all seems so...harmful.” I replied. He smiled, nodding knowingly. “Yes, because so much of it is,” he stated in affirmation. My brows shot up, tears (my least favorite body response to frustration) beginning to well in my eyes. He went on, gently, “it doesn’t have to be.” He turned around, peering at his bookshelf. He pulled down a white-bound book with a large grey fist, and black and red letters. Sliding it across the table towards me, he asked “have you seen this book, yet?” I shook my head, communicating I had not, and wiped my damp eyes at the corners. Phrases immediately popped out at me from the cover, words like: “youth activism”, “new democratic possibilities”, and in bright bold letters, “Resistance!”. My eyes lit up, and I quickly typed the title and editor’s names into my open laptop. Ginwright. Noguera. Cammarota. I foreciously ran down the list of contributing authors and chapters. “I think you may find what you are looking 95 for here in this.” He stated motioning to the book. And just like that, it popped out to me “Youth Participatory Action Research?!” I looked up, excitedly. “Have you met Dr. W, yet? That’s the kind of research he does, you may want to reach out to him to have a conversation. Send him an email, first.” My advisor was right. Having a conversation began a ball rolling that still hasn’t stopped. I began to envision possibilities for being in research where I could stand alongside in solidarity. Given my early orientations to civic organizing and my original purpose in desiring to become an educator, seeing these possibilities in research became a boon of energy that set me on a path of which I am only beginning to make sense. That summer, the rising seniors in the summer program and I read Coate’s Between the World and Me. I had chosen this book in late spring when I received the position teaching in the summer program. At the time, I was both beginning my own racial healing (Love, 2018), while also responding to the unnecessary and violent killing of Black boys and Black men (and Black girls and women) across the U.S. at the hands of white supremacists--authorities with dangerously overinflated estimations of their power and citizens with racist violence in their souls. That summer, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were both killed within only a couple of days of each other, and the same week as the U.S. celebration of Independence. If Sterling’s death wasn’t reason enough to consider deeply how to address these tragedies, Castile’s was an alarm bell that as conscious educators, we had to provide space for youth to process whatever they were feeling. A couple of weeks later, as the seniors and I wrapped up our reading of Coate’s book one young woman spoke up. “What’s next?” She asked. She went on to elaborate on her question, asking how they could get involved in pushing back against institutionalized racism and the school to prison pipeline. 96 Purpose, Aim & Reflections as Guided by the Pilot This chapter focuses on solidarity work with and alongside youth in participatory action research (YPAR). Central to the purpose of this chapter is youth’s own taking up of solidarity as seen through coalitional civic resistance, I highlight three “seasons” of YPAR with youth across 2017, 2018, and 2019. Coalitional civic resistance (see Chapter 2) offers a frame for understanding the various inquiry, design, and action made by youth to center critical pedagogy, multimodalism, and participatory literacies in Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), while foregrounding collaborative and coalitional solidarity work with various community artists, organizers, and organizations. The framework of coalitional civic resistance forwards youth engagement in a networked approach to building and deepening commitments to (endarkened) feminist epistemologies, civic innovation and expansion, and transformational resistance for the purpose of centering reciprocal relationships with their communities, rooted in educational and racial justice. My initial inquiry into the literacies practices that youth take up across YPAR began in 2016, when approaching the inquiry into youth’s purposes for multimodal and participatory literacies in coalitional civic resistance in community spaces. In the fall of 2017, I began my partnership with Littleton’s Parks and Recreation for a youth-led participatory literacies, research, and action program that would come to inform my findings of youth multimodal and participatory literacies engagement for social action. In reviewing the extant literature that explored the various means, meanings, and making of youth’s multimodal literacies, questions of my own emerged. These questions led to the taking-up of field notes, research memos, multimodal and participatory literacies artifacts, and guided journal entries with what would become four years of building with youth across community spaces. At the time, my guiding 97 question for the study was, in what ways and for what purposes do youth engage with participatory literacies and multimodal composing? Further questions extended to, what specific literacies are forwarded during collaborative and coalitional inquiry and action? As questions developed further, I came to inquire as to in what ways are youth learning, asserting, or possibly reclaiming their civic identity across their literacies practice? Across the following chapter, I provide context for three years of YPAR built with a variety of youth and adult co-researchers. Each project had a different and often unconnected scope and aim from inquiry to action. As such it is important to note that congruency across the projects was not what I was looking for, but rather that the reasons for which youth took up multimodal curation, composing, and participatory literacies was my emphasis for this inquiry. These three “seasons” (in communication with youth co-researcher Spring, 2017) were not meant to inform what these literacies look like or to analyze how they have been taken up. That work has been done (as noted in Chapter 3). Rather, I sought to understand why youth would engage, and more specifically how that engagement was civic, transformational, in solidarity, and humanizing. I came to refer to this amalgamation of elements as Coalitional Civic Resistance (see Chapter 2). In doing so, I purposely analyzed the literacies artifacts, research memos, and fieldnotes through the CCR framework as a lens. This was enacted as value coding (see Chapter 4), as I wanted to understand the variety of youth’s literacies practices and how they reflected on the value that youth placed on the work they envisioned and enacted, as seen through a CCR framework. In the discussion, I bring these three years together in less linear ways in order to emphasize the codes that were found when looking across three “seasons” of YPAR projects. 98 2017 YPAR (Pilot) Project The sun beat in through the coffeeshop windows, a group of eight of us were tucked away in the back of our local coffeeshop. Sitting at the high table, above us hung a chandelier made of bone and white wood. Our laptops crowding the table. This time, I was joined by two other adult facilitators--the college radio station’s assistant manager and another graduate from the writing center. Angie’s chestnut coils framed her laptop screen as her head was tucked, furiously trying to record the agenda minutes from today’s meeting. Lexi’s short red and pink bob framed her petite features. Her brow wrinkled as she worked and reworked our flyer design for the upcoming community outreach day. The five young women at the table, recently graduated from high school, sat around the table and leading our meeting. I was grateful that both Lexi and Angie, the college radio station manager, seemed to take my cue of sitting and listening-- interjecting when necessary. Meeting at the coffee shop and facilitating when necessary, but otherwise taking our cues from the five young women dotted around the table was one of my relational actions. It was important to me that the five young women not associate me with a classroom space. YPAR is pedagogical, but the kind of work that I have sought to do in community spaces is never meant to feel like school. We had been discussing revisions for the community day event flyer, but it was Adrianna who the other young women turned. “I want to keep the word feminist” Adrianna began. This group discussion of language was very important to who we intended to draw in for our community event. “I’m concerned that the word feminist is too often associated with white women’s feminism. Are we sure it welcomes everyone to the event?” I asked. In this first YPAR project to reach public action, the five young women had chosen a topic that was sensitive in its nature. In part, this was due to the approval of the Institutional 99 Review Board (IRB), the body of gatekeepers at every university whose job it is to keep researchers accountable for not doing harmful work. An alternative interpretation would be that the job of the IRB is to keep the university safe from any potential lawsuits over research conducted by scholars across campus. However, as a community-engaged scholar, I had two communities with whose safety I was more concerned. First, I had to make sure that every young woman in the group was over 18. Primarily, this was due to the fact that their parents would have to grant permission for the young women to take part in this very sensitive research topic. However, given the topic and what I knew of at least a couple of their backgrounds, this would have been only further complicating matters. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S., “the majority of children and teen victims know the perpetrator” (rainn.org, 2020). As a team, we began with existing research that forwarded our understanding of the inquiry topic, this was the relevant (see codes, above) work with which we began. I refer to this collection of relevant existing data as relevant communication. However, it didn’t answer our inquiry question, in what ways do victims of assault and domestic violence heal and move past healing from their experiences? In order to understand this, we went back to existing research to understand the topic of inquiry. However, what we found was that not only was there not much of the research surrounding healing and what we came to refer to as thriving, but what little research existed was told for and from a majority white population. In thinking through entering work with youth, I consider how to enter space with authenticity, an open heart, and generosity of spirit. Irizarry and Brown (2013), and Winn (2013) all note the complexity of messages youth may internalize in our shared spaces juxtaposed with messages received in their larger world, specifically about their agency. Winn (2013) notes that 100 the hope of so many youth-centered scholars is in sharing work wherein “a youth-led inquiry process went well…the youth owned the process (and product) …and… {that someone with agency and influence} listened to these young people and acted” (pgs.60-61). This hope is often in sharp contrast to the power that has been exercised as control over others (especially youth of Color in working poor neighborhoods) “through the threat and use of sanctions which can be levied against those who fail to acquiesce” (Irizarry & Brown, 2013). I know that it is often a much slower process to earn the trust of youth with whom I work and that this trust does not exonerate me from the responsibility of never getting too comfortable and always examining my motives and my message, while maintaining my consistent, open, and loving behavior. Our team consisted of all women, mostly between the ages of 18-28 (I am the outlier, in age). In this community of women, five of us identify as LGBTQ+ (for which we could find almost no data), and four members of the team are women of Color (about which the data was incredibly paltry, if not missing altogether). We recognized that our own collective wasn’t reflected by the data, though certainly this inquiry was personal to all of us in various ways. Our care for ourselves and each other forwarded the collaborative nature of this work. Furthermore, our desire to expand who was represented by the existing research, and how they were represented (not just the damage, but the hope) moved us necessarily toward coalitional work. Further, through examining whose voices were not included in the literature, we began our journey of relevant-awareness building. At that point, we understood that we had our own research to do, and began identifying how we would collect that research. However, this was just the beginning of the work that I would engage through YPAR over the course of the next few years. In a framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance (CCR) it is necessary and vital that white scholars and youth organizers build from the knowledge of folks 101 who are local to the spaces that we occupy. Building from these local knowledges, especially across racial groups, it is important to consider who we are building with and that expert experience and wisdom is forwarded as part of the work that we seek to accomplish. In the CCR framework, I refer to youth engaging “work collaboratively with others who may have lived experience with the topic of inquiry”, and as such when our focus shifted I began networking across the greater Littleton community with artists and organizers of Color who would bring voices into the room that we previously had not included. This became especially important as we began forwarding a youth program that would center the work in the community and with youth who may have otherwise not had access to youth programming due to the lack of economic resources. As I reflect on this work that was so necessary at the time, what I realize now is that youth programs were being defunded and disbanded across central Littleton, as a new mayor came into power with an agenda that did not reflect the people. Adrianna and I were both compelled to forward the work in new ways. Something had happened here, and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Again, she turned to me. This time with the question, “What’s next?” The small table at which I sat was stacked with books, haphazardly arranged sticky notes with scribbled article titles, and a longer sheet of paper with several items checked off. I had been working all afternoon, getting syllabi ready for the courses I would begin teaching in just a couple of weeks as the fall semester began at the university. Adrianna sat to join me, this time her hair shorned off into a starkly angled bob. “Cute hair, lady” I said, smiling, and welcomed her to the table, as I quickly rearranged items to give her welcome space. I had invited Adrianna to coffee as both a way to inquire about her interest in coming back as a mentor and also to check in with her. Adrianna, not unlike myself, was not sure that college was “for” her, the last 102 time we talked about plans for the fall. “Let’s check-in, how are you? What’s new?” I asked. Adrianna shrugged. “I’m okay. It’s kinda weird having a few friends move away, but most of my friends are staying at home and going to LCC (Littleton Community College).” I nodded. Before I could get to my conversation with Wren, the administrator at the eastside community center, Adrianna asked, “So what’s next?” Again. This young woman had her finger on the pulse of what her community desired. Again, before I could answer her first question, she went on. “I think younger teens need something like Breaking Silence.” I smiled. That fall, Adrianna came back as a youth mentor for what she and her cohort of YPAR youth had dubbed, “Breaking Silence”. Though at first I thought I would be renting a room from the Parks and Recreation department, something else was unfolding… 2018 YPAR Project That fall of 2018, we began our second YPAR project that would successfully reach a greater audience outside of the community center walls. It began with a conversation. We began by deconstructing what Youth Participatory Action Research might mean to us, as a collective. Four posters were placed on the wall, with each word in large letters. I invited the entire crew to take up a different colored marker and walk around the posters, in any order that they wanted, writing whatever words or phrases they felt had associations with each of those words. Following this, we chatted as a collective about what each of these words meant, ending with Youth. Shiller’s (2013) cross-case analysis of youth critical civic engagement in two Bronx based community organizing groups highlights youth civic engagement and learning through grassroots-based organizing. The author’s data collection came from three sources: participant observations, semi structured interviews with adults, and focus groups with youth. Shiller 103 discovered that three themes emerged from the data collected: relationship-building, encouraging critique, and political efficacy. The author’s data collection yielded democratized evidence which spoke to increased youth civic learning and leadership: “it is important for urban youth to participate in civic activities in which they can have an impact and see the concrete results of their work” (p. 88). In our own work, we moved from word association with youth to inquiring into where we believed youth held power at the Local, City, State, National, and Global level. This time, the group was invited to list a 5 for the most power and a 1 for the least. This conversation led to interesting dialogue about youth’s constructs of who holds power, and interestingly the youth in attendance that night seemed to point to youth not having much individual power, but holding collective power when working in collaborative coalitions. In my reflections on youth collective building of movements (see Chapter 3) this was certainly something that we could all agree held up both historically (SNCC) and more recently (March for our Lives). I asked youth to consider what they might want to inquire about in our YPAR project, and invited them to return the following week with some concrete ideas into that with which they might want to inquire. The early evening sun was still streaming through the conference room windows of the community center. The six of us sat around the four longer tables that I had moved into a square prior to youth arriving for our evening session of LYV. Drew sat quietly, his brow furrowed above the black frame of his glasses in anticipation of the conversation we would have that night. Though I wasn’t sure what was on his mind, it was clear that something was troubling him. Malik seemed pensive. Occasionally he stole furtive glances in Drew’s general direction. Bradley was facilitating tonight. He was standing up near a corner of the table between Malik and Adrianna. A large pad of sticky posters in front of him, and a black sharpie in his hand. “So 104 what ideas did we bring back for tonight’s session?” Bradley asked, again. This time Malik spoke up, glancing furtively at Drew, again. “Drew…” he started. Drew shot Malik a sharp look. “Come on man,” Malik started, “I think it’s a good idea.” Drew sighed, heavily. Bradley looked back and forth between them, “What’s up guys?” Drew sat up tall, straightening his glasses. “It’s kind of hard to explain,” he started. The rest of us waited for him to go on. “It’s just…” he trailed off, “I don’t want you all to judge my friend--” Malik cut in, “Our friend.” Drew nodded in agreement, “Our friend.” Bradley softened, “We aren’t going to judge anyone.” “Yeah,” I added, “that’s not what this space is about. Besides whatever we say here stays here.” Drew seemed to relax, a little. “This week at school...one of our friends was saying some really mean things...things I don’t want to repeat.” Drew said. Bradley cut in, “You don’t have to repeat anything that you feel uncomfortable saying, but can you tell us what the comments were about?” Malik shook his head, “It wasn’t cool.” Drew nodded, “No, it wasn’t. We have this friend, and he is generally a nice guy, but…” Drew trailed off. Malik added, “Naw man, he isn’t that nice. He’s said stuff before that wasn’t cool.” Drew looked sharply at Malik, “What?” Malik added, “Yeah man, he’s said stuff before to me about being ‘mixed’.” Drew’s face was incredulous, “What? Man. That ain’t true. Get outta here.” Malik shook his head emphatically, “Oh, okay. Who’s your best friend? Who are you going to believe?” Drew nodded. The rest of us waited, patiently. “Its just that he said some stuff about gay dudes…”. Adrianna spoke up, “You mean the LGBT community?” she asked, irritated. Adrianna’s face conveyed her irritation at Drew’s phrasing. Only about six years older than Drew, Adrianna was definitely the “cool” one among us. Drew’s face reddened, “Yeah,” he said softly, “the LGBTQ dudes.” I bit my lip to conceal a smile and to keep myself from laughing at the exchange. Preach! I thought to myself. Malik stepped in, “He’s a homophobe.” Bradley looked concerned, “You think your 105 friend is homophobic?” he asked. Drew’s face paled. “Maybe.” He said weakly. “Did you tell your teacher?” Shelly asked. Bradley’s eyebrows shot up. I hadn’t caught that this happened at school, and neither did Bradley, apparently. “Nah, we ain’t snitches” Malik said. Drew shook his head, again turning a little red. Shelly was definitely the closest in age to Malik and Drew, being that she was only two years older and a sophomore in high school. “Our teacher doesn’t really do anything about stuff other kids say, anyway.” I wasn’t surprised. “There really isn’t much she could do, anyway.” Shelly added. “Why is that?” I inquired. “There really isn’t much that they do about bullying in our district” she replied. I nodded. “Have you looked at the handbook?” Bradley asked me. “For the district?” I inquired. Bradley nodded. “I’ve been working with the school’s GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) after school. There isn’t anything that teachers can do.” Bradley replied. This was his year-long student teaching year, and I was not surprised that he was already involved. “There isn’t any policy for LGBTQ youth?” I asked. Everyone around the room shook their heads. This was the beginning of a larger conversation. The larger conversation that needed to be had was thinking through what our own commitments to both the inquiry and our connections to the community that the inquiry centered. In a CCR framework, it is vital that we begin with what I refer to as “recognizing one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship; (and) identifying whose perspectives are missing from the conversation”. In an inquiry that highlighted the necessity for school policy that would forward protection for LGBTQ+ youth, we had to consider what connections to the community existed in the group. None of our youth identified as coming from the community themselves. Bradley, one of our YPAR mentors in his second year with the program, was in his year-long teaching placement at a local high school and supporting their GSA (Gay Straight Alliance). Then, there was me. As someone who identified 106 in my early teens as part of the (then) LGBT community, I had expert knowledge in my lived experience. However, to center myself as the lone voice of this community would not have been appropriate, for a variety of reasons. Adichie’s (2009) cautionary tale of the single story and constructing a narrative around a sole experience or single story meant that I could support our group in finding further resources, but that I could not position myself as the expert in the room. This led our group to beginning to brainstorm further questions for existing research. 2019 YPAR Project Over my time partnering with Littleton’s Parks and Recreation, I had longed for connections that would remain to buoy the youth program after my inevitable departure. This desire to sustain the work I had long built in the community came from grounding my organizing in Indigenous values of sustaining relationality and respect. Steinhauer’s (2001) understanding of respect and dismisses notions of objectivity as the goal of rigorous research. Steinhauer asserts that through listening deeply the researcher, and I would add youth co-researcher, must “show honor, consider the well-being of others, and treat others with kindness and courtesy” (p.73). Particularly in education, where white, middle class, suburban women make up 80% of the teaching force, the words kind and nice have become false synonyms. Kindness is rooted in respect, radical love, and critical self-examination. However, there is nothing nice about being kind. To be nice implies acquiescence and conformity, a lack of rippling of waves, and a pandering to dominant norms of so-called civilized society. Though many white scholars and teachers may feel that respect is inherent to what some may refer to as being nice, I would argue that definitions of respect vary across communities. A humanizing understanding of respect must take into consideration who education and literacy research will benefit. 107 In the summer of 2019, I began working more closely with the Teen Director for Littleton’s Parks and Recreation Department, Marie (see Chapter 6). This close partnership provided the avenue that I had hoped for in sustaining LYV in my partnering community space after my departure from the city. It would, also, mean accomplishing in eight weeks what it mostly took us two “seasons” to render. I began building a curriculum for what YPAR in eight sessions might look like, doubtful that we could pull it off. That summer, we began our third YPAR project that would successfully reach a greater audience outside of the community center walls. Yet, it did not as closely resemble the work of coalitional civic resistance. The shifts and the changes needed for the building of a sustainable youth program meant letting go of my vision of what LYV could be, in order to turn it over to the community for what the community (and youth) needed it to be, instead. Instead of pushing the group to make, what I consider to be, more meaningful connections to nearby organizations that were addressing our line of inquiry in their already- present work, which I refer to as “coalitional”, we followed youth’s desire for action and our collective restraints of time. In forwarding the CCR framework, this would be considered a failure. In particular, I point to youth engagement in the CCR Framework as “enrolling already existing communities/organizations in collaboration to both leverage a larger platform for youth action and working alongside to consciously engage in youth action that cares for community and cultivates further relationship building”. Did we accomplish this with the 8-week YPAR intensive that summer? No. However, those goals are mine, alone. I have argued, across this work, that it is vitally important that researchers do work in ways that are respectful to the community's desires. That work was accomplished, even if my goals were not. 108 Engaging Multimodal & Participatory Literacies to Forward Youth Leadership Beginning in the summer of 2016 and continuing into this summer of 2020, I have engaged across research, teaching, and learning spaces with youth in a variety of YPAR projects. Over those years, youth and organizing with youth has taught me more than I believe I ever taught them. Across the work, I refer to this taking up as “our” work, for a couple of reasons. First, in doing so, I seek to not center myself, but rather to note that I am only one part of the collective. Additionally, this work could not have been taken up if I maintained the objectivity that some researchers call for in arguing for more rigorous research. From the fall of 2017 to summer 2019, I highlight three distinct projects that all reached public audiences--which I note is an important part of action when engaging YPAR. There was no cost for youth to attend the program, and no mentors (including myself) were ever paid for their attendance. Moreover, the mentors who continued to come into the space did so because they believed in the project and saw the emancipatory nature of this work. Questions come up here as to how I came to understand the nature of the CCR framework, in what ways I analyzed youth work, and what evaluation was used to further my understanding of mentors in the community space. The CCR framework is one that was built from a convergence of deep study into youth participatory action research, literacies (critical, multimodal, and participatory), and humanizing research frameworks (including Critical Race Theory, Decolonizing, and Indigenous methodologies). Filling my gaps in understanding that literature can never really get to, this deep reading was accompanied by a multi-year (longitudinal) study of YPAR from 2016 to 2020. In this way, I argue that the CCR framework is praxis, or the coming together of theory and practice. Collection of youth literacies artifacts, including multimodal and participatory literacies examples, were analyzed through value coding (Saldana, 2016) with an emphasis placed on what 109 I refer to as multirelational analysis. These multirelational codes are grounded in anti-racist pedagogy (Baker-Bell, 2020), decolonial methodologies (Tuwihai Smith, 1999), and community- based participatory action research with youth (Tuck, 2014), these three specific areas of thought undergird the larger themes that emerged. Multiple instances of youth’s growth in building inquiry from relevance to reciprocity across the three focal YPAR projects were guided by the youth framework for Coalitional Civic Resistance (see Chapter 2). After collapsing these codes, the following nine codes emerged as larger codes in the organization of data collected across multimodal and participatory literacies artifacts: 1) self-work; 2) collaborative; 3) coalitional; 4) collaborative communication; 5) coalitional communication; 6) relevant communication; 7) relevant collaborations; 8) coalitional collaborations; and, 9) relevant awareness-building. Starting with these nine major codes, I highlighted connections amongst the multimodal and participatory literacies youth engaged across YPAR projects toward coalitional civic resistance. These literacies artifacts brought together an arc from initial inquiry and building relevant relationality, across protocol design and data collection through deepening relevant awareness- building and collaborative communication, and finally both relevant collaborations and coalitional collectives in action. As seen, below, the areas of organization became: Building Toward Collaboration as Self-Work & Peer Work (which highlights multimodal curating); Collaborative Communication & Relevant Awareness-Building (which forwards participatory literacies); and, Reaching Collaboration & Coalitional Collectives in Action (which forwards multimodal composing as participatory literacies). Further, in order to make sense of the data collected from the three very different projects, I have organized each collection by year under the headings, above. Each project was enacted with diverse youth across different settings and in different time ranges, as noted in the descriptive section above. 110 Building Toward Collaboration as Self-Work & Peer Work 2017: Un-Hushed Lips “Un-hushed Lips: An Intersectional Feminist Healing Circle for Sharing our Stories of Assault, Survival, and Thriving”, became both a community outreach day, and an opportunity for us to collect stories of healing, love, and hope. At the beginning of this inquiry, I had no idea how necessary these stories would be, including for the eight of us. As we moved across the project, relationships to the area of inquiry began to come to the surface. The young women and three adult facilitators (myself included) had moments across collaboration where each of us would be triggered by something we all sought to understand. As we began what I refer to above as self-work (or continued that self-work), it became clear that this inquiry was deeply personal. Moving from initial inquiry to design of interview and storytelling protocol we discussed various plans for coalitional collaborations. We came to the agreement that we needed to show care for both ourselves and the community members that we were inviting in, which I refer to above as collaboration as self-work and peer-work. Collaborative engagement that centers critical consciousness asks youth and adult facilitators to deeply interrogate their own positionality in the research, teaching, and learning we engage, in order to come together for collective inquiry into systems of oppression. Akom, Ginwright and Cammarota (2008) argue that “young people have the ability to analyze their social context, to collectively engage in critical research, and resist repressive state and ideological institutions” (p.2). This building of critical civic praxis creates opportunities for youth to become leaders in their communities about causes with which they are passionate and that resist social injustice, while highlighting youth and community strengths. In coming together to extend our self-work into providing for more liberatory acts in peer-work we 111 must understand when to listen deeply, unpack negative self-efficacy, and engage in pushing back when there are moments where constructively resisting each other is needed. In the excerpt of our minutes from that day’s meeting, the eight of us worked through what it would mean to create an image and language that would invite everyone into the space who we all wanted to attend. This work of making the language reflect the invitational nature of the work we were taking up was important to all of us. The centering of critical civic praxis in research, teaching, and learning as collaborative and coalitional demands that we take up research that reflects the interests and desires of the collective, while always remembering to provide space for youth to lead. Below, you will see how youth’s literacies reflect both their lived realities and their values. 1. Messaging a. Group Deliberation i. Too many qualifiers in the title. Makes it hard to explain ii. Dissecting Feminist 1. Adrianna wanted to use this word because she sees it as an inclusive practice, however, for certain groups, there is some baggage to this word 2. Rae made a great point that the word Feminist is limiting 3. Lexi (on the topic of calling it a Women’s Healing Circle) using the word Woman isolates the LGBTQ community b. Change Messaging i. Lexi 1. Unhushed Lips: A Healing Circle for Survivors of Sexual Assault 112 ii. Rae 1. I would like to keep woman in the title iii. Adrianna 1. It would be cool if men shared their stories too iv. Ella 1. I want transwomen to feel safe here v. Rae 1. Intersectional Feminist Healing Circle 2. The graphic reads “ Healing Circle of sharing our stories of assault” vi. Adrianna 1. An intersectional feminist healing circle: sharing our stories of assault, survival and thriving In this excerpt from our day’s meeting, it is clear that Adrianna continued to take a leadership role in the group dynamic. Her willingness to humbly listen and attend to the group’s wishes was present, as well. This coming together to work through something as small as the title of the community outreach event is an example of what I refer to as collaborative communication. The self-work necessary to understand our place in the work we do, as youth or adult researchers is necessary for moving forward in inquiry through action that reflect the tensions and possibilities of the research that we find ourselves in. In order to understand the work that we needed to be doing, across this project, we took up existing research from across digital platforms to curate our understanding of our main inquiry question prior to identifying the modes of collection that would highlight areas in need of being filled in. Specifically, the 113 conversation above, which I refer to as peer-work in this section demanded that we have common language, shared understanding, and a collective vision of our research moving forward. These moments of tension, such as Adrianna pushing back on my noting of “woman” staying in the title left out important work needed to include men in the conversation about who is centered in the current research around domestic violence and sexual assault. Furthermore, Ella’s assertion that “transwomen” needed to feel safe in the space reflects her moving forward to interrogate how and in what ways we were defining “woman”. As a former and forever teacher, and as someone who seeks to do work that flattens power hierarchies, I very much welcomed their criticisms. These critiques of power and opinion become important moments in building toward collaborative communication. 2018: Breaking Silence In the summer of 2018, I began working more closely with the Assistant Director, Julie, for Littleton’s Parks and Recreation Department. The shifts and changes needed for the building of a sustainable youth program meant listing Littleton Youth Voices in the Parks and Recreation fall brochure. The description for the program pointed the way for youth whose interests were aligned with coalitional civic resistance. The language used for the youth program read: Littleton Youth Voices is a youth-based community service, civic leadership, and digital/arts infused social justice group. Participants will choose community-based organizations to collaborate with to develop civic leadership skills around a service project of their vision and design. Teens will also: enrich their understanding of local, state, and world events; think of what it means to think globally and act locally; and develop papers, presentations and digital media productions to share with local lead ers and policy makers. Come and be the change! Though this wasn’t what I had originally written when asked for program description, it fairly represents in many ways what the YPAR group would become. Continuing on as mentors in the program, Adrianna was joined for a second season by Bradley and Venus. Continuing my 114 reflexive practice, I had noted the year before how youth had turned to me as the sole leader of the project, though this had not been my intention. In an effort to flatten this distinction, and to provide space for shared leadership among both all of the adult facilitators (mentors) and youth, I began to email plans for the weeks to come asking for the adult facilitators to step up and take weeks where they may want to try their hand at leading facilitation. Yet, more recent (re)turns in literacy research have expansively shifted what qualifies as literacy and literacies as not just growing but having always existed in ways that are not honored by dominant systems of education. For instance, Mahiri (2004) asks whether “societal structures and school curricula accommodate and incorporate youth desires for knowledge and the new kinds of knowledge they need for negotiating the literacy demands and possibilities of a new century” (p. 15). Mahiri’s questions, posed more than a decade ago, positioned the educational research community to consider three pointed questions: 1) what do we consider knowledge 2) what knowledge do we share in school and community learning spaces, and 3) and who are the knowledge holders? Yet, more than a decade later, the educational research community has only uncovered more questions, which are explored further in this chapter. Moreover, in specifically considering working with youth in “negotiating the literacy demands and possibilities of a new century” (Mahiri, 2004, p. 15), this essay reviews not only multiliteracy, but for what purpose youth are curating across multiliterate modes. This rotation of facilitators provided further opportunities for youth to build closer rapport with each of the mentors, which was even more necessary that year, as the group dynamics had shifted and now the Assistant Director’s eldest son, Drew, and his best friend, Malik, became two of the strongest leaders in the room. 115 Figure 2. Drafting for Inquiry It was clear, both from the kinds of questions that youth were asking and from comments being made that night that youth had very little working knowledge of the LGBTQ+ community. Yet, as noted in above sections of this chapter, it was vital that we examine our own positionality in the inquiry. Given that none of the youth identified as being from the LGBTQ+ community themselves, it became vital that we all situate ourselves as learners, especially when engaging through a Coalitional Civic Resistance framework. As such, we began with some very broad questions that would guide our collection of existing research. Bradley began mapping ideas and connections as Shelly, Malik, and Drew offered ideas on what could be collected with existing research. This moved the team to beginning collaborative work, acknowledging what they may or may not know and working together to regard the other team members in what understandings that they may be bringing into the conversation, as well. As this was only our second meeting of the fall season, this set the team’s intention for inquiry. Given how little background knowledge the majority of the group had about the LGBTQ+ community, this phase of the research, collecting existing data, would need to be more intentional. As such, we decided to create protocol for collecting existing research that would support the group in narrowing their 116 research. This excerpt of our co-constructed protocol for collecting existing research was a scaffolded step necessary in this particular project due to the limitations of youth’s lived experience with the topic. What policies are affecting LGBTQ+ youth across the nation? What policies are affecting LGBTQ+ youth in the state? What policies are affecting LGBTQ+ youth in our city? How are schools supporting students that identify as LBGTQ+? Networking? Resources? Alliances? Positive stories? How are schools handling bullying and mental health of LGBTQ students? There was some work yet to be done in order for the group to dive into inquiry. I wasn’t clear about what knowledge Drew, Malik, and Shelly possessed about the LGBTQ+ community, and being a member of that community myself--this was something of which I knew we needed to be mindful. Hart and Atkins (2002) assert a lack of civic engagement by youth in urban contexts due to three factors that they examine in two neighboring cities: family and adults, schools, and neighboring institutions. The authors highlight evidence of this lack of civic participation as adults in urban centers who are “less likely to vote, more likely to be distrustful of others than suburban populations, and more likely to be born outside of the United States” (p. 234). The authors’ argument proves foundational to the further mindful building of research in youth’s civic participation. This need for mindfulness begins with what I refer to as self -work. I appreciated that Drew and Malik wanted to focus on what they referred to as getting rid of 117 “homophobia”, but I was very concerned with the idea of them conducting surveys with that in mind. Instead, Bradley began steering them to what they may want out of this YPAR project. Figure 3. Connected Inquiry The following excerpt comes from the field notes I took during that conversation: The following conversation was brought up as Bradley discussed whether or not we needed to include questions that might have been directed towards people who might be labeled homophobic: M: it makes me nervous making me think how people are going to think about this in a situation like this...I’m not the best when thinking about hate B: what can we do? M: what we would need to have in place D: spread information M: maybe this is just me trying to save my own butt from trying to deal with this stuff...I feel like instead of saying that they are wrong (homophobes)...they can have their own opinion...that they are able to have their own opinion until it threatens someone else 118 M: sometimes it’s dealing with traumatic events...lets just say we are thinking about a certain race shooting someone of a different race...you wouldn’t hate the whole race...it’s kind of like religion...I’m a Christian, but I still believe that there is nothing wrong with being LGBTQ...everyone deserves to be happy...there are worse things that people can do in the world than identify as the opposite gender B: What do we think about the questions? Are we missing anything? Getting some initial data we know we can support it with...some resources...because when this reaches out we want to include resources Malik noting that “they are able to have their own opinions until it threatens someone else”, reminds me that there is much to be learned from youth, and much for youth to learn. This phase of relevant awareness-building would come in waves, as youth (and all of the adult facilitators) began to learn just how needed policy protecting LGBTQ+ youth truly was in Littleton, and across the country. As seen through a CCR framework, this interrogation of current and existing research supports our understanding of whose voices might be missing from the important conversations we engage in YPAR spaces. Specifically, in this case, little of the existing research came from youth in the LGBTQ+ community. 2019: Littleton Youth Voices In engaging across the eight weeks that we built this YPAR project in, I had expected that less could be accomplished. I was very wrong. Youth engaged in opportunities for their voices to be centered in the conversations that they sought to take up across their inquiry. Specifically, we began with conversations about what it was they wanted for and from their communities. This forwarding of youth leadership in their communities is often not seen as civic, as the notion of youth voice as being relevant is often shaped by those who would only contextualize civic 119 identity as for those over the age 18. Hobbs, et al conclude that youth who have access to spaces that engage them in pre-production technologies are more active consumers of news media. Thus, their understanding of civic engagement centers on the emphasis youth place on news media and social networks of sharing these literacies. I would argue that the data collected from youth co-researcher journals, below, provides evidence that young people absolutely have their own understanding of the issues that they seek to take up in inquiry, regardless of their own media exposure regarding the topic. In examining the issue of bullying and the desire for peace- making, notable reflections to co-researcher journal prompts came from Christopher, Yulia, and Kris. Prompt: “Why do you think bullying is serious enough to research?”, Yulia: bullying is a nation-wide issue not getting attention Christopher: I think its serious enough to research, because so many people get bullied in schools and some even take their own lives because of it Kris: because kids and others are taking their own lives, some even take the lives of others Prompt: “What could be some benefits of doing research on peace-making?”, Kris: it could help those that get bullied (give them confidence) get the bullies and bystanders’ ideas of what they do could encourage negative things and events, have a more open idea on how they can help and change Yulia: decrease bullying Christopher: stopping the root of the problem In answer to the questions, above, it is important to note that these questions were posed in our first week of meeting, and as we were establishing our data collection for that short summer 120 session. However, these answers weren’t particularly elaborate or intimate, and I would caution to say that these move toward understanding of self-work or peer-work. However, in coming together the following week, I witnessed trust being built with two youth who would advance these into their stories for our community storytelling night. Troubling the narrative that is often taken up by white, dominant teachers about black boys, especially as they grow into men is this story starter from Shiloh, who wrote: ...one child used to push me and hit me all the time. When I told the teacher she said to just stay away from him and never told him anything. She never took care of the situation until one day it was the end of the day and I was bullied again. I had already told my mom and dad about it. I was furious. I banged on the desk harder than ever and told the teacher she’s not doing her job. As that happened my mom and dad came in the class and had a firm talk with the teacher and they finally took care of it. Shiloh would later elaborate on this story about the ineffectiveness of the teacher, who failed to intervene on Shiloh’s behalf. Shiloh’s writing certainly lends itself to (counter)storytelling. Solorzano and Delgado Bernal (2001) utilize counter-storying as a means to forward their construction a framework for transformational resistance. In Shiloh’s case, I believe that he was functioning from a space of reactionary behavior, both to a system that didn’t protect him and to another young person who saw Shiloh as a target for their own pain. Interestingly, in this journal entry Shiloh is sharing more from his speaking voice than he had in prior writing. His voice coming through here asserts the power of his reaction as he notes that he “banged on the desk harder than ever”. For Shiloh, this project provided him with an opportunity to speak back to the oppressive system of schooling who did not reward his peace with protection, but instead sought to punish him for coming to his own self-defense. This self-work in his storying pushes back on the deficit narrative of Black boys without ever having been presented with the research of how his experience is mirrored across the research. Though resistance can be liberating, as Noguera, 121 Tuck, and Yang (2013) assert. Over the years of studying resistance theories, Noguera’s perspective has shifted from one of believing that resistance can be a transferable framework to understanding that though systems of oppression are interconnected, resistance is locally contextualized. Noguera notes that “what hasn’t changed for me is the idea that resistance is not individual” (p.80) nor is it necessarily transferable. Resistance can come in many forms, and often the resistance necessary to unpack the negative conversations that internalized oppression can be hard for a variety of youth with marginalized identities to engage. For instance, when seeking to unpack the socially constructed dominant norms of gender or sexuality, LGBTQ+ youth struggle with a lack of strong role models to support their development. Sobré-Denton’s (2016) findings suggest that virtual cosmopolitanism across modes works to “uphold the rights of a displaced group within a larger majority that marginalizes them, and as such empowers group members as a space of identity security and collective camaraderie” (p.1726). The author’s work begins to move toward necessary bridge building that much more research is needed with which to understand. This study seeks to center bridge building as necessary and vital work, both between youth and adult co-researchers and across youth’s multiple identities. The following excerpt, from Kris, suggests that when we engaged brave spaces and share of ourselves this space making provides youth with possibilities to begin to voice their own frustrations as necessary self-work: I’m guessing for being different than their assigned role in society. They were harassed, bothered, and possibly ignored if they didn’t do as told (ignored pleas and facts) they weren’t bad people, they didn’t like to be called something they were not, people don’t understand that roles hurt others in some ways more than they think or choose to believe. They didn’t like how the people around them didn’t take them seriously. Kris’s writing suggests an understanding of the “roles” that many are forced to assimilate to, and what society’s construction of these roles across classroom spaces may mean for the very real 122 marginalization of youth who find themselves troubling binaries. This is not the first time that Kris suggested we trouble binaries in our work, as Kris’s comment on our first day about not assuming gender roles speaks back to how gender is constructed both in classroom spaces and across many communities. In doing so, Kris demands that we all lean in to any discomfort we may have in troubling gender roles for ourselves, and unpacking the various ways that we have internalized gender role construction from cishet patriarchal society. Collaborative Communication & Relevant Awareness-Building In seeking to understand our various forms of necessary self-work and peer-work, in doing that work, and understanding it as a place of beginning we start moving toward collaboration. Key to this collaboration in a Coalitional Civic Resistance (CCR) framework is collaborative communication. Collaborative communication supports our willingness to begin to (un)learn much of what youth and adults are taught, internalize, and leave unexamined across dominant school and community spaces. Further, collaborative communication may often lead to what I refer to as relevant awareness-building. Relevant awareness-building is an ongoing and iterative practice that is vital for youth and adults to engage. There is no arrival point. It becomes necessary to foreground critical humility (Sealey-Ruiz, 2019) and deep listening. In so doing, the work that we do in collaboratives must move toward action that highlights the foregrounding of how we construct our moral and civic identities. Nasir and Kirshner (2003) define moral id entity as “the convergence of moral ideals and one’s personal identity” (p.138). The authors argue that given the opportunity to engage in cultural and social practices, youth’s moral identity is fostered. Analyzing social interaction, Nasir and Kirshner argue that “concepts such as social positioning, framing, and authoring” (p.146) help to make sense of social interactions that foster 123 civic and moral identity development. Such ideas as moral and civic identity, when rooted in community knowledge, have more often been documented outside of dominant school spaces. 2017: We Were Seeds Torre (2009) worked with a team of 13 youth co-researchers across gender, sexual identity, race, religion, and economic background, intentionally to create as much diversity of knowledge holding as possible. Beginning with a multimodal survey that included a Likert scale, youth co-researchers came together to revise the survey adding cartoons and open-ended questions. Coming together a second time, the youth co-researching group and educational research scholars also brought together “community elders, social scientists, spoken word artists, dancers, choreographers and a video crew” to review the Opportunity Gap data. (p.110) The research team began interrogating the social and political history of school segregation and integration, while also learning about the legal history of these areas of their research focus. The work of collaborative communication with a diverse group of youth and adult co-researchers created opportunities for relevant awareness-building for the entire group. The following data collection protocol highlights a moment of collaborative communication across eight youth and adult co-researchers in this 2017 YPAR project. Angie and I facilitated co-construction of data collection for oral histories with the following guided interview questions: 1. What would you like to see different in your community? a. What would you like to see change in the conversations revolving around sexual assault? i. What identity groups are excluded in these conversations? ii. What terminology needs to change? iii. What can schools do to educate youth on this topic? 124 2. What advice would you give your younger self? 3. Is there anything else that you would like to share? 4. Make sure to check in with participants and let them know that there is an art table to create something, if they feel like it, or a counselor, if they feel that they need it 5. CLOSING STATEMENTS a. Thank you for sharing your story… b. How are you feeling? What could I have done differently to make you more comfortable during the interview process? c. If at any point today you feel you need to speak with someone, there are crisis counselors Figure 4. Youth-Led Directing This excerpt of questions was meant to guide attendees, who wished to share with us, into their stories. The stories could be recorded via audio or video devices that we had borrowed from both the radio station and Littleton Public Media’s film resources. Additionally, we offered the option of no recording at all. We felt that our largest responsibility that day was to always be mindful of caring for our community members. In order to further this consideration of care for our community, we invited three sexual assault counselors to join us that day, so that we may be responsive to any attendee who felt a need for further healing. The storytelling space was set far 125 away from our main event, in order to give everyone privacy. Furthermore, we constructed the space to provide shade, comfortable seating, and privacy from the eyes of the outside world when sharing stories. These acts of care were cultivated both through youth suggestion and adult facilitator experience, thus bringing us all closer to what I refer to as relevant collaborations. Youth in this example from our earliest LYV YPAR project developed collaborative communication skills while engaging in critical multimodal and participatory literacies, including learning how to work with audio collecting equipment, digital cameras, and City Public Media Center’s studio backpack. In these spaces the intention is to think beyond the classroom, to envision youth participation and leadership in civic engagement and activism, and to do so through creative understandings of composing through writing, art, storytelling, and research with youth about supporting underrepresented populations in their community. 2018: The Roots Take Soil Across this second public scholarship YPAR project, our inquiry into the existing data led to our writing of survey protocol. Baker’s (2015) mixed- methods photovoice scholarship, rooted in both ethnic studies and feminist theory, engaged youth co-researchers in the global south. Living in a coastal community in El Salvador, Baker’s youth co-researchers all young Salvadorian women shared keen insight into their lives and lived realities. The author engaged her analysis through a sociopolitical development lens. Yet, Baker notes the tensions of working across identities, herself a white researcher, with Latinx youth. She notes, “while we are both gendered and so differently positioned, an important question remains salient: how can we disrupt these binaries and work together to push upon the structures that aim to separate us” (p.49). These considerations are, also, very important as we engage youth in inquiry that matters to them. In examining ourselves through self-work, coming together to engage peer-work is 126 deepened through collaborative communication. Additionally, it is necessary to inquire what youth and adult co-researchers’ positionalities are in the work we collectively engage. This is the first step toward relevant awareness-building. As a team, we had hoped to collect surveys across youth and tax-paying voters. However, this was stunted by our inability to circulate this among larger groups of young folx. In our attempt to collect further data from youth, we worked as a group to co-construct the following letter to principals, a suggestion of Shelly’s: We represent Littleton Youth Voices, a youth-led organization that aims to support and lift up underrepresented groups in the Greater Littleton area. We are currently working on addressing the lack of policy in Littleton Public Schools to better support LGBTQ+ students. We are asking for your support. Could you please forward this to your teachers and have as many classes complete the survey as possible before February 7th. If you could also please have the survey open at conferences for parents to complete, and pass the link along to all parents, we would appreciate it greatly. Please feel free to reach out with any questions. Thank you in advance for your support, Shelly L. This letter never seemed to make it past the principals, which was not surprising. This letter did bring our research to the attention of the Littleton School Board. In doing so, we were invited to bring our presentation, data collection, and suggestions to the board’s meeting. In retrospect, it was most likely more powerful that we had collected so many adult participant surveys. Furthermore, this invitation demanded that we engage in even more relevant awareness-building, and reach out past our little group to seek recommendations from the community most affected by the opportunity of changing school policy--LGBTQ+ youth. Knowing that these recommendations could not come from within our little group, we reached out to queer community spaces, across Littleton, to seek partnership in providing recommended policy change. This move toward coalition work is a key component in Coalitional Civic Resistance. In our construction of survey questions, we wanted to know what residents of Littleton knew of 127 Littleton School District’s policy in regard to LGBTQ+ students, which guided us to the following question: LGBTQ+ students' rights are made clear in greater Littleton area schools. Figure 5. Youth-Led Survey Collection The scale, in the survey question above, was meant to reflect from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). Respondents’ answer to this question, alone, shed light on how much the residents of Littleton, or at least our survey group, knew about the lack of policy protecting LGBTQ+ youth in Littleton schools. This taking up of what Mirra and Garcia (2020) refer to as participatory politics has always been a central goal of the work of LYV. The authors note that “while digital tools are an important element of (participatory literacies) culture, they are not the focal point” (p. 91). Asserting the importance of not the what or the how, but rather the why of participatory literacies (across digital and arts-based practices) has driven this inquiry across the four years of data collection. Though the what and the how of multimodal and participatory literacies is important work that this study seeks to extend, I agree with the authors who argue that, “technology is simply making more apparent what sociocultural theorists have been saying for decades about the social nature of learning and development and the way that individual voices emerge from the interaction of social, historical, and cultural contexts” (p. 91). I extend this argument to note that it is not only technology where this important work of highlighting how the “interaction of social, historical, and cultural contexts” comes forward, but that the artistic endeavors of any community of Color has always done this. 128 A key component of all of the YPAR projects that I have been involved with since 2016 is their multiple and mixed method data collection. The variety of project topics have certainly shifted and changed over these years, as this is always driven by youth’s vision from inquiry to action, but the mixed and multiple methods of data collection have stayed consistent. The YPAR projects that I have been on have always had at least three methods of data collection. This taking up of multiple and mixed method data collection speaks to the possibilities of YPAR to push back on any ideas of participatory data collection lacking rigor. For this particular project, youth decided to take up interviews and another form of multimodal data collection. In this case, the multimodal collection took the form of collages that youth asked participants to construct based on a single question: Make a piece of art that portrays what it is like to be in the shoes of a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Figure 6. Solidarity in LGBTQ+ Spaces This multimodal (arts-based) data collection supported youth’s understanding of their respondents’ perspective of the LGBTQ+ community. In this case, youth’s analysis of these pieces led them to what I refer to as collaborative communication. The group came together to make sense of a variety of collages that were created that day by attending respondents. However, this analysis (though collaborative among the group of youth and adult co-researchers) lacked the perspective of LGBTQ+ youth or adults from the community, aside from myself. In fact, I withheld my own analysis of these pieces, as I did not feel that my sole perspective as a 129 queer woman could take the place of the larger community’s perspective. Further, due to the liminal nature of my identity within the LGBTQ+ community as a pansexual woman, I felt that being a single representative would have been limiting to youth’s understanding of these multimodal pieces. 2019: The Fruit of our Labor In working alongside youth in 2019, we came together to cultivate stories about bullying and peace-making from across the greater Littleton community. With our collective goal of broadening the conversation that is centered on bullying into peace-making, we worked toward our desire for action from day one. Coming together to accomplish in eight weeks what we have provided two seasons to come through was a challenge that I doubted the efficacy of from the start. Therefore, I intentionally positioned the “action” and the “research” (see below) as being a design from the beginning where one could inform the other. In so doing, there were deliberate moves made to connect community partners to this youth project in order to leverage platforms for sharing our research. Figure 7. Planning for Action & Research In this particular project, youth were most interested in sharing our findings as some sort of gallery walk. Moreover, my experience has taught me that partnering with an already existing event would provide for a larger audience for sharing our research. In forwarding a framework 130 for participatory literacies that is, also, multimodal in nature, Jocson (2018) notes that “for youth media artists, mode or the particular choice of mode becomes central in the process of production...mode is also integral to the articulation (encoding) and interpretation (decoding) of any text” (p. 51). The author’s emphasis on encoding and decoding is not a binary. Rather, this process is iterative and ongoing as the location, viewer, and sociocultural context of the moment often inform the interpretation of any multimodal text. For instance, in writing this in the month of June, which in recent history marks Pride month, the text below takes on a new meaning. Moreover, understanding that this was written toward the end of June makes the possibility of the interpretation even more likely, especially from what we have already seen from Kris. Kris, responding to the question “When was a time someone came into your life that you would identify as a peace-maker?” wrote: At first he was just a friend's friend, we wouldn’t talk much to each other. Sometime a little while later he was having problems he couldn’t handle on his own, and since I’ve been in his place maybe I could help him too. We ended up talking about it more in detail than I thought, realizing how much of myself I actually told them was nerve racking, even if I was in their spot (still kind of am). How exactly would they react? Would they see me differently? But it also felt good to talk about what's going on to someone. It helped get some heavy overthinking off my chest (that probably wouldn’t have ended well if I just kept it inside like usual). After that we became the best of friends, sometimes I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper, where I had no chance of getting out, no hope, no help. Only the worst would happen, until he showed up to help. You’d think someone can only help so much but you’re wrong there is always a time someone could continue helping or they’re always there when you're in the best position. However you think, however you feel, there is always a chance to rise, to help others, and maybe even yourself. There is a lot that Kris shares in the journal entry, above, that could be unpacked through an (endarkened) feminist epistemology lens. Amoah (1997) notes the power of storytelling, which is central in this study: “storytelling, which began as an oral trad ition of passing on information and family wisdom, can now be seen as a means to confront and deny the myths of the dominant 131 mainstream” (p.85). The labor of Black and Chicana feminist scholars to the shifting conversation around feminism as emancipatory is crucial to the forward movement of us all. In Kris’s case, her switching pronouns is important, as can be seen later in this chapter. She is queering the binary of gender by doing so, which she notes earlier in this chapter is important. Moreover, she shares that there was reciprocity in the support that she and her unnamed friend gave each other, which she notes as, “there is always a chance to rise, to help others, and maybe even yourself”. Kris emphasizes an important aspect of relevant awareness-building in this excerpt. Through a CCR lens, relevant awareness-building will necessarily be nuanced for youth and adults in a variety of ways due to the diverse nature of our identities. Critical literacy theorists have long argued for the potential of a broad definition of literacies to provide emancipatory potential for youth and more specifically for youth of Color (Morrell, 2006). For instance, Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez and Scorza (2015) assert that “participatory culture facilitates youth learning (that) illustrates ripe, complex, literacy practices” (p.155). In this taking up of participatory literacies, we chose to write stories of bullying and peace-making which would provide context as we shared our collages. In crafting our stories, we also understood a need for a deeper dive into our own survey data collection which would support a greater context across Littleton for stories centered on our inquiry. While it was our desire to collect from a variety of people across diverse age ranges, the majority of our survey findings are actually from the summer staff at Littleton Parks and Recreation’s youth camps. The question, below, for instance was incredibly insightful for understanding what responsibility youth camp leaders felt for moving into peace-making themselves. 132 Figure 8. Peace-Making Survey Collection The answers given, above, to the question about the “actions” that people have taken to “foster peace” provide insight into the differences between youth’s answers and youth camp directors’ answers. For instance, the answer “grab an adult” was most likely from a young person’s perspective, as someone who does not position themselves as an authority figure. Yet, even in the adult answers, it is clear that there are some adults with a more informed background in peace-making, such as the insight shared with the answer, “build relationship; restorative justice”. This survey provided an opportunity for youth to come to question their own roles in peace-making, which brought them further into relevant awareness-building. These moments of relevant awareness-building are a vital component of CCR. In reflecting how they might construct peace-making for themselves, the following two journal entries stand out as moments of growth toward coalition building with and among youth outside of the community center spaces we took up. For instance, Kris noted: Peace-making looks like someone who includes a person who is normally left out. Someone who’s kind to others even when the people aren’t being kind to them. It feels like everyone is connected, always helping each other. Always there for each other when someone is down or feeling down. It sounds like harmony, everyone working together to 133 move up/become better in their own ways or together. Unity is important in peace- making without it the peace won’t last. Everyone needs to understand one another to figure out how to keep peace or for one to make peace. The peace-making that Kris speaks to, above, pushes toward the notion that “unity” is central in the peace-making that she envisions. This idea of “unity” being foregrounded by everyone coming to “understand one another” is an important element when we reflect on the instances where Kris has shared pieces of her story that trouble the gender binary. It is clear that this understanding of “one another”, in her own process of coming to envision a better world, is a necessary tenet. Yet, this understanding of one another is not enough for all youth in this project. Some journal entries, like Shiloh’s below, shared a need for disruption before peace can occur. Shiloh challenges us to envision a different and necessary understanding in the peace-making process: Peace-making looks like someone able enough to stand up for another in a difficult situation; peace-making sounds like someone expressing their feelings about that situation, whether if it’s to stop or go. Peace-making feels like a warm blanket around you making sure you know that you’re going to be ok and you’re safe at last, now that the peace has been made, like you know nothing can harm you now. In Shiloh’s journal entry, we can see evidence of the need from youth of Color, specifically, to name the pain and disrupt the often violent behavior of (white) dominant teachers in schools across the country. He mentions that peace-making involves one person disrupting harmful behavior in a “difficult situation”. Further down, Shiloh speaks to an individual “expressing their feelings”, as if that behavior isn’t something that many want. Further, teachers grapple to understand their place within both their institutions and standing alongside the many youth of Color and working-poor youth they teach today. As youth are both finding themselves struggling within a system that was never meant to benefit them and seeking to make their important messages heard, the collectively raised voices of youth organizers across the nation (Black 134 Liberation Collective, 2015) must not be pushed aside. This is echoed in Shiloh’s description of peace-making. Thus, it is important to understand the necessity for youth learning and teaching across community and school spaces that provides necessary platforms for youth’s collaborative communication and necessary relevant awareness-building. This is central in a CCR framework, and demands that youth-program leaders and teachers do the important work of coming to their own commitments to relevant awareness-building. This is not comfortable work. (Un)Learning the lessons many teachers and youth-program leaders have internalized is vital to a CCR framework where youth are encouraged and invited into brave spaces. Reaching Collaboration & Coalitional Collectives in Action In moving beyond the necessary self-work and peer-work that leads to opportunities for collaborative communication and relevant awareness-building, we begin to engage true collaboration as an honoring of our deeper relational work and extending of respect, for ourselves and our communities. Emerging from this collaboration are opportunities for coalitional collectives. These opportunities are foregrounded as we seek to understand ourselves, our place in the work, and the necessary outreach to understanding our communities and where that work is already being taken up. These opportunities for coalitional collectives are, not unlike the youth work, led by youth’s desire for action in YPAR. Yet, as we extend invitations into collective building we must remember that the self-work and peer-work must also be deepened, as this work is always iterative and ongoing. Thus, this coming together in truly collaborative work becomes a place of beginning, as we start moving toward coalitional collectives. Across this study, this coalitional work has been taken up with an eye toward analyzing the multimodal curation, participatory literacies, and multimodal composing that youth enact when seeking to reach broader audiences in forms of communication that are forwarded and valued by youth co- 135 researchers. Our work as teachers and youth-group facilitators is to make connections across spaces where artists, organizers, and community leaders who can model and partner with youth to ensure that youth literacies, media, and action matter. 2017: Community Collectives LYV’s first event, “Unhushed Lips: An Intersectional Feminist Healing Circle for Sharing Our Stories of Assault, Survival, and Thriving” collected and curated community stories of healing from survivors of assault, friends, and service providers. On July 30, 2017 we partnered with Collision 99 FM, Archway Youth Services, Urban Outreach, Child and Family Charities, LADY (Lasting Affect with Diverse Youth), the nearby university’s Sexual Assault Program, and The Illumination Incorporation to provide a responsible healing space where we brought communities together for sharing stories of healing and thriving after sexual assault. It wasn’t a heavy day, we intentionally built opportunities for engagement through entertainment and art. Under the pavilion at a local park, we decorated three tables with posters the young women had made representing each table’s theme: healing; surviving; and thriving. At each table, there was a different arts-based multimodal activity that guests could engage with that we had decided upon and created as a group: inside/outside masks; a poetry and zine making table; and a collective table of messages to our “younger selves” that could be left behind (with pieces of tape holding down the decorated messages) or taken home. Finally, we invited one local neo soul singer and a youth poet to join us, both of whom Angie had connections to due to her undergraduate status at the university. These performances, as well as the playlist that Angie and a couple of the young women put together, and the supplies for the three multimodal data collection tables were shared with the larger group that day thanks to the contributions of our community partners. 136 Figure 9. Healing in Community through Music & Art From still shots to moving pictures, from cameras to video media production, Hobbs, Donnelly, Friesem, and Moen’s (2013) study of news media literacy and video production for civic engagement examines the possibilities of multimodal composing within a high school media course for youth citizen identity. The authors define a citizen as, “participating in discussion and debate that that advances action” (p. 4). The authors note that active citizenship requires participation in producing information that is created and shared by peers, across social media, and self-distributed digitally. Attending the multimodal literacy practices of youth engaging in media news production, the authors emphasize “composing with image, language and sound” (p. 5) youth must reflect on the basics of argumentative writing, such as context, form, genre, purpose, and audience. Moreover, in considering what they note as civic engagement, the authors envision “intention to participate in individual acts of agency in relation to the public sphere” (p.16). Yet many scholars and teachers who have worked in overwhelmingly under resourced schools in rural and urban spaces may pause to consider whether this is an accurate assessment of youth’s interest in civic participation across media literacies (Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2017). Furthering opportunities for youth engagement in media making, coalitional collectives invite community partners to engage with youth media makers in forwarding opportunities of solidarity. In the following podcast, from our collective 137 work in YPAR 2017 youth media makers worked to establish rapport with community members, coalitional collectives with community media makers, and sought a platform for important conversations about domestic violence and sexual assault. Adrianna and Ella, supported by Angie, did the majority of sound editing for our podcast. Our small group’s collected oral histories from those in attendance during the community outreach day became our missing data. Here were stories of healing and hope. We were invited to interview with another radio station employee, who featured the youth-designed podcast on the August 26, 2017 episode of The Cross Current, which focused on an earlier formation of LYV (previously named Breaking Silence). Figure 10. Re-Mixing for Relevance ...a crowd of people are gathered beneath a pavilion. Today is Un-hushed Lips a community event designed to help people heal from trauma related to sexual assault and domestic violence. This event is put on by a group of youth activists known as Breaking Silence in Littleton, we've joined forces to change the conversations about social inequity. The women behind Breaking Silence believe discussing rape culture is important...because...well...it is normalized in society. The side effects are hardly ever discussed. So they made a Facebook group and personally invited residents of Littleton to an afternoon focused on healing from sexual or violent trauma. Un-hushed lips was the group's very first attempt to pass the mic over to those who have actually dealt with assault to share their personal stories….those affected by assault are confronted with the emotional choice of whether or not to report the incident. According to RAINN.org, of sexual abuse cases reported to law enforcement 93% of juvenile victims knew their perpetrator, 59% of those were acquaintances, and 34% were family members….We found in the participant stories of healing that there was a recurring theme of putting our pieces back together...The healing process is not linear and no single story can encompass 138 all of our participants’ experiences of healing. (Breaking Silence, excerpt from podcast, 2017) The focus of the community outreach day is echoed, above, in the podcast transcript as, “an afternoon focused on healing from sexual or violent trauma”. Existing research data collection supported our oral history data collection co-construction, especially relying on current studies and statistics forwarded by RAINN.org. Collectively, we resisted and refused narratives of harm, partnered with existing organizations, were deeply invested in the inquiry for myriad personal reasons, and collected and designed a multimodal inquiry that was intended to be shared with a community that was grappling with its own healing from a similar issue which had turned into a national scandal the previous school year. Through collecting our own data from oral histories that supported a deeper understanding of the inquiry in our local context, we forwarded a framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance. Specifically, we did so through multiple partnerships that provided care and opportunities for highlighting stories of healing and thriving. Our intention was clearly to support not only those women who raised their voices and came out to end this kind of violence during the time of the #MeToo movement, but for all youth who had stayed quiet and were healing (or not) in silence. 2018: Community Coalitions Across the three forms of data collection that LYV took up in the 2018 project (surveys, collages, and interviews) though much data was taken up, this data did not speak to what recommendations we could bring in front of the Littleton School Board. This took further discussion led by the adult facilitators to inquire as to what youth thought we should do next. In this case, the decision was made to connect with another youth group across spaces. In this case, the group began coalitional communication with a few youth groups across the cities of Littleton and East Littleton. We sought to bring policy recommendations forward with and alongside 139 LGBTQ+ youth. Vasudevan emphasizes a multimodal cosmopolitanism that, “allows for inquiry about and curriculum development for young people that renders visible their multimodal articulations and expressions of curiosity about the world” (p.64). Vasudevan’s research with youth emphasizes a much-needed turn towards systems change that asks youth to think globally and act locally toward transformation. Thus, literacy and educational research both in and out of schools that emphasizes youth vision and action must necessarily move toward a framework that supports this type of youth-led participatory and multimodal literacies enaction. Our vision and action came from our partnership with TRUE LGBTQ+ Youth Group, just a couple of miles away. Our group was invited to come and share what it was we had been working on, and we hoped to be in dialogue and solidarity toward a common goal. This action brought the group closer to what I refer to as coalitional collaborations. Our intention was to build relationships that could be reciprocal and invite TRUE to join us for our presentation in front of the Littleton School Board. The day that we met with youth members of TRUE was an important day for our youth, for a couple of reasons. So many youth members of TRUE had stories to share of how they had left and had been pushed out of Littleton schools when various teachers and administrators had failed to protect them from homophobic actions of other youth, and even of teachers. These stories were shared in the spirit of community and trust. These stories are not ours to share. In a CCR framework, it is crucial that we forward only community knowledge that the collaborators we seek to be in a coalitional movement want shared. This provides opportunities for our collective to care for our new relations in ways that forward respect and provide opportunities for reciprocity. TRUE youth’s recommendations were poignant, critical, and actionable. The 140 recommendations can be found in this slide from our presentation to the Littleton School Board, below: Figure 11. TRUE brings the Truth The stories shared that day, and the recommendations made helped to bring relevant awareness-building to both our LYV youth members and the larger Littleton community. However, this action did not bring our group closer to coalitional collaborations, as TRUE youth members opted to not join us for the presentation. This became a further lesson for our youth, who saw and felt the power of the narratives that were shared with them that day. Instead, it became a moment that, in debriefing our visit, left LYV youth with a powerful lesson to consider. When they asked adult facilitators why TRUE youth members wouldn’t want to join us, the adult facilitators turned to me. This moment in time became one that I will always remember. That day, I explained to our youth that the stories they heard had reopened painful memories for youth we had met and shared space with that day. This they understood. Yet still, they did not see why they wouldn’t want to share these stories with the members of the board. After careful consideration, I asked our youth members to reflect on why they, themselves, had opted to not share the survey with their peers at school. Though they had been invited to do so, only Shelly had agreed to share the survey. Malik and Drew had both been adamant that they could not do this. When I asked them to reflect back to this conversation, realization began to 141 dawn. “It would hurt them even more,” Malik said quietly. I nodded in agreement. Causing further pain would never have met the goals of this project. Instead, we opted to share TRUE’s recommendations. This brought another level of relevant awareness-building to LYV youth. If everything we do is relational, it becomes our responsibility to care for our relations. 2019: Community Awareness-Building Working with youth co-researchers in YPAR enacted across eight weeks of meetings provided for a very condensed space for co-researching our inquiry topic of bullying and peace- making. Weekly, we would begin with writing prompts for journal entries that would re-situate us in our collaborative research from week to week. In Goulding’s (2015) work with Asian American riot grrls’s construction of zines, the author notes these zines are a remix of text, graphics, and photography, that “explore the fluidity of gender and sexuality…and excavate the invisible histories of queer women of color” (p.166). The zines seek to resist and transform the outdated and false monolith of Asian women’s identities. In resisting through the zines, the riot grrls’ identities are explored, yet their identities continue to exist as outside of the norm as many of them are not able to push past cisheteronormative performances within their own families and communities. Kris, echoing Goulding's findings, also was working through her own tensions of the narrative disrupting gender construction that she was carefully navigating both with her own family and across communities. Kris wrote: Well I’m concerned about all the people who would/might be listening and how they would react to a story like mine where it doesn’t have as much importance or impact as someone else’s story might be, although I am excited to see all of our collages being put out for everyone to see, I think they would really appreciate what we put out and our stories we’re willing to share with them. I’m really proud how hard we have been working on not just our collages but our stories as well and I’m glad we can share them with others. 142 Kris notes that she believes that the audience for our art and storytelling will “really appreciate what we put out and our stories we’re willing to share”, and this is an important point given that Kris is not out herself to her family. Yet, in Kris’s collage, below, we are able to draw our own conclusion about the placement of the trans flag colors inside of the rainbow. The shadowed figure, that echoes her own outline, with its one raised hand asks us to look a little deeper into what this piece may mean in light of her comment, above, about what youth are “willing to share”. Though Kris kept her story that accompanied her collage, somewhat vague in the tensions she was taking up across stories of bullying and peace-making, there are clear nods to the hidden meaning behind her story. One only needs to look between the lines of Kris’s collage, below: Figure 12. A Light in the Rainbow The iterative and ongoing effort of self-work that is necessary in a CCR framework supported Kris in designing a collage that provided a platform for her disrupted narrative of gender. In the image, above, of Kris’s collage we can see the colors of the trans flag embedded within a rainbow. In the foreground is an image of a profile outline of Kris, herself. The lightbulb that floats above her head is further evidence of the light she wishes to bring in revealing her identity to those who can listen through the lines. Kris is not the only one who seeks to disrupt narratives, however. In Shiloh’s sharing of his story of bullying and peace-making, below, he 143 demands that we listen deeply to his sharing of a story that challenges us to rethink the narrative of Black boys who resist school spaces. In Shiloh’s words: I was getting bullied by this kid. I told the teacher and she didn't really listen. So the next time I told her again and she didn't really listen again, so she had just brush it off. And before I told her that he is bullying me, but she just said to stay away from him, but I tried to, but he just kept coming around me. So at the end of that day, I was really mad about the situation because my mom right here, she had always told me first tell the students to stop what they're doing, stop hurting you or wherever they're doing in that situation. First, tell the teacher what they're doing in the situation. Second, tell the higher authority. Third, to another higher authority before you handle it on your own, because you've done everything. You tell someone about this situation, how they're hurting you. So that's what I did and I got mad...I was mad at this situation because I know the teacher was supposed to do something about the situation cuz she had never done anything to the student. So at the end of the day, I started banging, dancing, kicking and stuff...So I had anger issues at that time in fourth grade. And my mom came in because she already knew about the whole situation and she said to calm down because I didn't know how to control it at that age. And she calmed me down and talked and talked to the teacher sternly about the situation, because the teacher was supposed to stop the bullying in that situation….So the moral of the story is that if teachers do not do anything about bullying, the bully will take advantage of the situation. Figure 13. Shiloh’s Truth Addressing Shiloh’s message of bullying and peace-making that school authorities failed to provide highlights the deep inequities that exist for Black and Brown students in schools across the country. Martinez (2017) calls for attention to be paid to the language of solidarity among Black and Brown youth. He argues for teachers to “interrogate acts of physical and linguistic violence against Black and Latinx youth and take them into consideration when 144 shaping curricula” (p. 182). Given the continuous white, female, monolinguistic majority teacher population, Martinez argues for a language of solidarity in all English classrooms between Black and Brown youth. Further, the author argues that platforms already exist and are engaged by youth to enact collective activism. Martinez asserts that “Facebook and Instagram posts, tweets, and the collective uses of hashtags offer a platform for youth of color to respond to and provide critiques of racialized violence and discourse that blame Black and Latinx victims for the violence enacted on them” (p.186). Shiloh’s noting the process that he sought to undertake in appealing to authorities for peace-making and a disruption of harm highlights three important steps, “First, tell the teacher what they're doing in the situation. Second, tell the higher authority. Third, to another higher authority before you handle it on your own, because you've done everything” (excerpt from Shiloh’s storytelling, 2019). The fact that Shiloh sought to appeal to a chain of authority suggests what so many raised voices at this time are crying out, no matter how many of the school’s tools you use, Black youth are not free from the overcorrection from authority figures who continue to not act to protect Black students. Shiloh’s story echoes Martinez’s call for solidarity that is supported by teachers, despite that teacher’s linguistic or cultural background. Shiloh reminds us that once youth “tell someone about this situation, how they're hurting you...I was mad at this situation because I know the teacher was supposed to do something about the situation” (excerpt from Shiloh’s storytelling, 2019). In Shiloh’s case, the lack of action by his teacher to create a space of peace for Shiloh, and I would argue intervening with the student who targeted Shiloh led to Shiloh experiencing necessary anger in light of the circumstances. Shiloh’s story reminds us to pause, reflect, and ask ourselves as teachers and youth-leaders if our own practices are supporting all of our youth, but especially the most vulnerable. 145 That summer marked an important turn for Littleton Youth Voices. As Marie shadowed me and we learned together what it might mean to build LYV as a sustainable youth program, I knew that I was letting go of something that would remain after I had left Littleton. The exit is never easy, but I had come to do what it was I both wanted and was invited in to accomplish. In 2020, Littleton Youth Voices won the award for Innovative Youth Programming from the state. This solidified the program as being a necessary part of Littleton’s Parks and Recreations youth offerings. For me, this was the biggest piece of coalitional reciprocity that I could have forwarded. At a time when youth programs were being systematically defunded by a negligent Mayor, LYV came forward as a necessary piece of youth building and highlighted the possibilities inherent in supporting youth through a Coalitional Civic Resistance framework. Youth who engaged in the program with our collective between the years of 2017-2020 have gone on to choose careers that engage deeply in community support as social workers (Adrianna), and nurses (Ella). Moreover, adult facilitators that have shared brave spaces with youth as co-researchers and mentors have gone on to forward some deeply participatory and community-engaged work with youth in classroom spaces across the country (see Chapter 6). Discussion: A Multi-Relational Analysis This chapter opens with storying through the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons of YPAR. The projects, as seen across this chapter, provide examples of Coalitional Civic Resistance from initial inquiry through action. The planning and design of YPAR, that centers youth knowledge is particularly compelling across these three cases as seen through a CCR framework. In particular, CCR positions youth as both co-researchers and agentive community leaders in their research and action. Through enacting YPAR and highlighting the relational work of CCR extends the conversation taken up in YPAR research. 146 Research that positions youth as co-researchers has been extended to all corners of the globe over the last twenty years. Irizarry and Brown (2013), and Winn (2013) all foreground the complexity of youth literacies as we unpack and push against internalized oppression in our shared co-researching spaces. Specifically, these three cases disrupt damage narratives of youth’s agency to be engaged in necessary civic action and leadership messages. Winn (2013) suggests that the desire of a variety of youth-centered scholars in sharing “youth-led” (p.60) work becomes communicating that youth are truly the owners of the process and the product. This desire is juxtaposed with the control that is enacted over youth, especially in school spaces. Irizarry and Brown (2013) note that teachers and administrators often use the threat of school- sanctioned violence against youth of Color who fail to conform to (white) dominant norms. Across these three cases youth take up research and action that is meaningful to them, to push for what it is they desire, and to do so by leveraging multimodal and participatory literacies to engage a variety of audiences. Building Toward Collaboration: Self-Work & Peer-Work Across Multimodal Curating In a framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance (CCR) relational understanding of what is possible is foregrounded as both self-work and peer-work. This relational work provides the first step toward building with and alongside as civic agents in their own communities. Shiller’s (2013) study brings forward new knowledge of youth’s civic identity when engaged in grassroots-based organizing. Not unlike the author’s data collection, which came from three sources (participant observations, semi structured interviews with adults, and focus groups with youth), the greater ethnographic study shared across this chapter serves as a model of the importance of triangulation in youth research. For instance, providing three cases of youth’s self - work and peer-work building provides three very different examples of what we mean by self- 147 work and peer-work. Through a CCR framework, it becomes vital to recognize one’s own relationship to the topic and the benefits or limitations of that relationship through self -storying, or as I refer to it self-work. Additionally, once the self-work process has begun the next layer of relational work to be taken up can begin. This next layer of relational work as seen through a CCR framework can be defined as seeking to work collaboratively with others who may have lived experience with the topic of inquiry, or peer-work. Developing the ongoing and iterative skill sets for both self-work and peer-work were present in all three cases, above. Yet, how this work was done and what it led to is the larger story that this chapter holds. Self-Work Across Multimodal Curating Earlier in this section, I describe self-work as developing an awareness of one’s own relationship to the subject of inquiry. Additionally, it is necessary to understand how our positionality determines the benefits or limitations of our involvement with the inquiry topic. Moreover, I would suggest that it is this ongoing and iterative work that is necessary to understand our place in the work as youth and adult co-researchers. In the work that I took up with our first group of youth co-researchers in 2017, each of our group of women have lived experiences that in various ways echoed our inquiry and was important in considering our project from initial inquiry into curating existing research. Although I do not believe that it is always necessary for each individual to have lived experience with the topic of inquiry, I assert that the tensions and possibilities that come into play as we understand our role can be generative for producing better work. For instance, in leveraging youth and community voices whose lived realities provide expert knowledge I was able to challenge both Drew and Malik in building work forward that modeled Coalitional Civic Resistance. Recalling earlier in this chapter, I shared that though I appreciated that Drew and Malik wanted to focus on what they referred to as 148 getting rid of “homophobia”. Simultaneously, I was very concerned with the idea of our 2018 youth co-researchers conducting any existing data collection that would foreground the harm of homophobia. In the 2019 project, our individual stories of bullying and peace-making could have potentially overly examined youth co-researchers' own experiences in ways that could be seen as exploitative and furthering harm. However, once again youth taught me more than I can ever teach them. For example in Shiloh’s story, the project provided him with a public platform to resist both his own narrative with the oppressive system of schooling, while providing opportunities for others to question their own positions. Shiloh’s self-work can be seen across both his collection of other stories in the existing research and his own composing as a counter- story that disrupts the damage-based narrative of Black boys. Peer-Work Across Multimodal Curating Once we have begun to examine our own positionality in the work, we can consider what it means to care for our closest relations in the peer-work that is engaged across YPAR projects. The best YPAR projects are collaborative, and I would argue coalitional, in nature. Yet, how can we hope to achieve this loft goal of coalitions if we cannot examine ourselves as both individuals and in our greater groups? Torre (2009) worked with a team of 13 youth co-researchers across gender, sexual identity, race, religion, and economic background, though this was intentional building it also required a great deal of intergroup relational building, or what I refer to as peer- work. For instance, in the 2017 YPAR project, we engaged conversations from the very beginning that challenged us to engage peer-work which can be seen as developing common language, shared understanding, and a collective vision for the outcome (or action) of our research. Earlier in this chapter, I highlight moments of generative tension that were forwarded in working moments between myself, Adrianna, Ella, and the rest of our team of women. In this 149 case, having worked with me before the girls knew that pushing back on me was welcome. In 2018’s YPAR project, Bradley beautifully encourages and challenges both Drew and Malik to think through what it is they really want to focus on, and this turns toward inquiry of existing data and a multimodal curation that forwarded action that centered policy recommendations from and alongside LGBTQ+ youth. Not surprisingly in 2019, Kris suggested we trouble gender binaries in our work. In challenging the group, Kris exhibits a critical component of peer-work, which is integral to a CCR framework. Specifically, she demands that we all lean in to any discomfort we may have in considering whose voices might be missing from our inquiry. Across this study I highlight moments of necessary bridge building, both between youth and adult co- researchers and across youth’s multiple identities. Collaborative Communication & Relevant Awareness-Building in Participatory Literacies Participatory literacies foregrounds the opportunities that are highlighted in literacies spaces to engage collaborative communication that leads to important relevant awareness- building. Mirra and Garcia (2020) note that participatory literacies invites “opportunities for multiple stories to be told” (p. 93). Therefore, participatory literacies supports enacting an advancement of multimodal literacies with youth that forwards intentional arts-based and digital literacies curation and composition. This was important, especially in light of continuous budget cuts that have historically harmed Littleton’s youth’s access to expanded notions of literacies in school spaces. As seen through a CCR framework, this expansion of literacies toward collaborative communication and relevant awareness-building supports youth’s building of critical civic praxis (Akom, Ginwright & Cammarota, 2008). 150 Collaborative Communication in Participatory Literacies Moving further into the multi-relational work that youth co-researching through a CCR framework demands, I turn toward further understandings of collaborative communication and participatory literacies. I have noted the importance of the CCR framework to build with an acknowledgement of the decolonial work that has come before. Therefore, I turn to Steinhauer’s (2001) understanding of respect, which centers deep listening. Steinhauer asserts that through listening deeply we must “show honor, consider the well-being of others, and treat others with kindness and courtesy” (p.73). Furthermore, by providing a platform for youth to engage in literacies that forward youth’s deep listening of each other, those who share their stories in data collection, and those with whom we would seek to stand with in solidarity, these three cases support youth in articulating themselves as civic agents by first connecting to relevant awareness-building. Relevant Awareness-Building in Participatory Literacies In understanding relevant awareness-building as connected to participatory literacies, it becomes important to turn back to the scholars who have most recently forwarded this work. Mirra and Garcia (2020) challenge us to consider participatory literacies as not determined “by age or geography as are far more civic actions” (p. 93). This grounding of participatory literacies provided youth with an important foundation in becoming critical change agents across their school and community settings. A CCR framework supports interrogation of current and existing research, which further illuminates whose voices might be missing from the important conversations we engage in YPAR spaces. Additionally, by collecting a variety of resources for understanding complex issues before problem posing, such as news sources, social media, music, and art. Inherent in a CCR framework is providing multiple opportunities for youth to engage in 151 curating resources that provide for more complexity in their understanding of the topic, as led by them. For instance, in building toward a deeper understanding of the need for policy changes in Littleton School District, we were invited to bring our findings forward to the school board. However, our focus on relevant awareness-building provided space for our group to reach out and seek recommendations from the community most affected, LGBTQ+ youth. It was in this way that we began to reach toward more meaningful collaboration, and in some ways this work was coalitional in nature. Moving the needle to coalition work is a key component in a CCR framework. Further examples of relevant awareness-building came from YPAR 2019. For instance, Kris may not have used the word reciprocity, but she explained a reciprocal process of support that led to peace-making for her and her friend. Through a CCR lens, relevant awareness-building is deeply connected to our identities, and as such is different for us all. Reaching Collaboration & Coalitional Collectives in Action: Multimodal Composing as Participatory Literacies Over the last eight years, the work of movements for Black Lives Matter(ing) have taken hold across the globe, which only highlights the urgency of positioning youth as co-researchers. This nation-state’s long and bloody history of building corporate-driven greed from the blood and stolen bones and land of Indigenous and Black people provide further proof that teaching, learning, and research that stands in solidarity has always been necessary and vital. In a framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance, I have sought to forward the necessity of building toward coalitional collectives. Moving this work into the 21st century, which has expanded our understanding of literacies to include multimodal and participatory literacies, a CCR framework is timely for engaging youth in spaces of collective camaraderie. Sobré-Denton’s (2016) study highlights literacies work that functions to “empowers group members as a space of identity 152 security” (p.1726). Yet, schools continue to subject diverse youth, specifically youth of Color, to standards that were never meant to empower them. The three YPAR cases, detailed above, detail this necessity of empowering youth work in three very different ways. Each case provides a critically hopeful look into community-engaged teaching and learning. How do we begin to share this work with community leaders and teachers in pathways to work that feels accessible and humanizing? In considering this question, I move into a chapter of findings (see Chapter 6) that engages this framework with preservice English teachers. Yet, in all three of those cases I highlight across the following chapter, this next necessary step of reaching collaboration and establishing coalitional collectives has yet to manifest. Reaching Collaboration Across Multimodal Composing as Participatory Literacies The necessary building of self-work, peer-work, collaborative communication, and relevant awareness-building are not stages that any of us come to with finality. There is no “woke”, no “evolved”, and no “arrival point”. These are all continuous and ongoing, where one informs the other and as we continue to build toward collaborative and coalitional collectives, I assert that there is even more of the work above to be done. It has not been my intention to create a sort of linear path into coalitional work, where A follows B followed by C. That wouldn’t be humanizing or realistic. Rather, it has been my desire to inform how and in what ways the larger ethnographic study developed and thus was analyzed in ways that would make sense for those with more linear thinking than my own. Further, I would agree with Akom, Ginwright and Cammarota’s (2008) argument that “young people have the ability to analyze their social context, to collectively engage in critical research, and resist repressive state and ideological institutions” (p.2), and that youth’s creative energy often looks anything but linear. Yet, engaging with youth’s own construction of critical civic praxis provides necessary lived 153 experience of youth as leaders in their own communities. Further, through a CCR framework youth develop and strengthen their community relationships as collaborations are forwarded toward coalitional research and action. Often, this happens across multimodal (both arts-based and digital) and participatory literacies as youth author data collection protocol, forward designs specific to the information they’ve gathered. For example, in the 2018 YPAR project, our extended invitation to TRUE was intended to build relationships that could be reciprocal. In the end, the biggest lesson in reciprocity came from TRUE youth themselves, who though sharing their stories with us opted to not cause themselves further harm by going in front of a school board that never sought to protect them as individual students. Having been in work that stood alongside since I was 13, I understood what I was seeing. However, this moment became a valuable lesson for Drew and Mikhail to internalize. Consequently, looking through a CCR framework maybe this is where the 2018 project landed, never reaching the point of coalitional collectives in action. Coalitional Collectives in Action Across Multimodal Composing as Participatory Literacies In turning back to the CCR framework and focusing on coalitional collectives, it is possible that no group since the 2017 YPAR group really reached coalition. However, instead of perceiving that as some sort of loss of facilitation on my part, I instead choose to look at how this became for me a moment to step back and not further colonize spaces in order to do good work. Much of educational and literacy research is quick to critique other folks doing work with youth, and then report their own work with a lack of humility. I refuse to engage in that behavior. In rejecting the idea of presenting a neatly wrapped package, I choose to provide one example of only a few I can recall reading myself where scholars have been transparent about the moves made that are ultimately more humanizing, even if for them it meant letting go of their own 154 vision of their research focus (for a notable exception see Guishard, 2009). Turning back to YPAR 2017, what lessons can be learned from how and in what ways that research was conducted that led to coalitional action? One possibility is that from multimodal curation through participatory literacies and into multimodal composition this project was always intended to be collaborative and coalitional, because youth envisioned it so. Hobbs, Donnelly, Friesem, and Moen (2013) conclude that youth who have access to spaces that engage them in pre-production technologies are more active consumers of news media. The 2017 YPAR project echoes Hobbs, et al. 's findings given that their design of this project was intended to reach a bigger audience and deeply connected youth to the production of media that was shared publicly. However, I would argue that a larger argument can be made that across all of the YPAR projects youth were encouraged to envision and enact action that they felt addressed the topic of inquiry in whatever way they found most. Moreover, it is important to note that this study was taken up in a year where young women’s stories of assault from authority at a nearby university were going national. Therefore, in 2017 youth felt most compelled to create a public product that would support a more complex understanding of the topic for the identified audience. Further, we are left to look to 2017 as possibly doing the deepest work of enrolling already existing communities and organizations in collaboration to both leverage a larger platform for youth action. Thus, youth in the 2017 project went from relevant awareness-building to working alongside in consciously engaging care for the community and cultivating further relationship building. Earlier in this chapter, I shared my interpretation of value coding as specifically examining the multimodal curation, composing, and participatory literacies that youth engaged in creating across a variety of products for diverse and specific audiences based on their inquiry. In this discussion of the findings, I wove together how and in what ways the Coalitional Civic 155 Resistance framework was echoed (and not) across all three projects. Though I structured the findings from 2017 through 2019 as somehow building one year off another, this may have only been true for the adults in the space, as youth came in and out of the project as their schedules allowed. In bringing these findings together in less linear ways in the discussion, I charted how the various groups of youth developed through the CCR framework. I assert that not only did youth participatory action research with a variety of youth exhibit the ways in which youth developed through the CCR framework, but that it was in building my own reflexive and reflective practice while facilitating these projects that youth taught me what it means to be in coalitional civic resistance. For that, and for so much more I hold a deep gratitude for the communities that welcomed me in, but especially the youth. 156 CHAPTER 6: PRE-SERVICE ENGLISH TEACHERS TAKE-UP AND WORK THROUGH STANCETAKINGS OF COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE Sun poured in through the windows at the local coffee shop where Julie and I began making small talk about the weather and our summer plans. She looked at me, her brow furrowed. “So, what would it take for you to come back in the fall?” she asked. I was delightfully surprised by her question. I remember thinking to myself, is this what one of my mentors had spoken about a couple of summers prior when we were chatting about her own work and what it looks like to be invited into a community? Julie went on, “I think you should know that Tyrell is no longer Littleton’s Teen Director, in fact he isn’t with the department at all anymore.” I was surprised by this, Tyrell had been the one to ask me to change community center locations for the summer, he had been the one that I had been working on earning trust with from the moment I applied to rent a room from the Parks and Recreation department’s west side community center. “However, he and I have had many talks about your involvement at the community center, and I want you to know that we want you to come back. You may not know this, but he was tracking your weekly numbers.” I looked at her, puzzled, “Of youth?” I asked. She nodded in affirmation. “Do you know that you almost doubled the numbers of teens in attendance at the center?” I shook my head, a bit in disbelief. I had felt like our numbers had been much lower than I was hoping that they would become. No. I didn’t, yet, quite understand why the numbers were important. She went on, “So, what would it take?” I looked out the window, contemplating what I needed to say next. “I would love it if we could be listed in the Fall program guide,” I started. “Done”, she stated, “what else?” My next words, I chose carefully. “I would like to write about this work, for my dissertation, possibly even a book.” Julie considered me for a moment, looking me over. “You know you aren’t the first to come to us for dissertation work, and we do try to 157 work with other graduates from the university.” I did not know that, I hadn’t seen anyone else from the university space, and certainly hadn’t picked up on other research being done. “You are the first, though, to want to do something that would add to our community. Most of the other graduates don’t even share their research findings with us.” I wasn’t shocked, certainly not. I had heard of this practice being done all over town--it was one of the reasons why I felt so blessed that my ‘locals’ were so welcoming of me. The practice of extracting research from a community, and not seeking to be reciprocal in our research practice was not a new idea in academia. No. It was as old as the academy itself. “What can I do for you in return?” I asked. “Could you provide more mentors, like you did last year?” I paused at her question. Could I? Purpose, Aim & Reflections as Guided by the Pilot This chapter focuses on the work of Preservice English Teachers (PSTs) in forwarding understandings of community-engaged literacy teaching through coalitional civic resistance, highlighting three examples of the PSTs in their year-long student teaching placements. Coalitional civic resistance (see Chapter 2) offers a frame for understanding the various inquiry, design, and teaching moves made by PSTs to center critical and participatory literacies, foregrounding multimodal engagement, and (re)purposing elements of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in the English classroom. Coalitional civic resistance further underscores the need for deepening commitments to (endarkened) feminist epistemologies, civic innovation and expansion, and transformational resistance for the purpose of centering reciprocal relationships with youth and their communities, rooted in educational and racial justice. This coming together of (endarkened) feminist epistemologies and transformational resistance provides a weaving together of tenets between authors (Pillow & Mayo, 2007; Solorzano & Delgado-Bernal, 2001) that highlights both shared critical thinking, or reflection on the ways in 158 which institutional power and systemic oppression favor few and harm many, and social justice action, that is rooted in community coalitional action. My interest in exploring PSTs’ forwarding of coalitional civic resistance in their English classrooms is guided by my community partner’s request for deep mentorship in LYV. This mentorship was first provided in the fall of 2017, as I began my partnership with Littleton’s Parks and Recreation for a youth-led participatory literacies, research, and action program that would come to inform my findings of youth multimodal and participatory literacies engagement for social action. As a beginning step in forwarding community request, I piloted the first season of LYV (at that time Breaking Silence) through the partnership of a community-engaged literacies scholar and teacher in a nearby university’s SEED grant as one of five community organizations. Questions of my own emerged across this first season, which led to the taking-up of field notes, research memos, and end of season interviews with what would become the first cohort of community-engaged PSTs. At the time, my guiding question for the study was, how do youth and community partners listen, speak, read, write, and compose for civic participation and engagement? Envisioning PSTs as “community partners” supported my desire to bring in local area PSTs who had a more critical understanding of community-engagement, and a lived- experience of Littleton area schools. Venus, who is herself a Littleton local, shared time with me in an interview taken after the end of her first season with LYV. In that interview, her early formation of a community- engaged teacher identity was forwarded: Coming up with solutions to problems in your community with your community. Prior to this I'm not sure how I saw myself participating in my community. I’ve lived in Littleton my whole life. I’ve kind of known some of the issues in Littleton schools because I’ve attended Littleton schools and I have family that have attended Littleton schools but I wasn't sure what my role in the community was. 159 I really want to be a teacher for social justice. I wrote a unit plan this semester deconstructing social constructs. Social constructs are really important like gender is very important to some people. Race? Extremely important to people, but it's also important to know that those things are made up. Even though they're made up...how it affects your life and how it affects your communities.... Before this I thought that the only way I would be able to kind of implement that would be in a classroom as a teacher. I didn’t think about ways I could do that before actually being in the classroom and I think that at (the westside community center) its a really great space for students to be able to engage in civic engagement. And be able to express themselves in ways that schools may not be traditionally recognized. (Venus, in interview, 2017) In the interview excerpt, above, Venus identifies herself as someone who understands the “issues” in Littleton schools and communities. However, she is certainly not without critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009), and it is this critical hope that she calls on when she positions herself as someone who wants to “be a teacher for social justice”. Duncan-Andrade first notes three kinds of hope: hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred. The author pivots to the need for critical hope stating that, “three elements of critical hope (material, Socratic, and audacious) must operate holistically” (p. 186). In her interview, Venus further exhibits critical hope as she goes on to elaborate that this stancetaking of “social justice” stems from her desire to address t he inequities of “gender” and “race” in her future classroom. She elaborates that she thought the only way that she could begin to deconstruct these “social constructs” with youth would be “in a classroom as a teacher”. Yet, she finds this is not the case. The community center’s YPAR project provides opportunities for her to begin to center critical civic praxis (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007) while engaging youth in literacies that “may not be traditionally recognized in schools”. The authors elaborate on their understanding of youth activism in urban contexts in community spaces through what they define as: a process that develops critical consciousness and builds the capacity for young people to respond and change oppressive conditions in their environment. In other words, critical 160 civic praxis is the organizational processes that promote civic engagement among youth and elevate their critical consciousness and capacities for social justice activism (p. 699) Venus identifies and echoes what the authors point to, above. The LYV space was intentionally constructed as a community literacy space where youth’s lived literacy practices and the development of arts-based and technological multimodal practices could be furthered to address inquiry and action as envisioned by youth co-researchers. In LYV, Venus came to understand that the engagement that she sought with youth from her own neighborhoods was possible outside of school spaces. Furthermore, she saw the purpose in sharing her own background as a Littleton local, and the noted possibility of her presence as a model both in and out of school learning spaces. This leveraging of both her own identity, as a Black woman from Littleton and as a teacher for “social justice”, provides her with a strong anchor to begin to move toward coalitional civic resistance with and alongside youth. Aside from Venus, my field notes and interviews from the rest of that first crew of mentors made clear that the “messy” (Lizbeth, mentor, in interview 2017) and humanizing space that YPAR can be is something that future educators were not prepared to facilitate. Having cultivated a reflexive approach to my own teaching and mentorship, I wondered what more I could have done. The answer was abundantly clear. Though I had brought in mentors who sought to work with young people, they had only been prepared by their own schooling experiences and those few experiences that they had from service learning hours in public schools across the city. Having been a public school teacher for more than a decade (see chapter 4), it was no surprise to me that the creative and inspired spaces that we can engage in when humanizing YPAR go against the standardization of curriculum. Furthermore, I was asking folks to facilitate YPAR, when they themselves had never been in a co-researching space. Thus, my purpose for the study began to expand, first at community request, and then in my own 161 development of a coalitional civic resistance framework. I came to understand that a further grounding in YPAR would be necessary if I hoped for PSTs to understand the powerful potential of multimodal and participatory literacies to forward educational and racial justice. Building a Foundation in Critical (Y)PAR In an effort to increase PSTs’ understanding of community-engagement and to forward knowledge of participatory literacies, I created an English Education methods practicum that was centered on YPAR. In the fall semester of 2018, I began working alongside a group of 10 PSTs who would come to design and enact their own YPAR project through highlighting the lack of justice-oriented conversations in the teacher education department at our university. To be clear, their involvement in discussions of inequity and educational justice began in a course on critical multicultural education that many of them took their first year in the teacher education department. However, at the time that this study was enacted, the group felt that this is where the conversations on justice ended. In their research, PSTs took up collective field notes, research memos of the YPAR process, and included their secondary methods peers in further data collection. Moreover, PSTs began with a survey, and then co-constructed protocol for focus groups and multimodal data collection. One survey question that highlighted PSTs’ need for further justice-oriented preparation was: I feel prepared to navigate discussions about ________ in my future classroom. Check all that apply. Of the close to 30 participants, only a third (or less) felt ready to take on difficult conversations around issues like class, gender, and race. Given that the participants were overwhelmingly white, middle class, and women this small sample reflects pre-existing data taken up in research around the sociopolitical debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Ladson-Billings 162 Figure 14. Pre-Service Teachers University Survey argues that previous conversations on the educational opportunity gap, particularly for youth of Color, has been devoid of a more contextualized conversation that takes into consideration the, “historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral decisions and policies that characterize our society” (p. 5). Building on this body of work, Lo (2019) turns away from deficit-based notions of the civic opportunity gap. Instead, the author builds on Ladson-Billings previous considerations, and adds that “two additional imbalances: a) a lack of racial dialog in the classroom and b) the teaching of a political philosophy that has been notoriously White-centric” (p. 114) provides further contextualizing for what she refers to as the civic debt. Given that the origin of my study forwarded a central inquiry of civic participation and engagement, it became necessary to further explore in what ways current scholars in civic education might be forwarding asset-based understandings of civic identity and action that would align with my own commitment to desire-based frameworks. Making necessary and important turns toward a desire-based framework (Tuck, 2009) in YPAR has been a further step in conducting education and literacies research that is grounded in radical love. In Tuck’s 163 “Suspending damage: A letter to communities”, she notes that desire-based frameworks in education research provide a perspective where “typical scripts of blame are flipped, and latent assumptions about responsibility are provoked” (p. 416). Too often in literacy research, those working in the field do little to situate the context of the problem statement as necessarily rooted in institutional power and systemic oppression. Instead, this body of work tends toward what Tuck refers to as pathologizing the problem coming from within the community, even in critical research that seeks to highlight the harm to the community from these institutional and systemic issues. Pivoting toward a desire-based framework in literacy research that brings together youth, communities, and those in positions of power in classroom spaces supports the potential for more liberatory praxis. This claim is reflected, later, in one of the PST examples given to illuminate the powerful liberatory potential of participatory literacies and coalitional civic resistance. This cycle of YPAR provided support for PSTs to take up participatory literacies and real-world action in their school placements the following year, as they built community- engaged learning spaces with and alongside youth in their classrooms. The impact that this year- long YPAR practicum had on PSTs is certainly foregrounded in the following excerpt from Edie’s end of year research memo: In engaging youth through collaborative methods of learning and researching, I learned how to effectively decenter myself as an educator when it comes to providing feedback, determining project objective/goals, and even things as simple as note-taking. It is often a challenge for me to relinquish control in academic spaces as I am very particular about how I like work to get done, but in working with LYV, I got to see the benefits of youth- led research and really practice playing the role of co-facilitator over lecturer. I would like to bring this notion into my classrooms in things like socratic seminars, feedback stations, even developing projects on their choice books. I am grateful to this experience for making me more confident in and familiar with dismantling the authoritative divide between teacher/student. (Edie, PST, research memo, 2019) Edie’s specific calling out of the “dismantling of the authoritative divide” is a key component of humanizing YPAR. As you will read later in this chapter, I follow Edie into their 164 (chosen pronoun) classroom placement the following year. In doing so, I am able to track Edie’s use of participatory learning cultures as stancetaking in how they refuse modeling and other teacher-centered banking models of education, and instead highlight problem-posing and smaller group work. Furthermore, not only does Edie “bring in this notion...in things like socratic seminars, feedback stations, (and) even developing projects on their choice books”, but they also create multiple opportunities for youth to engage in participatory literacies that forward coalitional civic resistance through the centering of collective research that provides a platform for youth’s activist literacies. This forwarding of youth’s activist literacies woven together across youth’s chosen commitments provides a solid example of what it means to bring coalitional civic resistance into the English Language Arts classroom. Edie’s example, detailed further in the findings below, is a central highlight of what is possible when teachers learn how to engage relational and humanizing lesson planning, involving youth in the planning process, that is also embedded and aligned with the district’s expectations. After a full year of YPAR with pre-service English teachers, I had the opportunity to cycle up with that second cohort of mentors/adult facilitators in the LYV space. In doing so, I had opportunities to bear witness to commitments they held, and in many ways those commitments came together to support a stancetaking of a coalitional civic resistance framework across this study. Opportunities to reflect on what planning and design moves PSTs made, how some PSTs learned to hack their instruction while others conformed, and the many critical lenses that PSTs held as central to not only their own school work, but also their teaching identities supported a reflexive practice of revising my central inquiry in relation to how PSTs that were in the LYV space would take up the various elements of coalitional civic resistance and YPAR in their year-long student teaching placements. Thus, my revised question became, in what ways do 165 preservice English teachers provide opportunities for critical multimodal and participatory literacies? Modeling Participatory Literacies to Forward Participatory Literacies In the fall of 2019, I followed the PSTs (who had all been in the YPAR practicum the year before) up to their year-long student teaching placement. Following PSTs into their student teaching year, as well as into their placements (in a couple of cases), meant being able to design coursework with them that was participatory in nature (Appendix 5). The “Teacher Inquiry” assignment provided opportunities for PSTs to define, for themselves, what they most valued -- distributing a self-selected point value system furthered their participation in their point distribution. Three areas of concentration were broadly defined as: critical; multimodal; and participatory. Criteria was given to each area’s most salient importance (25 possible points), then to an area of balance that would be the second criteria they forwarded (10 possible points), and finally PSTs were asked to choose the last area of importance where they were nodding to a particular criterion (and 5 possible points). Further, everyone was asked to provide a rationale for design that would support why they believed they should receive their self-chosen scoring in whatever areas they chose to foreground or background. This rationale for design acted as a final research memo for the entire project, which included a beginning inquiry, and a Community Asset Map (CAM). Overall, this project was intended to challenge them to construct all three areas as important to their teacher stancetaking, as they saw value. Furthermore, by understanding what they valued, this provided me with a means of early member checking for the purpose of analysis in value coding (Saldana, 2016). As mentioned earlier (see Chapter 4), this method of coding takes a top down approach to organizing participant values to provide key insight into the research, especially when 166 forwarding a new conceptual framework. The value codes that I looked for were originally described as stemming from critical pedagogy, YPAR, and (endarkened) feminist epistemologies (see Chapter 2). These value codes were further illuminated upon in Modes of Inquiry (see Chapter 4). Twelve codes emerged from this analysis of the conceptual framework of coalitional civic resistance, as related to three larger areas: YPAR (which I refer to below as, Beginning Inquiry), critical pedagogy (Problematizing Power Structures & Anti-Racism in Moving from Inquiry to Planning for Teaching), and (endarkened) feminist epistemologies (Problematizing Power Structures & Anti-Racism in Action). In all, the original twelve codes could be collapsed into four areas of analysis, and further narrowed down to two more specific codes: 1. relational & participatory literacies 2. problematizing power & anti-racist action Starting with these two major codes, connections begin to be highlighted as to PSTs own values, as seen through their design and implementation of the larger teacher inquiry project. For the purpose of highlighting these codes, I move to an analysis of three PSTs who all spent time in YPAR spaces (see “Participants”, Chapter 4, for more information). These three PSTs brought with them into very different classrooms their different backgrounds, a variety of experiences, and diverse commitments. Beginning Inquiry In highlighting the three PST examples, below, I share findings from three classroom settings which are as diverse as the PSTs in those settings. The first case comes from Littleton, where the youth participatory action research (YPAR) program LYV takes place. The Littleton public school district has seen deep financial cuts continue over the last twenty years, which has led to a lack of planning time for its teachers, a depletion of updated technology available to 167 students, and a general curriculum based solely on outdated basal textbooks. These financial issues reflect what is commonly seen in many urban school districts across the U.S. that have not seen the financial benefits of raised property taxes from gentrification. That is not to say that gentrification is a benefit to any working-poor community of Color, as can be seen by Lisa’s example. Lisa teaches in a city that I refer to as Big Cedar. About an hour away from Littleton, and the second largest city in the state, Big Cedar has seen rapid development due to gentrification in the last fifteen years. This development is not without its issues, as Lisa highlights. In fact, the city’s public school district would make for a very interesting and needed study as to how gentrification creates even larger divides between the mostly white folks who gentrify the city and the communities of Color who have been there all along. Big Cedar’s school district runs on a two-tier system, wherein the top-tier functions as a privileged space of what Lisa refers to as theme schools. Those who cannot or choose not to conform (majority youth of Color) to the dominant (white) norms of the theme schools are pushed out to the second -tier schools which are underfunded and underserved. These top-tier theme schools have tightly run budgets that do benefit those students who can conform to dominant (white) norms through access to AP classes, teachers who are provided recent and more comprehensive curricular materials, and updated technology. However, in both tiers the curriculum is heavily scripted and Lisa’s innovation in hacking these materials, as detailed below, provides hope that coalitional civic resistance can inform even the tightest of curricula when given space for planning. The last case comes from what I refer to as East Littleton. East Littleton benefits from the higher property taxes and the progressive academic thinking that comes from a majority higher education- employed parent base. The East Littleton school district is situated in the same town as the second largest university in the state. In Edie’s example, the benefits of both a well-resourced 168 school district and a large amount of teacher agency provide the best ground for Edie to enact coalitional civic resistance. Though the district is not without its flaws, it provides an example of what is possible when we care for and nurture our schools and our students by placing the expertise and the funding in the hands of expert teachers who we trust. Venus, who was previously a mentor with Littleton Youth Voices, is the first preservice English teacher whose findings can be found, below. Although Venus should have been in her placement in the 2018/19 school year, circumstances were such that she ended up being included in our 2019/20 student teaching year, instead. Venus’s commitment to “social justice” (Venus, in interview, 2017) teaching had turned into a dedication to “community-engaged teaching” (Venus, in communication, 2020). Her solidarity with her community had gone from being a facilitator in the YPAR space, to working for the community center as an after-school teacher, and a summer program youth leader. Though she had not had the opportunity to engage as a YPAR participant with the 2018/19 YPAR practicum, she had been in the LYV project since 2017. Venus’s placement is in a mid-size public high school on Littleton’s south side, which I refer to as South Littleton. As will be explored across the findings, the economic toll that abandoning industries has left on Littleton has certainly become the bane of Littleton families and youth who may not have the capital to leave the city or the ravaged school district. The second case comes from Lisa’s Teacher Inquiry assignment. Lisa was in the 2019/20 student teaching cohort, and had been introduced to YPAR in the 2018/19 YPAR practicum. However, she attended the second community site during our second semester YPAR placements, and as such was not in the LYV space. Lisa’s commitment to teaching for justice had been supported by critical scholars in our English department, who had instilled in Lisa both a commitment to anti-racist teaching and a desire to address educational inequity. Her 169 dedication to her students and her student’s community shined through on her Teacher Inquiry project, which foregrounded the systemic injustice that she encountered in the district in which her teaching placement took place. About an hour away from Littleton, Big Cedar is the state’s second largest city, and has seen rapid changes over the last ten years due to gentrification. Finally, the third case comes from Edie’s Teacher Inquiry assignment. Edie was in the 2019/20 student teaching cohort, and had been introduced to YPAR in the 2018/19 YPAR practicum. They (preferred pronoun) attended the LYV community space with me during our second semester YPAR placements, and took a lead role in a separate YPAR project that I facilitated with a small group of LGBTQ+ preservice teachers (Oviatt, Feith, Espinoza, 2020, under preparation). Edie’s commitment to liberatory praxis had been supported by critical scholars in our English department, as well as further mentorship with critical queer scholars through the honors school. Their dedication to forwarding their students’ participatory and activist literacies were seen across the school year in their student teaching placement. Edie’s specific calling out of the “dismantling of the authoritative divide” (Edie, PST, research memo, 2019) would be echoed a year later when pushing back on the suggestion that they extend their model and guided practice (from observation, 2019). This humanizing of the educational space is seen through foregrounding participatory learning cultures as stancetaking in how they refuse modeling and other teacher-centered banking models of education, and instead highlight problem-posing and smaller group work. Furthermore, not only does Edie create multiple opportunities for youth to engage in participatory literacies, they forward coalitional civic resistance through the centering of collective research that provides a platform for youth’s activist literacies. 170 Relational & Participatory Literacies in Beginning Inquiry In the following section, I detail how relational and participatory literacies are embedded in the three cases of Venus, Lisa, and Edie’s classrooms. As detailed above, their three settings are very different and their background, training, and exposure to YPAR is diverse. That said, I would note that though they may not include youth in every phase of their inquiry or planning, the intention behind their inquiry is to further understand and center relationality. They each begin with an inquiry question that foregrounds how and in what ways youth are participating in their own teaching and learning environments. What can be noted from these initial points of inquiry, across all three cases, are the commitments that each PST holds to the very humanity (or civic identity) of youth with which they each share teaching and learning space. Venus: Interrogating the Context Returning to an analysis of Venus’s questions to foreground the presence of the relational and participatory literacies, it's clear that her desire is to understand the emphasis that the teachers whom she interviewed are placing on students’ ever-present literacies: 1. In what ways do you draw on technology to engage with popular culture in your teaching? 2. What do you understand multimodality to be? (This included a definition of multimodal in case people were unsure.) 3. How are you already incorporating multimodality in your classroom? 4. How are you intentionally planning your lessons to be multimodal? 5. In what ways are you incorporating student choice and interest in your lesson planning? 6. How are students given space to express their identities in the classroom? 7. In what ways do you incorporate technology in the classroom? 171 In Venus’s questions two, three, and four, the word multimodal appears. Vasudevan (2010) notes that “whereas digital literacies are multimodal, literacy practices that are multimodal need not be digital” (p. 44). Expanding the literacy research community’s understanding of multimodal literacies as not confined to the digital realm is incredibly important for moving away from any classist understandings of multimodal literacy as only for those who have access to digital production. As noted earlier, Littleton public schools have been economically destabilized over the last twenty years. As such, Venus’s understanding of what counts as multimodal is important to understand. She comes from a place of having learned deeply from me about what multimodal is and can be, and as such envisions beyond the classist notions of multimodal as restricted to the digital realm. Her inquiry centers what teachers in her school understand and forward as multimodal, and even more so how these teachers value multimodality. Finally, in her construction of question 5, Venus clearly is seeking answers as to how student-focused the classrooms are across her school. Her emphasis on the phrase, “student- choice”, suggests that she is working to understand the power structures in her teaching placement, and the norms of the school culture itself. Her strengths are absolutely in relationship- building with youth, this is not the best example of what relational moves she is capable of --a fact that I have key insight into due her time with LYV. Rather, I see it as a reflection of the extreme conditions that teachers in her placement district are working under given their lack of planning time, numerous struggles for equitable pay, and a lack of resources. This environment is in many ways the most restrictive of the three cases that I represent here, and there is much that I am refusing to share out of love and respect for Venus. 172 Lisa: Inquiring with Youth In her Teacher Inquiry project, Lisa chose to survey youth about their understanding of opportunity and cost that rapid gentrification has highlighted across communities. Kinloch’s (2010) research highlights a community and youth literacy project. In her research, youth ethnographers of Color used a variety of collection tools to discuss gentrification of Harlem. Moving across modes such as writing, research memos, and video media collection Kinloch (2010) and the youth ethnographers examine the effects of a rapidly gentrifying Harlem, from youth’s perspectives. Lisa’s inquiry echoes similar issues that youth of Color find in their own experience in Big Cedar. She did so, first, by constructing a parking lot question activity for youth in her classroom. These questions asked students to take a stand about their beliefs around the following questions: 1. Is this your first year at Spring Lake High School? How many years have you been at Spring Lake? 2. Where did you go before you went to Spring Lake? What was it like? Did you enjoy it? What were your teachers like? 3. Did you want to come to Spring Lake? Did your parent/guardian make this decision for you? 4. (Seniors) What friends have you seen that have been revoked? What did they do? Where did they go? (Freshmen) Do you fear being revoked? 5. In what ways do you think the two-tiered education system has affected the quality of your education? During this activity, students maneuvered around each other in the classroom answering questions on the sticky notes provided. Lisa then asked students to support her construction of an 173 assets/issues t-chart that provided key insight into her teacher-led research question. In her rationale for design, Lisa explained how youth supported her understanding of assets and issues in the community. She wrote, “If the sticky note evoked feelings of joy, they were to place that sticky note in the asset column. If the sticky note evoked feelings of discontentedness, they were to place that sticky note in the issues column.” In this way, Lisa exemplified participatory literacies rooted in building relationships with her students. Relationality is central to the work of coalitional civic resistance (CCR), and Lisa’s ability to decenter herself as “expert” is incredibly important to how her inquiry aligns with the CCR framework. Lisa humbly understands, as both someone who is not from Big Cedar and as someone who is not finding their community under resourced and displaced through the gentrification in Big Cedar, that in order to understand how best to have her inquiry inform her instruction she must turn to her students to inform her planning process. Figure 15. Building Toward Inquiry in the Classroom Edie: Facilitating Youth Inquiry Edie’s Teacher Inquiry project began with centering the relational through their use of a student survey on Google forms. They invited questions that would guide the construction of a research unit meant to be centered on youth’s activist literacies. They began with questions such as the following: 174 Figure 16. Composing Toward Inquiry in the Classroom Edie’s Community Asset Map is further evidence that the construction of this Teacher Inquiry project is intended to forward the participatory learning culture stancetaking that Edie has taken on: Figure 17. Brainstorming our Activist Literacies Edie notes that their construction of this Community Asset Map provided pathways into their design for the unit: In reviewing the data from the pre-unit survey, and also the informal data that I have been gathering through weeks of teaching and relationship building, I decided to construct a mind map. This multimodal representation of the major findings of the survey helped me 175 think about where I could integrate representative authors, opportunities for multimodal models and composition, as well as guiding questions for the unit. Thinking about what students are interested in, and seem to already be working toward in their spare time, led me to think about how to structure the unit around the personal - elevating emotion and identity to the stakes of academia. By constructing a mind map, I am vulnerably charting my thoughts on the data, while also attempting to make meaningful connections to content and practice. (Edie, rationale for design, 2019) Through humanizing their planning of the unit or as they state it “elevating emotion and identity to the stakes of academia”, starting with coming deeply to know their students through teacher-designed data collection and analysis, they are able to construct a unit particularly tailored to youth that they share learning space with and alongside. This is further evidence of the emphasis Edie places on the relational. Reflecting on the literature in literacies of solidarity, youth’s “social-civic literacies [involve] building upon traditional notions of citizenship and civic action” (Watson, Knight, & Taylor Jaffee, 2014, p. 45) as daily practices youth engage, simultaneously challenging meanings and extending understandings of social justice issues. For example, in Watson, Knight, and Taylor Jaffee’s study, Ade, a second -generation Nigerian immigrant to the US, enacts social-civic literacies in “repurpos[ing] Facebook as a personal blog to sustain conversations about personal interest issues across local/global contexts” (p. 44). Edie’s planning and teaching work which embeds youth’s personal interest issues into the unit which is evidence of Edie’s talent for problematizing power structures through their use of student co-construction of the unit. Edie, under the guidance of a very strong and justice-oriented mentor, clearly shows a knack for flying under the radar (Gutierrez, 2013). In Gutierrez’s framework of creative insubordination, she forwards the following tenets as necessary for teachers to move forward in the deep work of centering justice in their classrooms: press for explanation, counter with evidence, use the master’s tools, seek allies, turn a rational issue into a moral one, and fly under the radar. Edie begins their inquiry and forwards their inquiry into 176 planning as an English teacher with a desire to deeply engage in creative insubordination. This desire stems from a sense of purpose in teaching future agitators. Furthermore, by embedding this teaching into lesson plans that would not raise a red flag for any administrator, Edie demonstrates an artful skill for embedding justice-oriented teaching, activist literacies, and anti- racist pedagogy into their curriculum. Edie does this all while continuing to build a reflexive praxis that continues to support English teaching and learning for educational justice: Figure 18. Planning for Inquiry: Flipping the Script Problematizing Power Structures & Anti-Racism in Moving from Inquiry to Planning for Teaching The following section forwards how problematizing power and anti-racism in moving from inquiry to planning for teaching is a necessary next step in embedding coalitional civic resistance into classroom spaces. For instance, in Venus’s inquiry, we found that she had begun to understand the value that teachers held (or did not hold) in connecting to their students and how these relationships were reflected in their classroom lessons. Alternatively, Lisa’s inquiry drew our attention to the systemic racism that pervades the gentrification of Big Cedar, yet we have yet to understand how youth (especially youth of Color) were internalizing this racist system. Finally, in Edie’s inquiry, they place value in understanding what interests and issues 177 youth in their classrooms are already committed to, and we were offered a brief peek into how Edie sought to flip the script in making room for these interests. Venus: Interrogating the Community In her Teacher Inquiry project, Venus chose to survey teachers about their use of multimodal (both digital and arts-based) teaching and learning, as to better understand how the teachers at her placement school were utilizing culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Venus’s construction of the Teacher Inquiry project is reflected in an analysis of her own work: For this project, I was inquiring into South Littleton High School teachers’ use of technology and how they planned multimodal lessons. I had originally planned to give my survey to English teachers in the school, but ended up also including some special education and language teachers for more variety. (Rationale for Design, Venus, 2019) In the excerpt above, Venus notes that though she had only planned to take up surveys from English teachers, she expanded her inquiry to include “some special education and language teachers”. In doing so, we might infer that she was taking a larger sample to vary her answers. Alternatively, it may be that Venus came to understand that these education specialists may have seen youth’s relationships with their special education and language teachers as being more asset-based than with their standard English classroom teachers. Either way, this taking up of survey answers from a variety of teachers with which youth are in relationship supports the notion that the best education is always collaborative in nature. Collaborations are one step that Venus certainly was present to during her time as a mentor with LYV. It is possible that as the framework for coalitional civic resistance grew from my experiences in building LYV from the ground up across five years of critical reflection, learning, and action that conversations influenced Venus’s own stancetaking. She began her inquiry by constructing survey questions: 178 1. In what ways do you draw on technology to engage with popular culture in your teaching? 2. What do you understand multimodality to be? (This included a definition of multimodal in case people were unsure.) 3. How are you already incorporating multimodality in your classroom? 4. How are you intentionally planning your lessons to be multimodal? 5. In what ways are you incorporating student choice and interest in your lesson planning? 6. How are students given space to express their identities in the classroom? 7. In what ways do you incorporate technology in the classroom? As seen in the questions above, it is clear that Venus is interested in discovering teachers’ relationship to the majority youth of Color at her placement school, and their culture. Venus’s use of phrases like “popular culture” (question 1), and “space to express their identities” (question 6), reflect Venus’s knowledge and experiences of both a few months of student teaching, and having gone to these same schools, as a young Black woman. This suggests that Venus emphasizes a desire for more participatory literacies, especially when paired with the two previous questions that point back to her desire for a more culturally relevant, if not sustaining, pedagogy. The questions are artfully written, not too leading, and leave room for a variety of answers. The many solid frameworks for educational justice that CCR is built upon, anti-racist literacy and language pedagogy (Baker-Bell, Paris & Jackson, 2017), Black youth workers and teachers working with and alongside youth of Color and youth in urban settings offer pathways of solidarity more necessary than ever. The insight offered by bring together “dialogic consciousness-raising, the dialogic spiral, PAR as critical pedagogy, and CSP as core principles in a humanizing research as culturally sustaining pedagogy framework” (p. 362) provides a 179 window into Venus’s work with youth across both LYV and the Littleton English Language Arts classroom in which she was placed during her year-long student teaching placement. Venus as a black woman, also identifies as queer and gender non-fluid, so though it is probable the phrasing in questions one and six are anti-racist in nature, Venus approaches “space to express their identities” in as many intersectional ways as she embodies. The responses that Venus collects are illuminating. Answers to the question of how teachers are making space for students to express their identities are quite varied (see Figure 19). How are students given space to express their identities in the classroom? a. I have done a classroom mural where students represented themselves artistically b. I allow my students to paint on the walls - each student gets a brick. For creative and free writing, I do not restrict their topics, and I allow colloquial language in these assignments as well. c. They have voice -- trust me. In their opinions expressed, in the way they read (assigned or required), in where they choose to sit, in how they write, etc.. d. Yes. e. I try to create a welcoming environment in my classroom by modeling respectful and inclusive behaviors. I also allow them to sit wherever they’d like, work with whomever they’d like, introduce themselves to me in whichever way they’d like on a private student interest survey, etc. f. Through narrative writing and acceptance of their natural language/speaking tendencies g. Students help plan the major assignments, so they get a say in what is fair h. Through art, video, acting out, there are many ways and options students are given to express themselves. I also allow students to give suggestions for ideas I have not included. Figure 19. Teacher-Driven Data Collection From a racio-linguistic perspective, some of these answers are deeply concerning. Phrases such as, “colloquial language” and “acceptance of their natural language/speaking tendencies”, speak to a particular mindset which results in the linguistic violence of “centuries- 180 old tension for Black Americans between valuing their ways with language and culture and adhering to dominant White norms of communication for access to material opportunity” (p. 370). Words are important, and the language that we use to describe people and their cultures is possibly most important of all, words such as: “allow”, “opinions”, “respectful”, and “acceptance”. However, in the grander scheme of the rest of Venus’s questions and teacher’s responses, it is abundantly clear that this group of teachers are in need of a culture shift if not racial healing (Love, 2018). Given that this is the case, it is no wonder that Venus finds herself questioning the teaching practices of the school’s English teachers more broadly. Her inquiry falls in line with any student teacher trying to make sense of their school placement’s culture. In this way, I do believe that Venus was problematizing power structures, if only by first seeking to understand them. Lisa: Mapping with Youth Lisa came to find out that the “theme schools” followed the parameters of private school education, but with public funding and competitive placement--at the expense of many working- poor and IBPOC youth being pushed into the under resourced second -tier. Drawing on Muhammad’s (2020) Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy, Lisa chose to align her expansive understanding of literacies with the lived - realities and ever-present literacies of youth (especially youth of Color) whom she worked with daily. Muhammad forwards three basic tenets for forwarding “literary presence in the classroom” (p. 28): 1) teachers should create space for youth to forward their visions for reading, writing, and speaking; 2) select texts that speak to the multiple identities of youth in classrooms; and 3) teachers must plan for scaffolding that supports student sharing. In the forwarding of coalitional civic resistance (Chapter 2), I note the importance of grounding classroom texts in youth’s lived 181 realities and identities. In fact, this is only a starting point for the CCR framework. The question that I would pose to build further off of Muhammad’s work, is what do we do when the students in our classrooms are majority white? Certainly, in Lisa’s case, she notes a diversity of students. However, she also notes that many youth of Color have been pushed out to the second -tier schools. That being the case, it becomes even more important that we ground our classroom literature in the voices of those who are missing from curriculum. I am not suggesting an inclusion, but rather a centering and foregrounding of LGBTQ+ and IBPOC authors, poets, musicians, artists, and composers (noted broadly). Oftentimes, turning to youth for these resources can provide a dearth of insight into what multimodality they are already curating. Lisa chose to construct the rest of her research with and alongside youth in her ninth- grade classroom, which provides evidence of anti-racist action. De/centering herself as the authority in the room, especially as she is not from Big Cedar provides a mod el for how white teachers can become learners with and alongside youth in their classrooms. Along with her students, Lisa constructed the Community Asset Map, seen below. Figure 20. Mapping for our Community In her rationale for design, Lisa notes that: In response to the questions posed, students provided me with A LOT of parks, landmarks and schools. Because my inquiry question and asset data were very centered 182 about geographic location, I found it most appropriate to design a map of the Big Cedar area. As I mapped assets (schools, parks, etc.) I recognized a prominent cluster of schools all in a particular area. This realization led me to further consider the accessibility and equity of education in a region that primarily depends on public transportation. Lisa, through co-constructing her Community Asset Map with and alongside youth, makes an important discovery here about the “accessibility and equity of education in a region that primarily depends on public transportation”. This discovery positions Lisa to be able to access important insider knowledge of the community that she is not from, which extends understandings of the relational to forward anti-racist pedagogies rooted in youth’s community knowledge. This type of anti-racist relational building makes room for forwarding coalitional civic resistance in classroom spaces, as it provides a grounding for further community relations to be built out with family, local artists, and community organizers. Lisa’s discovery, however, lacks the desire-based framework that moves past pathologizing youth’s (especially youth of Color) lived realities as mere “survival”. In what ways does this discovery support Lisa’s understanding of the effects of mass gentrification across the city? The segregation on the basis of race, ability, and socio-economic class within the BCPS system made it all the more critical for me to discuss social constructs and systemic discrimination that are not only still present in our society, but the driving forces behind it! With a harshly rigid curriculum just introduced to the BCPS English department, I’m taking this opportunity to relate each unit to a particular social issue. This unit, ‘Survival,’ will give my ninth grade ELA classroom the space to discuss the ways in which socio-economic class (and the factors that go into determining one’s class) influence one’s ability to survive/their quality of life, including their access to education. Although I would push back on some of the language used in her reflection, “survival”, for instance, how Lisa constructs the curriculum to support youth’s critical understanding of “social constructs and systemic discrimination” holds potential for youth to disrupt the often internalized narratives that this sort of racist and colonial system would seek to embed in youth’s understanding of their own worth. However, I would argue that this notion of “survival” needs a 183 closer examination and unpacking before that goal can be fully realized. Love (2014) argues that, “If educators do not take action to problematize, examine, confront, and challenge their own inscribed dispositions to create social change, they determine that their role in schools is to criminalize Black bodies” (p. 304). I would add that to pathologize our youth’s communities and neighborhoods is a continuation of this criminalization. Lisa’s desire to support youth’s critical understanding of racist constructs and how they are played out in their schools is not a wrong move. What does it mean to support youth in understanding that they are not the problem? I would argue that it takes going a step further than a critical examination of gentrification and the effects on youth’s communities and educational access. That further step would be to turn back to youth’s take up of the civic imagination of what their communities and lives could become. Edie: Learning from Youth Inquiry Not only did Edie discover that they had quite a few students in their room with a strong sense of what activism meant to them, but Edie also became clear on what issues youth were taking up: Figure 21. Positioning our Advocacy 184 In constructing and collecting a survey which informed the unit on youth activism and poetry that was yet to come, Edie forwarded notions of combining what scholars are more recently referring to as participatory literacies (Jocson, 2015; Mirra & Garcia, 2020). Jocson’s research takes up notions of youth media for the purpose of participatory politics, or activist literacies that she claims forward “our own sense of being a citizen and an advocate of social justice using arts-based work” (p. 42). The emphasis that Jocson places on this work being arts- based, as well as activist-oriented pushes at the notion of multimodality as somehow being confined to the digital realm. Though Edie’s students had access to technology and certainly used tech to conduct research into their chosen interest issues, the final product did not make this technology necessary for completion. Further, rooting the initial inquiry in topics that are already stated concerns of youth provided for a deeper understanding for Edie of how to craft the unit. This understanding of how and in what ways youth already considered themselves to be active advocates was balanced by Edie’s next question, which inquired about what youth might want to learn more about: Figure 22. Seeking out Advocacy 185 The many interest issues above, both chosen by Edie and filled in by youth, contain layers of intersecting systems of oppression. For instance, understanding racism as foundational to the majority of these issues makes for a deeper and more critical analysis. An argument could be made that all of the interest issues shared in the graph, above, have racism as foundational to these injustices. For instance, if we were to look at issues such as environmental sustainability, police brutality, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, #BlackLivesMatter, livable wages (including the gender pay gap), affordable housing, universal healthcare, immigration reform, and reproductive rights, we can make connections back to how these myriad and seemingly disparate issues can all be connected in a place like Flint, Michigan where these issues coalesce to perpetuate further marginalization and harm to the Black and Latinx communities. Though Edie does not speak to the connections that institutional and systemic racism have to these issues, they do make space for youth to bring in their own research, including personal narrative as evidence of youth’s expert activist literacies. Forwarding youth as experts, decentering your own activist orientations, and learning alongside and from youth are important tenets of coalitional civic resistance. In Edie’s rationale for design, which I have included a short excerpt of below, they note how their teacher-led research on youth’s funds of knowledge and activist literacies will guide their construction of the unit. Supporting Edie in their field placement allowed me a perspective into both their mentor teacher’s generous disposition and the freedom Edie had to construct very critical and participatory unit plans without being fettered by a prescriptive curriculum. Edie notes that: In a pre-unit survey, students were asked if they considered themselves to be an activist, and 52% of them claimed that they do. Even more notable, on a scale of 1-5, 87% of students are at least at a 3 when it comes to being confident in their understanding of activism. The prior knowledge on activism, but also justice causes, is a valuable asset of this community. Many students noted that they actively spend time advocating for #BlackLivesMatter, reproductive rights, environmental sustainability, and LGBTQ+ 186 rights. They also commented that they are investing time in speaking out against police brutality, human trafficking, and animal cruelty. What strikes me is that they have a stated interest in learning more about various justice issues such as the school to prison pipeline, net neutrality, censorship, privatization of schools, and #MeToo. The span of these causes/issues provides most students a buy-in to this project/unit. The curiosity displayed in the survey will guide the construction of this unit. (Edie, rationale for design excerpt, 2019) Edie’s analysis of their survey clearly identifies Edie’s own commitments to teaching for “activism, but also justice causes”. There is clear evidence that Edie’s commitment to teaching is anti-racist at its core, and is anti-oppressive in general. They go on to note that the “span of these causes/issues provides most students a buy-in to the project/unit….(which) will guide the construction of this unit”, and thereby making this unit participatory in nature through starting with both an understanding of what youth know and what they want to know. Humanizing Lesson Planning & Design Across the three cases above, the PSTs all began with rooting their initial inquiry in understanding and building reciprocal relationships with youth. Venus, Lisa, and Edie all began inquiry from different starting points in each of their settings. Venus sought to understand what ways teachers in her year-long student teaching placement sought to center relationships with youth whose lived realities diverted from their own. Lisa, as an outsider in Big Cedar, centered her inquiry in the inequitable system of gentrification and its effects on youth’s perceptions of access to education and success. Edie, having strong relationships to both youth and to their own commitment to activism, highlighted the ways in which youth took up their own participatory literacies outside of school spaces. Each of the three brought the learning garnered from their inquiries into their planning and design of the units that followed. In Venus’s case, she centered youth’s literacies through taking up of multimodalism that was anti-racist and troubled class, mostly through enacting arts-based multimodality. Whereas Lisa took a learning stance, 187 positioning her students as the expert knowledge holders of their communities which generated opportunities for Lisa to bring in critical and anti-racist foundations of hacking the curriculum to examine with youth how their contexts were influenced by institutional and systemic oppression. In Edie’s case, though they did not explicitly use the phrasing anti-racist, institutional and systemic forms of racism undergirded the activist literacies youth took up that informed the planning of the unit. Thus, these three PSTs forwarded the necessary anti-racist and power- problematizing notions necessary to a coalitional civic resistance framework in each of their lesson designs. As we will come to see in the following sections, each PST centered critical pedagogy, while providing opportunities for transforming curriculum to encompass the call for social justice action that critical feminists call for in their research. Critical Pedagogy & (Endarkened) Feminist Epistemologies in Teaching & Action The long history of critical pedagogy in education has taken turns in the last twenty years to situate itself in literacies. Specifically, the use of critical literacies, critical media literacies, critical race English Education, and critical race media literacies have brought together critical understandings of resisting systems of inequity from social foundations and an expansive understanding of what we understand as reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Most importantly, these schools of thought have come together to acknowledge whose literacies are counted as valuable and necessary in learning spaces both in and outside of schools. Situating critical pedagogy (or critical literacy) as rooted in (endarkened) feminist epistemologies demands that we not only cultivate English classrooms that cultivate critical thinking, but learning spaces that forward that critical thinking into social action. My use of the phrase (endarkened) feminist epistemologies draws on Black and Indigenous women scholars whose work has foregrounded the ancestral (both by blood and by academic family) knowledge of those who have come before 188 them. It is not my intention to appropriate their wisdom, but rather my desire to recognize where much of my own learning has come from while honoring the intended audience, youth and communities of Color. This is vital to the work of building and embedding coalitional civic resistance into learning spaces, as this framework is meant to act like a bridge into deeper and more radically resistant forms of pedagogy that are needed now more than ever. Thus, this framework is meant to be a scaffold into stepping into pedagogies such as culturally sustaining pedagogies and abolitionist teaching. As I understand these more deeply held stancetakings of solidarity, this is not work that most white teachers are prepared to wholly take on. This is especially true of new teachers who hold the tension of both being imbued with justice- orientations into teaching and also learning to maintain employment, while not conforming to harmful practices that perpetuate further marginalization of youth of Color who increasingly embody public school spaces across the nation. Thus, the following section provides a needed turn into examining how relational, participatory, heterarchical, and anti-racist inquiry and lesson design is enacted in teaching, learning, and action. Relational & Participatory Literacies in Teaching & Learning I situate another section of relational and participatory literacies, here, to speak to the necessity of building reciprocal relationships and co-constructing participatory literacies as iterative and ongoing in our classroom spaces. Much like the need for continued self-work, racial healing, and more critical and liberatory professional development, our work in understanding and building with and alongside youth with which we share a classroom is ongoing. There is no arrival point. Recalling back to the three very different contexts that Venus, Lisa, and Edie find themselves in--detailed above--it is important to understand that the level of execution of coalitional civic resistance in their teaching, learning, and action was necessarily informed by the 189 agency that each setting provided these PSTs. Thus, what might be interpreted as a critique of each PST, below, is rather meant to be an honest and critical analysis and retelling of what happened, with the understanding that this is not indicative of their commitments, but rather of their contexts and their further need for growth. Venus: Mapping the Lack of Resources Turning back to Venus’s construction of the Teacher Inquiry project, I look next at her own analysis of the planning work through a sharing of an excerpt from her rationale for design: The assets in South Littleton High School are there are more computer labs than I had previously thought. While I am not in the New Tech wing, there are classrooms equipped with computers in that wing that teachers presumably use during class time. Another asset is that the digital media center contains both a computer lab and resources available for art projects. However, there are not enough computers or laptop rentals to go around. While it is unrealistic that there would be a computer or laptop for every one of the school’s 1700+ students, what is available does seem inadequate. (Venus, rationale for design excerpt, 2019) Venus keenly notes the lack of available technology that is accessible to the larger number of students in her school setting. It is important to remember that Venus’s construction of multimodality includes a critique of the classist narrowing of multimodality as simply digital. Instead, she takes up expansive notions of multimodality that can be seen as rooted in her youth’s community literacies. In fact, what Venus did bring into the classroom was highly creative, most definitely culturally relevant, and participatory in nature. Youth were asked to design tattoos that would represent a symbol that they felt connected to, and to follow that up with a brief personal narrative that included a description of the tattoo’s significance. This work echoes Kirkland (2009) whose study of tattoos as literacies forwards a deeper understanding of youth’s agency to communicate in a language that they themselves choose. The author notes: it implies a potential to make meaning and an opportunity to comment on one’s realities through a symbol system that uses more than words. Literacy, in this way, speaks not 190 only of how one uses words, but also of what one perceives as possible (e.g., the lengthening of human life and experience) through signs and symbols inscribed on paper or on flesh (p. 376) In David Kirkland’s work the tattoo becomes a symbol of what is possible, and this possibility provides for Venus’s bringing in of youth’s own criticality. Through this taking up of tattoos as critical literacy, Venus brings forward not only opportunities for youth to express themselves, but to do so without the gatekeeping of dominant English. In her rationale, Venus mentions that, “there are not enough computers or laptop rentals to go around”. Figure 23. Mapping the Lack of Resources In Venus’s Community Asset Map (above), there originally existed a legend with the following description: South Littleton High School is full of opportunities for students to engage in non- traditional learning. There are multiple computer labs, and teachers are also able to reserve and check out laptops for their students. These are labeled on the map in blue. There are also resources for students to engage in crafts and art projects, where they can be given space to express themselves. These are labeled in purple. While there are many technology resources available, both resources are not enough to serve South Littleton’s population of 1500+ students. For example, during NWEA 191 testing, test days had to spread out over the week to ensure there would be enough laptops. It is evident, when reflecting on the Community Asset Map and Venus’s description, that there is limited access to technology both based on student population and the spaces that students’ take up. One is left to wonder why there is a specific wing of the school that seems to have more prevalent access to technology, while the main body of the school only has two blue dots denoting available tech. Further troubling are the purple dots labeling student access to supplies for “arts and crafts”, while only two of those dots show up in the main building. This might not be quite so problematic, if South Littleton wasn’t labeled as a visual and performing arts magnet school, as Venus details below: Also, although South Littleton is a visual and performing arts magnet school, of the places marked on the community asset map for having art supplies, only two of those rooms are actual art rooms. It feels as though art is something that is not truly valued in schools. I wanted to ensure that my students had opportunities to use technology other than the textbook from which we would be reading our short story. I wanted to be able to present students with chances to express themselves through art and through a short writing prompt in which we would use computers to type formal paragraphs. (Edie, rationale for design excerpt, 2019) Venus notes that she “feels as though art is something that is not truly valued in schools”. With a lack of access to technology, and a limited supply of materials to engage “arts and crafts”, it is surprising that Venus would continue to push through for a multimodal project. Yet, Venus chooses to utilize a broader understanding of arts-based multimodalism, and provides a variety of art supplies with which students were invited to express their designs. In short, this artwork and her student’s words are stunning examples of youth brilliance. Moreover, this lesson design asks students to bring in their cultures in a way that is a significant departure from their dominant classroom norms, as such I would point to this being a first step toward participatory literacies. 192 Mirra and Garcia (2020) note in a 2012 survey conducted by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) that schools with access to technology and youth with a plethora of internet access were prevented from accessing social media sites and other resources that youth engage in their social-civic literacies. For instance, 88% of schools blocked social media sites, 74% blocked chatting programs, “and 66% blocked video programs like YouTube” (p. 87). If schools with a plethora of access to technology are so heavily regulating youth access to their social-civic literacies, in what ways can teachers bring in participatory literacies that forward youth’s engagement with issues and interests that connect them to the world? Venus provides one possibility for entering into difficult conversations with youth through her use of arts-based multimodality. Yet, the question remains, is this an example of coalitional civic resistance? Lisa: Co-constructing with Youth As noted in earlier conversations on participatory literacies (see Chapter 3), “participation is not as circumscribed by age or geography as are far more civic actions; in turn, youth are leveraging the various aspects of their identities in their digital expressions in ways that break down the boundaries between personal, cultural, and political life” (Mirra & Garcia, 2020, p. 93). In Lisa’s inquiry, she included youth in evaluating the value that they set on the various questions she constructed, and turned to their lived experiences of living in Big Cedar to support her understanding of the city’s local issues with gentrification. This turning to building relationships with youth through centering participatory literacies in her classroom forwarded her knowledge of how youth understood the various changes to their city and their school system. To further illuminate Lisa’s focus on building relationships with youth and participatory literacies, I have included her rationale for design: Upon first visiting Spring Lake High, I could tell this academic environment was unique. The more that I immersed myself in the Big Cedar and BCPS culture, the more I started 193 to recognize the ways in which the BCPS system differs from most public school districts in very problematic and marginalizing ways. Theme schools, such as Spring Lake, dominate the district while district schools are becoming almost nonexistent. This led me to wonder what students are in BCPS traditional schools and what the dynamic does to their quality of education. These theme schools follow the parameters of private schools under the label of public schools. We know what private school does to the authenticity and the prosperity of our public schools, so I had to ask myself, how are theme schools within public school districts affecting the accessibility, equity, and quality of education in the Big Cedar school district? On the basis of knowing that when a student is revoked or removed from a theme school the only other options other than theme schools are our traditional schools, I hypothesized that traditional schools are suffering, and as a result, their students are suffering in a devastating way. (Lisa, rationale for design excerpt, 2019) Lisa notes, above, that “these theme schools follow the parameters of private schools under the label of public schools”. According to edglossary.org, “A theme-based academy is either a stand- alone school or a distinct academic program housed within a larger school that emphasizes and builds its academic program around specific academic disciplines, professional fields, or career paths” (https://www.edglossary.org/theme-based-academy/). A common critique of theme schools is that they often function as a form of tracking, which has been found to cause further disparity between working-class youth of Color, and middle-class white youth (Ladson-Billings, 2007). The author poses a poignant question that is vital in understanding the push out of youth of Color from the top-tier theme schools in Big Cedar, “why are children in suburban schools worth, on average $10,000 more than children in urban schools?” (p. 317). Over the last decade, who and what we understand as “urban” has been further complicated in city centers like Big Cedar due to gentrification and increased property values that should benefit all students in the Big Cedar school system. Yet, as Lisa has already concluded, this is not the case. In order to better understand how Lisa is positioning participatory literacies in her curriculum design we turn to the excerpt, below: 194 As to drive conversation on the ways in which economic status influences the accessibility of quality education, students will explore, analyze and discuss various multimodal texts, topics, and themes that inspire thoughts and expand understanding of the ways in which socio-economic class connects to concepts of survival. While this is an inquiry that might be difficult to address with youth that are enrolled in a school that is arguably inequitable, making this a teacher-led action research project, being an outsider in this community required me to engage youth in asking questions about the community and attitudes towards particular aspects of the community. (Lisa, rationale for design excerpt, 2019) Lisa's inquiry was teacher-envisioned, but there is evidence here of her integrating her participatory inquiry into her teaching, even inside a “harshly rigid curriculum”. By grounding her unit in the initial inquiry, not only is she able to provide youth with connections that relate back to their lives and lived realities, but she is able to forward relationships with youth (relational). As a self-described “outsider in this community”, Lisa relied heavily on her student’s knowledge of their own community. This centering of youth knowledge provides a key example of problematizing power structures. She must act as a learner when it comes to her limited knowledge of the community space, and co-facilitates inquiry with youth by providing a critical perspective of the inequitable system. The implementation of participatory literacies and her decentering of the traditional role of teacher as knowledge-holder, forwards two aspects of coalitional civic resistance which are necessary for beginning to build toward reciprocal relationships and flattening of the hierarchical that is often found in dominant classrooms. Lisa’s lesson planning moves direct her enacting of problem-based education, which asks us to consider who is doing the teaching and who is doing the learning in Lisa’s classroom? These shared positions of teacher-student and student-teachers are vital to forwarding justice-oriented conversations in curriculum rooted in youth’s lived realities. 195 Edie: Honoring Youth as Knowledge-Creators As has been outlined in earlier sections of this chapter, Edie’s approach to their unit plan was to begin with coming to understand how and in what ways youth were taking up activist literacies outside of school. These activist literacies spanned a variety of topics from environmental sustainability to #BlackLivesMatter. Edie’s survey guided their construction of a unit plan that would forward multimodal literacies (both arts-based and digital). In Torre’s (2009) study, youth co-researchers noted that they came from “particular communities with our own relationships to research and power; that each of us carry interests and social justice agendas; that we are each differently situated and that we each have varying relationships (to) power and privilege” (p.117). Collectively, the group brought their research findings to the public through a performance of poetry and movement that moved across modes. Torre’s article is a powerful example of what working across both modes and identities for justice makes possible. Edie’s unit plan construction, guided by their initial inquiry, echoes Torre’s findings: My original project was guided by the question: in what ways do youth use poetry for activism? I aimed to incorporate multimodalism in my lessons by asking students to record sounds clips to inspire their poetry, create collages in response to songs, construct posters to present their work, draw heart maps for brainstorming, co-write anchor charts up on the back wall, and other day-to-day activities that integrated multiple modes. Additionally, each student was encouraged to choose a topic that mattered to them, their family, their friends, their communities, etc. Since the topics were individually selected, students were supported in critically analyzing texts relating to activism as a whole, but then looking at them under feminist, marxist, CREE, queer, sustainability, etc lenses respectively. (Edie, summary statement, 2019) Edie’s commitment to bringing in a variety of modes, “sound clips to inspire their poetry...collages in response to songs...posters to present their work” came together to provide multiple entry points for youth in their classroom. These steps in the product, which moved across modes, was rooted in “a topic that mattered to them”. Taken together, this unit could have 196 served to bring in youth’s home literacies, alone. Yet, Edie did not stop there. Instead, Edie chose to support individual students in examining their topics of choice through a variety of critical lenses “feminist, marxist, CREE, queer, sustainability, et…”. Edie’s decision to understand what commitments their students held to activism provided opportunities for participatory literacies to be centered in their shared learning space. The connections that Edie makes through integrating a variety of modes, provided by youth and crossing between school and home spaces, forwards the coalitional civic resistance framework (CCR). CCR emphasizes teachers providing ample opportunities for youth to bring in a variety of texts and a decentering of dominant voices. Edie’s ability to use the classroom space as a platform for youth literacies is evident from their careful construction of the unit, based on their inquiry into youth’s activist literacies. Edie shares how this unit forwarded student “engagement”: Throughout the unit, students' engagement was high, and deliberate, overall. I was pleasantly surprised that so many students were taking up the multimodal composition in ways that appeared so natural. I say this because they really chose to put their own spin on it...my heart grew ten times in size when students really made the project their own when they incorporated photos they had taken. For example, one student who wrote about environmental sustainability used photos of her favorite places on Earth that she had taken herself and she wrote about how she wants to preserve those spaces. Some students took symbolic approaches. One student who wrote about mental health created a collage that served as “a visual representation of her thoughts during anxiety attacks and depressive episodes” (her words). Another student chose to record her poem as a song. The possibilities were outlined and executed by students (YPAR!). (Edie, summary statement, 2019) Edie’s invitation to compose in multiple ways and across a multitude of modes supported students to engage across modes that were meaningful to them. Edie reflects on their surprise that students took the invitation and trusted the process and their teacher. Edie’s invitation was taken up by youth as an opportunity to connect deeper with their topic and with Edie who shares that “my heart grew ten times in size when students really made the project their own when they 197 incorporated photos they had taken”. I would argue that Edie’s ability to negotiate parameters of individual student projects was a large part of engagement. As Edie notes, above, “the possibilities were outlined and executed by students (YPAR!)”. It is important to recall that Edie, in particular, had engaged across three different YPAR projects in the year preceding their student teaching placement. Humanizing Teaching & Learning In all three cases across the work, PSTs sought to create further spaces of humanization for youth to engage. In Edie’s case, the impact of engaging in three YPAR projects, specifically focused on multimodal literacies, provided them with a foundation of understanding to launch this work in the classroom the following year. I would argue that this may have provided more facility for emphasizing relational and participatory literacies in their classrooms. Though Lisa had gone through the same YPAR practicum that Edie had, the year before, her engagement with YPAR had been limited to only the two YPAR projects that were embedded in the practicum. Given that this is the case, it is no surprise that Lisa’s engagement is teacher led. Yet, it is important to note that Lisa’s heavily scripted curriculum had a large part to play in this, as well. Lisa’s hacking of the curriculum, positioning youth as experts, and forwarding critical analysis of institutional and systemic racism embedded into their school-going experiences still aligns with coalitional civic resistance. Turning back to Venus’s work, it is vital to remember that this was the most restrictive of the three classrooms, for a variety of reasons. Yet, Venus was still able to center youth’s literacies and gave space for “youth to express themselves”, a commitment that she forwarded both because it matters deeply to her and because she saw this as a way to decenter the dominant (white) curriculum. This decentering of whiteness and problematizing of 198 power structures provided for more meaningful classroom engagements and investment in learning from youth. Problematizing Power Structures & Anti-Racism in Action This final section of PST findings focuses on what each of the three learned in implementing the Teacher Inquiry project across their diverse settings. Recalling that each took up this assignment in three very different ways, as is reflected above. The section, below, foregrounds their final reflections, or summary statements, of the overall project. Venus: A Need for Critical Race Literacy in Teacher Education Recalling some of what we have learned so far in Venus’s placement, it is important to note that Venus’s mentor teacher was a white woman who had worked in the greater Littleton schools for close to 20 years. Additionally, important to this conversation, the majority of the teachers at the school where Venus was assigned for her year-long student teaching placement were also white. Venus’s understanding of what might be a disconnect between white teachers and their majority students of Color at South Littleton was the inspiration for her initial inquiry. In this way, she began with an inquiry question that demanded a problematizing of power structures. Her questions, which I examined earlier in this chapter, were seen to be anti-racist at their core. Yet, how did this line of inquiry, her planning for instruction, and the enactment of teaching and learning break down the dominant classroom’s hierarchical and implicitly racially biased structure? In order to better understand this question, I turn to Venus’s summary statement: During this project, I found that intentionally making lessons multimodal will cause students to be more engaged with lessons and be engaged on a deeper level, as shown by the symbolism tattoo assignment. When lessons are not being designed to be meaningful to students, they will not be as present with the material as they could be. I also found this out when I was reading the short story with the students and I was not fully engaged with the text. My intention for this project was to make my lessons multimodal and use 199 technology in the classroom, as I found through my survey that some teachers were against the use of technology. Wild. (Venus, summary statement, 2019) As Venus notes, “I found through my survey that teachers were against the use of technology”, and her critique, “Wild”, echoes what we understand from the literature in participatory literacies. Mirra and Garcia (2020) argue that teacher’s discomfort with technology and participatory literacies stems from “the contradictory pulls on educators in public schools” (p. 92). This tension arises from the demand on public school teachers to both shape critical thinkers for active engagement in society, and for that engagement to be bound within the guidelines of what (white) dominant society suggests are civilized. That, in itself, is problematic. As a curative for this issue, teacher education research has cried out for an increase in teachers of Color in the workforce. As if, by the experience of their race, alone, teachers of Color are somehow more prepared to teach students of Color. Venus’s reflection, below, complicates that narrative: I believe this project made me more aware of my shortcomings in making my teaching culturally relevant. While I have cultivated a culture of care in my classroom, I need to be more aware of how I am engaging with different texts to ensure that my students will also engage. I want to be a teacher that leaves a lasting impact on students and I feel as though this project has shown me where I still need to grow and in what areas I am already doing well. (Venus, summary statement, 2019) Echoing Venus’s sentiment, above, that her “shortcoming” is in culturally relevant teaching, Montecinos (2004) notes that “teacher educators cannot assume that teachers who are members of an ethnic group of color can translate their cultural knowledge into culturally relevant pedagogy and content” (p. 177). Reflecting on the teaching setting, what might be missing from Venus’s self-assessment is not her own commitment to culturally relevant teaching, but an appropriate model. Additionally, I would argue that what Venus might be exhibiting as negative self-efficacy is actually a reflection of PSTs’ findings from their first semester YPAR practicum, 200 in which she was not a co-researching participant. Instead of Venus blaming herself, it is necessary to problematize where the missing steps really lie. In this case, a combination of a white mentor with unpacked racial bias and a teacher education curriculum that is predicated on whiteness has worked in tandem to not support a Black woman’s implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy. Lisa: A Turn to Further Critical Self-Work for Co-Conspirators Reflecting on Lisa’s previous description of her school setting and what this may mean for youth of Color, especially in light of the known interstices of class and race in the U.S., it becomes evident that centering interrogation of power in Big Cedar schools is a first step for anti-racist teaching. The interrogation of power, especially in a school district in which you are only a guest, is a move not without risk. It is clear, in Lisa’s summary statement, that her interrogation guided her instruction. This is a necessary move in forwarding a framework of coalitional civic resistance. The Teacher Inquiry assignment supported Lisa in doing just that. Lisa’s analysis of her Teacher Inquiry, what she came to learn about BCPS schools, and what this means for youth she works with every day provides keen insight in her summary, below: The disparities between themed and traditional schools are quite evident by merely stepping into my school and then United High School, the traditional high school less than a mile down the street. The disparity is made clear as it is often used as a threat to our students with “behavioral issues.” When a student is “acting out,” teachers and administrators often turn to the alternative, traditional high schools, as the motivator for students to “act right.” The fact alone that these students are threatened to be sent to a traditional school, as a punishment, is telling enough that our traditional schools in BCPS are struggling. However, this dynamic which restricts and limits the accessibility and equity of education in the Big Cedar region has infiltrated our theme schools as well. These practices have made public education in the region almost impossible to access for our students that come from Black, Brown, and low socio-economic communities. Our ninth grade classroom at (my school) has interacted with and engaged with topics relating to the inaccessibility and inequity of education for those that are not middle/upper-class. Using a socio-economic critical lens, my teaching and my students’ teaching has further 201 reinforced the effects of the two-tier education system that is BCPS. The privatization of public schools in BCPS (while the reasons for it can be debated) has made quality education nearly (in some cases completely) inaccessible and inequitable for our students that come from low socio-economic situations, of which our Black and Brown students are predominant. (Lisa, summary statement, 2019) Returning to Love’s (2014) analysis of the perceptions of racial bias that white teachers hold and continue to normalize as what Lisa refers to as demanding students “act right” is an incredibly important point to interrogate. The author notes that “too often, teachers make judgments concerning Black male students having nothing to do with their intellectual ability and everything to do with stereotypes, assumptions, and fear” (p. 294). In reflecting on Love’s argument, I would extend that consideration to Lisa’s own inability to name whiteness in her analysis, above. Though she mentions the racial implications for students, which is important, she does so while navigating around ever calling out the system of white supremacy. That is a problem, as we know that “Black males more than any other group are suspended and expelled from school” (Love, 2014, p. 295). I hold firm that there is no arrival point in learning to do anti- racist work in our classrooms, especially for white teachers. Therefore, I am hopeful that this is a point where Lisa can lean in and begin to call out both the system of white supremacy, how it affects youth she has commitments to teaching, and her own implications in that system (for all white folks are implicated). Edie: A Call for Facilitation as Empowerment In recalling Edie’s work in their year-long student teaching placement, it is clear that Edie has had considerable agency to enact the comprehensive and critical unit of study. This unit has forwarded multimodal and participatory literacies, as well as youth’s already present activist orientations. By forwarding elements of YPAR, Edie has already demonstrated an emphasis on flattening power structures. As a result, Edie made space for anti-racist teaching and learning 202 while positioning youth as teacher-students. In doing so, we can see that Edie’s commitment to more liberatory praxis is grounded in cultivating coalitional civic resistance. Moreover, Edie outlines, in the following excerpts from their summary statement, what they have stood in worthy witness to in their shared learning spaces: Throughout this unit, and upon reflecting and assessing student work, I have found that youth...share intimate stories about their families, things they’ve witnessed, things they’ve endured. This unit shows that youth use poetry as activism by making the personal political...the #BLM activist will draw his dad’s fist in the air...the immigration reform advocate records her dad singing in Spanish, the list goes on. Youth use poetry as activism by taking up space in the most productive ways. They want their voices heard. The lesson plans incorporated various modes. We listened to songs and made response collages, we analyzed poetry with flow charts and graphic organizers. We made posters and drew, some students composed songs, others would spruce up their writing sessions with impromptu dance. It was an intentionally creative space that modeled and encouraged crossing over the boundaries of a single mode. One student chose to write on “success in the black culture” and opened up discussion on how difficult it was to find “good pictures” of black people in magazines. (Edie, summary statement, 2019) By making space for participatory literacies in their classroom, Edie’s students took the opportunity to foreground advocacy issues that were closest to their heart. Bringing in youth’s literacies through co-constructed topic selection, as well as across various modes that were chosen by youth, provided a platform for youth’s “voices” to be heard. Jocson (2018) notes that “mode or the particular choice of mode becomes central in the process of production” (p. 51). Edie’s work begs questions of the media and modes that we both consume and produce. For instance, what does it mean when a Black youth can’t find images representing “success in the black culture”? How and in what ways do our standardized curriculums lift up stories of Black success, particularly stories that are not meant to be single whit-washed narratives? Providing space for youth to take up their own advocacy interests made room for Edie’s students to ask questions like this. Additionally, Edie’s refusal to extend models that might only serve to 203 advance reproduction in their classroom was another step toward the flattening of power structures. Supporting youth in not just having a platform, but taking up space in anti-racist action highlights the need for more of this kind of work. As Edie notes, below, it is vitally important to, also, deeply consider what resources are being brought into the classroom and how these resources hold potential to speak back to the hidden curriculum in schools: Artifacts for this element came from a response collage to Kimya Dawson’s song “Fire”. One example that I can speak to is that one student wrote that, “this song makes me think of war, corruption, inequality, sexism, racism,power, greed, misfortune, and saddest great saddest in which I do not know where it comes from. Lastly I think the song was trying to tell me to stay pure.” He couples this statement with images of political cartoons, protests, riots, overdoses, and police. The range of connections he makes to a song about activism is enlightening and highlights the justice issues that are on his mind as he approached the text/through what lens he interpreted the song. (Edie, summary statement, 2019) Edie makes clear, in the above excerpt from their summary statement, that it is vitally important that we not only make room for youth to bring in modes and media that matter to them, but that we lead by example. Not surprisingly, Edie’s bringing in gender-fluid, Black anti-folk/folk-punk artist Kimya Dawson’s song “Fire”, Edie is making space to trouble lots of narratives. What does it look like to bring in culturally relevant multimodal texts that trouble binaries? It looks like this. It supports youth, especially youth of Color, in coming to understand that their teacher does not have a single narrative for gender or race. This is necessary and important work to lead by example through bringing in contemporary Black artists that push back on the cannon. This supports the importance of anti-racist pedagogy as being central to coalitional civic resistance. Discussion: Moving into Coalitional Civic Resistance, One Step at a Time This chapter opens with Venus, as she centers critical hope when she positions herself as someone who wants to “be a teacher for social justice”. Duncan-Andrade (2009) highlights critical hope as being built on three necessary elements: material, Socratic, and audacious. The 204 material, as seen across this chapter, could be looked at as the curricula that these three PSTs build from their initial inquiry through action. The planning and design of responsive education, sometimes referred to as culturally relevant pedagogy, that centers youth knowledge is particularly compelling across these three cases. In particular, Lisa and Edie positioned youth as co-researchers as they began their inquiry process. Research that positions youth as co-researchers has been extended in all corners of the globe over the last twenty years. For example, Baker’s (2015) mixed - methods photovoice scholarship, rooted in both ethnic studies and feminist theory, engaged youth co-researchers in what the author refers to as the global south. Living in a coastal community in El Salvador, Baker’s youth co-researchers all young Salvadorian women shared keen insight into their lives and lived realities. The author engages her analysis through a sociopolitical development lens. Yet, Baker notes the tensions of working across race, herself a white researcher, with Latinx youth. She notes, “while we are both gendered and so differently positioned, an important question remained salient: how can we disrupt these binaries and work together to push upon the structures that aim to separate us” (p.49). Disrupting binaries was of particular importance in the work that Edie forwarded as “YPAR!” in their activist literacies unit. Relational Advancing Socratic understandings of what is possible, especially when we create platforms for youth voices in classroom spaces, was a very different task for the three PSTs, due mostly to their classroom and school settings. For instance, Edie certainly had the most facility with this, but they also had a district that did not have a prescribed curriculum and they had the support of a justice-oriented mentor teacher. Edie’s work with youth came from a place of coming to understand what youth desire. Tuck (2009) foregrounds a desire-based framework 205 (Tuck, 2009), which this work extends into YPAR to ground literacies research in radical love. Building from a place of desire-based research, deficit/damage-based narratives are refocused onto the problem statement as necessarily rooted in institutional power and systemic oppression. Shifting the narrative of the problem to the institution was certainly highlighted in Lisa’s work with youth examining gentrification in their city. Lisa sought to understand this work by collaborating with youth, and in some instances creating dialogic opportunities for youth to take the pedagogical lead. In building out the relational in her classroom in these ways that then informed the positioning of a critical lens of the school system, Lisa provided opportunities for youth’s own consciousness raising. The Combahee River Collective asserts that “work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work” (2014, p. 5). Through forwarding the relational, these three PSTs moved classroom practices forward toward more liberatory language and literacies that centers youth of Color, each in their own way. Participatory Literacies Participatory literacies foregrounds the opportunities that are highlighted in literacies spaces to center participatory politics. Mirra and Garcia (2020) note that participatory politics “offers the opportunities for multiple stories to be told” (p. 93). These multiple stories being told across all three of the PSTs’ classroom spaces advanced the importance of youth to “express their identities” (Venus, 2019). Echoing Vasudevan (2010), Venus’s multimodal literacies with youth was intentionally arts-based, which the author argues “need not be digital” (p. 44). This was important, especially in Venus’s setting, where access to technology was restricted due to continuous funding cuts that have historically harmed Littleton’s youth’s access to expanded notions of literacies in school spaces. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that many youth are engaged in solidarity literacy practices outside of school across social-civic literacies (Watson, 206 Knight, & Taylor Jaffee, 2014, p. 45). These social-civic literacies are understood as daily practices youth engage, simultaneously challenging meanings and extending understandings of social justice issues. Edie forwarded notions of social-civic and participatory literacies. Jocson’s (2015; 2018) research centers youth media and participatory politics, which she argues provides opportunities for youth to understand their “own sense of being a citizen and an advocate of social justice” (2015, p. 42). The emphasis that Jocson (2018) and Kirkland (2009) place on multimodal literacies as being arts-based, as well as activist-oriented, forwards a deeper understanding of youth’s agency to communicate in a language that they themselves choose. Furthermore, by providing a platform for youth to engage in literacies that forward youth’s agency, these three PSTs also supported youth in articulating themselves as civic agents. Mirra and Garcia (2020) forward participatory literacies as not determined “by age or geography as are far more civic actions” (p. 93). This grounding of participatory literacies provided youth with an important foundation in becoming critical change agents across their school and community settings. Anti-Racist Action In this moment as uprisings are sweeping the world in movements for Black Lives Matter(ing), now more than ever the Anti-Racist teaching that Venus, Lisa, and Edie highlight the urgency of this work. The U.S.’s long history, of building a nation-state off the blood, bones and stolen land of Indigenous and Black people, provides examples of how Anti-Racist teaching has always been necessary and vital. Yet, schools continue to subject youth, specifically youth of Color, to inherently oppressive and racist teaching and learning that was never meant to uplift them. Though each of the three cases, detailed above, detail this necessary and vital work in very different ways, they provide a hopeful look into the teaching future. Yet, what can we continue 207 to learn from future teachers like Venus, where marginalizing teachers of Color is certainly nothing new? This dehumanization is not something that Venus reproduces. Providing further insight into Venus’s teaching as humanizing and culturally sustaining, are the four core principles forwarded by Baker-Bell, Paris, and Jackson (2017). Venus’s teaching is intentionally dialogic and consciousness-raising, particularly because centering youth’s literacies is not something that her district’s prescriptive curriculum encompasses. Further, in seeking to understand what teachers are not doing to center youth’s lived realities and already-present literacies, Venus’s lesson engages in what she seeks to understand by putting herself in conversation with both teachers and youth across the dialogic spiral. Though Venus notes that she does not believe her work to be culturally relevant, I would argue that this is her own internalizing of the damage narrative that she absorbed as a student in the same district. Montecinos’s (2004) article positions the real damage as being an amalgamation of the teaching setting, the lack of an appropriate model for culturally relevant and sustaining teaching, and a Euro-centric teacher education curriculum that is to blame. In Lisa’s case, she seeks to bring a critical eye to the systems and institutions that violently embed damage narratives into youth of Color. In doins so, Lisa reverberates Muhammad’s (2020) call for youth of Color to hold “literary presence in the classroom” (p. 28). Moreover, her structuring curricular materials through a “socio-economic” (Marxist) lens provides room for an interrogation of curricular violence. Yet, Lisa continues to not entirely see the forest through the trees, as she lifts this unit up as one of “survival”. Love’s (2014) analysis of racial bias that is normalized in classrooms across the nation is echoed as Lisa continues to reproduce a flattening of identity in never interrogating how she herself is complicit in a system of white supremacy. Thus, we are left to look to Edie as the coming together of their own justice-oriented position mirrors the anti-bias 208 education values of their mentor teacher. Edie’s facility with leveraging youth’s literacies to engage Anti-Racist teaching and learning teaches us that it is necessary to have abolitionist mentors, while seeking to teach for justice. The onus of building relationships with mentors proficient in teaching the values that our most critical scholars uphold is on university departments that support English teacher education. Problematizing Power No classroom is neutral. Teaching is inherently a political act, as the personal is always political. Thus, it becomes the work of teachers, teacher educators, and preservice teachers to interrogate their own (mis)conceptions of teaching and learning. Recalling Ladson-Billings (2006) seminal work that forwarded our understanding of the educational opportunity gap for youth of Color, we find that Lo’s (2019) calling out of the absence of critical racial dialogue and the teaching of white politics continues to be an issue in both Venus and Lisa’s classrooms. Further, when examining both Lisa and Venus’s classroom and district settings, it is clear that each is doing their best work given the circumstances. How do we challenge teachers to do better? It is in rooting this work in feminist research that I am provided with hopeful models of what it may mean to engage work with and alongside youth and their communities for racial and educational justice. Pillow and Mayo assert that feminist research is “committed to social change” (p.190). I would argue that Venus and Lisa are, also, committed to social change. Yet, each of them communicates constraints in their year-long student teaching placement. These constraints may be from continuing relationships with inappropriate mentors (in Venus’s cas) or they may be from the context of the district itself (in Lisa’s case). So who does the work and who has the space to flatten hierarchies when seeking to do work with youth that is both in solidarity and centers justice? Edie’s providing a unit plan that is a platform for youth’s activist literacies is 209 a good place to begin. Echoing Torre’s (2009) study, Edie works with youth as co-researchers to highlight their “interests and social justice agendas” (p.117). It certainly wasn’t reflected by my own first year of teaching, when I stood on the desks and chairs and railed poetry at my students with which they didn’t connect. No, Edie’s work does something that I wish mine had done in those early first years. Edie’s teaching begs questions of the media and modes that we both consume and produce that supports youth in their own interrogations: Overall this project invigorated me, and I would like to think some of my students as well. While I got the normal groans about participation and in-class work, most students really bought in. Some opened up really fruitful discussions about things they were really hesitant to talk about at first. Students whispered about things or would ask permission to write something down that they thought was “too controversial”. As the unit went on they were louder, more confident, and more curious. A student asked me seriously, “what makes people uncomfortable about talking about sex?”, another student asked, “do you think we are doomed to follow in the footsteps of our parents?, another asked, “is it okay if I write something that people might disagree with?”, and I got a lot of, “is this appropriate to talk about here?” (and they were about reproductive rights, police brutality, censorship, and drug abuse). I think that creating a unit centered around the individual desires of students and encouraging them to compose writing that in a form that is authentic and nonstandard opens up space for culturally relevant and sustaining teaching/learning practices. (Edie, summary statement, 2019) It is deeply important to take a moment to pause here, and reflect on Edie’s responses from youth, above. What does it mean to center classroom spaces where youth ask such questions as, “Is this appropriate to talk about here?” What do we do with teachers who cry out that the classroom is a neutral space if youth inquire, “Is it okay if I write something that people might disagree with?” How do we begin to enter brave spaces where youth can ask such vulnerable questions like, “Do you think we are doomed to follow in the footsteps of our parents?” My heart is heavy just looking at these questions to consider how we are silencing all of our students, and 210 not preparing youth to engage in critical dialogue across communities that break down barriers and humanize each other. Earlier in this chapter, I shared my interpretation of value coding. In it, I note that I was able to break codes down to four major areas: 1) relational; 2) anti-racist action; 3) participatory literacies; and 4) problematizing power structures. I structured the findings through looking at Venus, Lisa, and Edie’s reflective writing and teaching practices from inquiry through action. By doing so, I charted their thinking and development as community-engaged and critical teachers who moved the dial towards coalitional civic resistance. In the framework for coalitional civic resistance, I highlight the idea that any teacher seeking to forward coalitional civic resistance, must begin by entering brave spaces of decentering themselves as the authority of knowled ge, move toward facilitator of the co-learning process, and finally become a learner from youth knowledge. In order to begin to engage coalitional civic resistance across classroom and community literacy and learning spaces, I proposed the following tenants below: 1. Positioning youth as leaders, thought partners, and expert knowledge holders 2. Coming in with humility, when invited, and being willing to do the deep work of unpacking the inherent biases that have been unknowingly imprinted by a system that privileges white, cis, straight, middle class, able, and Christian identities 3. Developing community connections and furthering reciprocal relationships 4. Listening deeply to stories being shared/modeling listening deeply with respect 5. Refusing the limitations of the academy/schools when providing time and space for coalitional civic resistance 6. Letting go of the facade of control and seeking only to facilitate participatory learning, research, and action 211 These are not meant to come in any particular order, or from any starting point. The work is forever ongoing and iterative. It requires that we, always, be both in critical self -reflection and anti-racist/anti-bias action. This is not easy work, but when was teaching ever truly an easy profession? This is bold, radically loving, liberatory work. This is work that Venus, Lisa, and Edie all engaged in three very different contexts, alongside three very different mentor teachers, and most importantly from three very different starting points. Recalling earlier in this chapter, it was Edie who had engaged with three different YPAR projects. Two of these projects where they were themselves the “youth”, and co-researched in two very different spaces. The third project in which they were an adult facilitator. I assert that when we engage teachers in participatory research and action, they are then more equipped to forward desire-based inquiry, participatory literacies, anti-racist action. As Edie states, above, “I think that creating a unit centered around the individual desires of students and encouraging them to compose writing that in a form that is authentic and nonstandard opens up space for culturally relevant and sustaining teaching/learning practices” (Edie, summary statement, 2019). Yes, it does, Edie. Yes, it does. 212 CHAPTER 7: HUMANIZING LITERACY RESEARCH, TEACHING & YPAR AS COALITIONAL CIVIC RESISTANCE “...thinking about ways one conducts research with youth and communities in that it positions researchers as evolving and situated, always being mindful of how critically important it is to respect the humanity of people who invite us into their worlds and help us answer questions about educational, social, and cultural justice” (Paris & Winn, 2014, p.xv) (Re)Defining Quality & Rigor through a Humanizing Lens In the last twenty years, there has been a shift toward understanding the possibility of participatory forms of learning, teaching, and research with and alongside youth and community members. Though this early work broke new ground through engaging youth and community members in PAR (McIntyre, 2000; Selener, 1997; Wang & Burris, 1997; Whyte, 1991), the rapid growth of PAR as a methodology has made room for a larger conversation of quality and rigor. On the one hand, some would argue that the educational research community must come together to share the “lived experiences of educators, students, and parents across multiple contexts” (Wells, Holme & Scott, 2018). From this perspective, educational researchers, educators, and communities working collaboratively to provide possibilities in advancement in education research that effectively furthers access to higher quality education with greater rigor for all students. While some might agree with the need for collaboration, early work in participatory action research (PAR) tended toward centering the problem within youth’s communities. More recent turns in YPAR scholarship problematizes working collaboratively in education research. Many of these scholars argue for moving away from centering narratives of damage (Bautista, Bertrand, Morrell, Scorza & Matthews, 2013; Cammarota, 2008, 2011; Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Guishard, 2009; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2016; Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza & Ford, 2013; Torre & Ayala, 2009; Tuck, 2008). According 213 to Tuck (2008), a turn toward desire-based frameworks is necessary as "without the context of racism and colonization, all we're left with is the damage, and this makes our stories vulnerable to pathologizing analyses" (p. 415). This cautionary call to action necessitates a critical and collaborative gathering of youth, communities, educators, and education researchers moving toward desire-based frameworks. This turn centers a need for social action that places the problem, and therefore the inquiry, within systems and institutions. By situating the problem statement as deeply embedded within oppressive systems and racist institutions, it is important to remember to situate the work in such a way that we name the pain and move toward desire. Recalling a recent webinar that centered on liberation and critical love, I am reminded of a comment made that scholars’ whose work only seeks resistance and revolution have inherently connected themselves to the struggle of historically marginalized people. It is my desire to have not done so, while still engaging in the difficult terrain of contentious truths. My inquiry questions for this dissertation highlighted what it was I hoped to understand across the larger study: 1. In what ways and for what purposes do youth engage with participatory literacies and multimodal composing? a. What specific literacies are forwarded during collaborative and coalitional inquiry and action? b. In what ways are youth learning, asserting, or possibly reclaiming their civic identity across their literacies practice? 2. How do preservice English teachers, who were adult facilitators in the YPAR space, provide opportunities for elements of YPAR in their teaching placements? 214 These questions came from very personal spaces, for me. As a youth protestor and organizer during the time of the 1992 racial uprising and the Riot Grrl movement, art became a place of resistance to the multiple oppressions that had an impact on my friends of Color and myself. Moreover, I had early lessons in the power of coalitions. At 15 years old, myself and about 100 queer, punk, skater, goth, hippie youth marched Neo-Nazis out of our city, because so many of us understood the harm of white supremacy and oppression. The weirdos were always my familia (family, in Italian, respective of both blood and chosen relations). Whether through lived experience or due to empathy, there were no questions that our lives and our friends’ lives were worthy, though many of us lacked the racial literacy to fully understand the interstices of oppression. Our diverse band of weirdos found escape, comfort, and sociopolitical expression through music, graffiti, and a variety of visual and performance art. When we worked collaboratively, we hosted punk shows or raves where proceeds went to organizations who supported homeless youth, AIDS palliative care centers, and animal shelters. Though we could not vote, we most certainly had a sense of our political development and personal responsibility. Yet, our schools were not where we learned these literacies or how to engage in any of the difficult conversations we took up. Many of us didn’t have those outlets at home. Yet collectively, we shared books (such as, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), film (for example, My Own Private Idaho), music (from Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet to Nirvana’s Nevermind), art (from tagging to circulating zines), and a desire for social change. We may have had different interests in activities, and varied commitments to social change (I, for one, am far more straight edge today than I ever was at 16). Yet, when needed and in support, the community always came together. 215 We taught each other what we couldn’t learn from our homes or at school. We shared knowledge, and we worked collectively to resist the systems which we knew would eventually come for us all. Later in life, we would hold these commitments in far more radically loving ways that for many of us became far more sustainable. Yet, I would assert that we continue to hold our commitment to action for social change with the same rigor we held as youth. For myself, being responsive to youth is only paying forward what I wish we would have had at that time. Therefore, the sharing of Coalitional Civic Resistance becomes a framework not only for youth to hold each other accountable in the work (as we did), but to move forward those commitments to whatever their journey holds next. For example, Adrianna (who you met in earlier chapters) is now studying to be a social worker and works for a nearby university office that supports people who are neurodiverse and differently abled. Now entering her early twenties, Adrianna’s question, “What’s next?” has become a point of personal reflection for her. Humanizing (Re)imaginings of Quality & Rigor Across this chapter, I assert a perspective on quality and rigor in participatory action research informed by humanizing theories and methodologies in research. In considering quality and rigor in participatory action research, we must interrogate our own research practices to inquire as to whose value system is centered. Across participatory action research, I assert that scholarship must move toward a radically more authentic understanding of what we observe. In this chapter, I explore three central criteria to determine quality and rigor, which I will refer to as tenets. Examining the quality and rigor informed by scholars in decolonizing research as it relates to participatory action research involves reframing deficit models of understanding and value. Criteria exists as a system through which something can be judged or decided. Envisioning a move toward using tenets to conceptualize the nature of knowledge, reality, and 216 existence forwards future possibilities. In shifting towards tenets, I conceptualize three central principles through which quality and rigor are recast. Thus, this reimagining of rigor and quality informed by decolonial research necessarily builds out from the Rs of Indigenous scholarship (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; Wilson, 2008), as essential for understanding rigor and quality that is defined with youth and communities with which we research in PAR. This chapter is organized to focus on the three Rs of Indigenous research—relationality, respect, and responsibility (Wilson, 2008)—as central tenets through which to understand a new way of knowing quality and rigor in education research. In his book, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Wilson (2008) maintains that “if Indigenous ways of knowing have to be narrowed through one particular lens...then surely that lens would be relationality” (p.58). Therefore, in the section highlighting this first central tenet, relationality is explored as a way to (re)imagine quality in PAR, specifically as determined by youth and communities with which education researchers collaborate (Cammarota, 2008, 2011; Guishard, 2009; Torre & Ayala, 2009; Tuck, 2009). In focusing on relationality as the first central tenet, I have forwarded an understanding of multirelational analysis for youth’s stancetakings in coalitional civic resistance. Moving to the second tenet, respect, Steinhauer (2001) states that “respect means you listen intently to others’ ideas, that you do not insist that your idea prevails” (p.73). This second central tenet was forwarded when working with community-engaged preservice teachers and analyzing their use of participatory literacies in their year-long student teaching placements. Education research in participatory action research (PAR) that underscores the importance of (re)conceiving rigor has increasingly turned toward conversations of researcher responsibility (Bautista, Bertrand, Morrell, Scorza & Matthews, 2013; Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Mirra, 217 Garcia & Morrell, 2016; Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza & Ford, 2013). Moreover, in considering who is responsible for that (re)conceiving, many scholars have enacted PAR that not only researches with and alongside youth and communities, but stresses the need for a more rigorous listening by taking up inquiry driven by co-researchers own questions and concerns. Further, this intent listening, or respect, must be followed up by responsibility (or reciprocity)—the final tenet. There are several intentional moves that I have made, across the years of forwarding this work with youth and preservice teachers that have intentionally called upon my own reflexive analysis of who I am responsible to and how I am responsible to them. In her book, Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit, Archibald (2008) defines responsibility as “carrying out the roles of teacher and learner (a serious approach to the work and being mindful of what readers/other learners can comprehend) ...so that we each gave to the other” (p.55). In building with heart-held reciprocity or responsibility, I explore responsibility by noting the importance of quality and rigor as envisioned by the communities with which my own collaborative research is enacted. Furthermore, complicating the notion of who has access to inform and participate in not only education research but systems change, I draw on scholars who move forward the necessity of decolonizing educational research (Patel, 2016; San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017; Toscana Villanueva, 2013; Tuck, 2008). Specifically, Tuck (2008) and Patel (2016) call on communities of scholars to rethink and (re)imagine our relationships and responsibility to knowledge holders, policy shapers, and community. In response to Tuck and Patel’s calls to action, the Coalitional Civic Resistance framework seeks to (re)imagine our relationships and responsibility to the knowledge holders 218 with which I work. In chapter two, I forwarded a set of tenets to support folks’ mindful understanding of what is next for someone who holds commitments to solidarity: 1. Positioning youth as leaders, thought partners, and expert knowledge holders 2. Coming in with humility, when invited, and being willing to do the deep work of unpacking the inherent biases that have been unknowingly imprinted by a system that privileges white, cis, straight, middle class, able, and Christian identities 3. Developing community connections and furthering reciprocal relationships 4. Listening deeply to stories being shared/modeling listening deeply with respect 5. Refusing the limitations of the academy/schools when providing time and space for Coalitional Civic Resistance 6. Letting go of the facade of control and seeking only to facilitate participatory learning, research, and action I would assert that whether one finds themselves in research, teaching, youth-leadership, or co-researching (as a younger person), these tenets are all applicable. The numbers are not meant to be in any particular order, and the work in many of these points is iterative and ongoing. At the heart of Coalitional Civic Resistance is respect and relationality. Relationality: Building & Sustaining Community Praxis Wilson (2008) notes that “all things are related and therefore relevant” (p.58). Like Wilson, who notes that Indigenous scholars question if “it is even possible for dominant system researchers to understand this concept” (p.58), I acknowledge that as a non-Indigenous scholar much of the core understanding of Indigenous research methods may remain inaccessible. Consequently, a counter-argument for my choice of tenets would be that I am appropriating Indigenous research principles. I concede that as a non-Indigenous scholar I will never fully 219 understand, but I believe strongly that Indigenous communities and scholarship have much to teach education researchers. For, instance, in my own work as a mentor for the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Program (IYEP), I have learned a careful practice of intentional listening and engaging in iterative dialogue with communities in the urban settings in which I work. This learning has deeply informed the last five years and ongoing collaboration with Littleton Youth Voices and the department of Parks & Recreation. Relationality: Examples from Participatory Action Research Scholars Learning from scholars who are deeply invested in decolonizing education research, I contend that various decolonizing methods can be engaged with youth and communities. These scholars highlight the nature of relationships and relationality across their participatory research methods. Possibilities emerge in considering the nature of building authentic relationships that come from deep listening in participatory action and literacies research as central to the connections made through the key tenet of relationality. Thus, I turn to learn from key Indigenous, Black, and scholars of Color whose participatory work is situated within this deep listening, or relationality (Cammarota, 2008, 2011; Guishard, 2009; Torre & Ayala, 2009; Tuck, 2009) to highlight the importance of engaging authentically in relation with ourselves, our research participants, and the world. A turn toward humanizing quality in education research with youth and communities with which we collaborate in participatory action research would necessarily begin with inquiry led by our participants. The opportunities of inquiry led by our participants’ inquiries points to possibilities of education research that attends to lines of inquiry that hold potential for building sustainable relations, thereby enriching the quality of our relationships with/in research. Moreover, not only would the research begin with our participants’ inquiry rooted in their desire, 220 but action that would necessarily impact the systems and institutions within which our collaborators have identified the issue. For example, Cammarota (2008, 2011) began a participatory learning course within the Tucson school district in which youth were trained as ethnographers to examine their own collaborative questions. This program, the Social Justice Education Program (SJEP), became a vehicle for youth’s perspectives of educational inequity to be forwarded to policy makers. Cammarota’s work is only one such example of the power of participatory action research to go beyond improving the quality of the education research community’s furthered understanding of who our research is meant to address and benefit. Cammarota’s participatory research with youth ethnographers, actually serves to impact not only our understanding of research, but further educational equity and access for youth with whom we are in the work. Additionally, in reference to quality, the AERA “Standards for Reporting on Humanities Oriented Research” (2009), specifically notes the importance of “quality of communication” (p.485). The standards report illuminates the necessity for quality in the words we use in research for “words and ideas themselves—their political meanings, other contextual connotations, and their historical usage—are often central to the exploration of educational phenomena” (p.485). I agree that it is crucial to understand our research with and alongside our research participants, because my experience with working alongside youth and teachers in urban contexts confirms that grounding my work in participatory action research informed by decolonial participatory methodologies supports research and accountability that is meaningful to various communities across spaces. Although I grant that a thorough understanding of relationality may remain outside of my understanding as a non-Indigenous scholar (Steinhauer, 2001), I maintain that relationality in my research holds possibilities of supporting co-researchers’ goals in educational 221 justice, while providing the research community with new insights. As a result, I argue that the first tenet, relationality, is key to justice-oriented participatory research due to the impact that our stories have on each other and our understanding of knowledge when we work to weave them together. Respect: Iterative & Intent Listening Steinhauer’s (2001) definition of respect poignantly sheds light on the subjectivity inherent in this second tenet. Further elaborating on her definition of respect, Steinhauer claims that by listening intently the researcher must “show honor, consider the well-being of others, and treat others with kindness and courtesy” (p.73). Though many in education may feel that respect is a given, definitions of respect certainly vary from community to community. A humanizing understanding of respect must take into consideration who the education research will benefit. Moreover, I contend that the various interpretations of respect are important to understand in considering who has the respect and knowledge necessary to assess rigor. In education research, rigor includes “not only how a study is carried out, but also how the methodology is conceptualized” (Ravitch & Riggan, 2012, p.7). Though I won’t argue that years of education, training, and peer reviewed assessment of one’s work within academia leads to a facility with conceptualizing methodology, I would posit that to leave our most important knowledge holders—the participants that we are working alongside—out of the inquiry to action process leads to unnecessary restrictions in understanding and a plethora of less than impactful, if not harmful research practices. Respect: Youth (Re)Conceptions of Rigor In critical youth participatory action research (Bautista, Bertrand, Morrell, Scorza & Matthews, 2013; Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 222 2016; Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza & Ford, 2013), scholars assert the rigor with which YPAR is enacted is built on who we may be most accountable, our youth co-researchers. Building on understandings of youth-led action and responsibility the Council of Youth Research (Bautista, Betrand, Morrell, Scorza & Matthews, 2013; Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2016; Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza & Ford, 2013) found that youth co- researchers’ research skills were increased through their engagement in civic inquiry projects in YPAR. Moreover, youth’s own concerns with their access to quality education and rigorous learning became a foothold for youth to engage in these civic inquiry projects, while at the same time training youth to utilize quality and rigor in their inquiry. For instance, Mirra, Garcia, and Morrell’s (2016) work with the Council of Youth Research highlights the various methodological choices youth researchers made when collecting data for their collective inquiry, which included: surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, and autoethnography (p.81). According to the authors, the methodological choices made by the collective of youth and adult researchers required the “Council maintain dexterity to quickly shift methodological approaches based on the contexts of a given research question” (p.80). This necessitated a series of rigorous research steps taken with youth from inquiry to action. Elaborating further in their book, Doing Youth Participatory Action Research, Mirra, Garcia, and Morrell (2016) note that the responsibility of education scholars who engage with YPAR “must give back in ways that create sustainable partnerships, contribute to the spaces we partner with, and take responsibility for the sometimes challenging research we encourage” (p.142). Further, in bringing together opportunities for meaningful engagement in participatory inquiry with youth and communities that begin with youth questions and end with actions that hold potential for positive impact on policy and schools, I assert that YPAR is where the interstices of relationality, respect, and responsibility 223 meet. Thus, seeking to build toward humanizing research that stands in solidarity and is informed by Indigenous and decolonizing scholarship, YPAR becomes a key tool for connecting education research with the schools and communities that could potentially most benefit from these collaborations. It does so without making the education researchers the sole paragons of knowledge. Respect: Pre-Service Teacher-Researchers (Re)Conceptions of Rigor The positioning of our research-selves as being humble servants to the communities with which we come to do the work, in both research and teaching, is not one that I entered into graciously. I came in like a hammer, when what was needed was a screwdriver. This came from strong convictions, but a total lack of humility. However, there were those who were patient with me and provided multiple examples of what it means to be in the work in ways that could be of far more use to a variety of communities. The engagement of participatory literacies is an almost inherent function of YPAR. Yet, even YPAR can be colonizing. Seen through a Coalitional Civic Resistance framework, YPAR can be an incredibly humanizing space for ourselves, our co-researchers, and our communities. This happens when we center and care for our relations. The principle of relationality is heavily informed by Indigenous research communities. As such, the tenets for a more humanizing YPAR do not come from the top down, but from the bottom up. In truth, this stands out as a bit of an anomaly in literacy research, and especially in the world of teacher education. Across this study, I have forwarded a framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance. In it, I noted that the tenets were: 1. Positioning youth as leaders, thought partners, and expert knowledge holders 224 2. Coming in with humility, when invited, and being willing to do the deep work of unpacking the inherent biases that have been unknowingly imprinted by a system that privileges white, cis, straight, middle class, able, and Christian identities 3. Developing community connections and furthering reciprocal relationships 4. Listening deeply to stories being shared/modeling listening deeply with respect 5. Refusing the limitations of the academy/schools when providing time and space for Coalitional Civic Resistance 6. Letting go of the facade of control and seeking only to facilitate participatory learning, research, and action This framework is intended to position the communities with which we work as the experts in pursuit of their own justice initiatives. As researchers, teacher-researchers, and pre- service teacher-researchers, we position the work of Coalitional Civic Resistance in classroom and community research spaces as being driven by desire-based frameworks. Thus, from the first stages of Beginning Inquiry pre-service teacher-researchers orient their inquiry situated in the context of their communities. This means beginning with the forwarding critical pedagogy as a lens through which a critical analysis of problem-posing, while situating the problem as being rooted in the systems and institutions whose power has never been distributed across the people with which they could serve. Rather, these systems and institutions have historically marginalized disparate communities in favor of the elite (white) few. By problematizing power as always being situated in such a way as to forward corporate profit power above humanity, t he pre-service teachers’ analysis of their own teaching and learning as needing to be actively anti- racist is vital. In grounding their anti-racist teaching and learning in (endarkened) feminist epistemologies, these three pre-service teachers echo Pillow and Mayo’s (2007) call for action in 225 research (and in this case pre-service teacher-research) as “committed to social change” (p.190). Through forwarding multimodal and participatory literacies as central to their inquiry, these three pre-service teachers center possibilities for youth to engage in learning that reflects their own activist interests and a variety of language possibilities. Responsibility & Reciprocity: Community-Defined & Engaged Action Archibald (2008) maintains that responsibility to community, storywork, and Indigenous knowledge requires intentional listening and remembering. Archibald states that responsibility includes “ensuring accuracy of content and cultural appropriateness of pedagogy” in order to “pass on what she/he has learned to those who are interested” (p.126). Furthermore, responsibility is understanding the purpose of research as being necessarily relevant to the community that education researchers are engaged in inquiring alongside, from initial question- posing to action that directly and positively informs systems change. However, some participatory research continues to center the problem with youth and their communities, specifically in communities of Color. Though certainly educational inequity is rife within many working-class communities of Color, I assert that placing the problem with youth of Color and their families lacks critical perspective. Further, this lack of critical perspective is deeply irresponsible considering the ease with which scholars are able to access documents that would provide for a more critical understanding of the inequities that have continually plagued American education. Thus, the last tenet of responsibility, seen through an Indigenous perspective of all things being related, supports my own experience as a participatory scholar. In my own work with youth, various employees at the community center, and preservice teachers, I have sought to member check through sharing this work with my co-researchers and those that have invited me into the communities with which I work. 226 Responsibility in Education Research: At the Intersections of the 3Rs, Quality, & Rigor Though inquiry over the last couple of decades has increasingly been taken up that highlights the experiences of youth of Color, little research has been done that specifically highlights what it means to be responsible to the communities and youth with which we co- research as “vested outsiders”. Enacting humanizing youth participatory action research with youth over the last five years, with preservice English teachers in the last three years, and building toward sustainable commitments with both communities has informed much of my understanding of the 3Rs in praxis. From early beginnings with youth inquiry into questions that are most relevant to their educational experiences, this ethnographic study has sought to build sustainable reciprocal relationships across communities. Learning deeply from scholarship that attends to responsibility in storywork, I noted a dearth of literature that focused on youth as co- researchers. Responsibility in Education Research: Across School & Community Literacy Spaces Across the years of this mixed methods humanizing youth participatory action research study and the participatory literacies work within classrooms, I’ve centered rigor in my research by collecting surveys, interviews, focus groups, photovoice, oral histories, and video data. Moreover, in noting the need for further work that not only centers youth in inquiry but also action, I’ve co-constructed proposals for presentations at local and national conferences. Further, I’ve humbly entered this work furthering my understanding of responsibility by forwarding multimodal and public scholarship with and alongside youth that has been envisioned and engaged through their leadership in coalitional civic resistance. Moreover, I assert that seeking various ways to share our work not only with our colleagues, but with youth and communities with which I am held responsible further humanizes the process of research. In 227 Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology, Davidson notes that our responsibility to our co-researching communities is “ensuring that the stories we tell are authentic and accurately reflect the perspectives of the participants in the study (p. 28). Sharing this work with youth to member check, particularly Adrianna, who went from a youth co- researcher to a mentor and facilitator of YPAR. Transitioning into an advising role and supporting co-researching community members such as Marie, the community center’s Teen Director, who carries on the sustainability of Littleton Youth Voices, as I make a graceful exit from the community. Finally, continuing to support and mentor preservice English teachers: especially Venus who remains in the community as a teacher and the community center as a facilitator of YPAR with LYV; and Edie, who undoubtedly will go on to further implement YPAR in their future teaching, as they did in their student teaching placement. Engaging Participatory Action Research Across Humanizing Understandings of Quality & Rigor Education research has more traditionally sought reproducible interventions to seek rapid gains in standardized education. I argue that research, teaching, and learning is never devoid of social context. Therefore, education research, youth programming, and teaching that centers the desires and experiences of youth in communities with which we work is inherently humanizing. The longitudinal youth participatory action research conducted by the Council of Youth Research (Bautista, Betrand, Morrell, Scorza & Matthews, 2013; Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez & Scorza, 2015; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2016; Mirra, Morrell, Cain, Scorza & Ford, 2013) asserts that the inquiry to action processes engaged in youth participatory action research lead to more rigorous education than in most English classrooms. My own work within and associated with LYV, asserts a humanizing YPAR rooted in Indigenous research principles. 228 Engaging Participatory Action Research as Situated in Coalitional Civic Resistance In a framework of Coalitional Civic Resistance (CCR), YPAR serves as a means of facilitating youth teaching and learning in inquiry projects that forward youth’s desire for action. Across three seasons of YPAR with LYV, youth action was a testament to responsibility. Each of the three public action pieces that forwarded youth action with community collaborators provided for three very different public projects and a variety of public platforms. Further, in sharing LYV with pre-service teachers who then shared the Coalitional Civic Resistance with youth in classrooms spaces in three different cities. Sharing this knowledge with PSTs supported enactments of critical learning communities which honored identities, curiosities, and real-world engagements across classroom spaces, all through the multimodal and participatory literacies lens. Engaging Humanizing Approaches in YPAR Across this critical ethnography, the iterative and on-going commitments to seeking to be responsive to my various communities was always foregrounded. This meant continuous and open communication, and hours of building and sustaining relations. This is slow and sustainable research, work that is engaged carefully, and with a refusal to put the academy’s values over the community’s desires. As such, it both draws from and extends meanings of what research can be, who it is for, and how and to whom we are answerable. This research has been rooted in Indigenous research principle, though I am not an Indigenous researcher. Thus, I make no claim to my ability to truly understand or ever extend Indigenous or Decolonizing research. Instead, I attend to how this study has been humanizing for all participants and extends understanding of and provides a further example of humanizing both YPAR and participatory literacies in classroom English spaces. 229 Humanizing YPAR is a subject that has been taken up in academic literature (Caraballow, Lozenski, Lysicott & Morrell, 2017: Irizarry & Brown, 2014). According to Caraballo, Lozenski, Lyiscott and Morrell (2017), education researcher that utilizes youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a way of seeing and coming to know both qualitative and quantitative research “blurs boundaries between research and action, and research and teaching, and encourages a critical broadening of conventional conceptions of rigor, positionality, and pedagogy” (p.323). Moreover, authors take up various interpretations of quality and rigor; overwhelmingly these various ways of situating quality require evidence of a standard through which a critical level of understanding can be accessed. The CCR framework is, in part, situated as building from and extending critical pedagogy. In Classroom spaces, CCR is extended across three different pre-service teacher- research projects. Venus, Lisa, and Edie all forward their own understanding of CCR in classroom literacy spaces. All three pre-service teachers spent time in the LYV YPAR community space. In the case of Lisa and Edie, both pre-service teachers were trained in YPAR facilitation through a year-long English methods practicum. Across the fall of 2018 and into spring 2019, Edie took part in an additional YPAR project that focused on Queer counter-space within their English methods course (forthcoming, Oviatt, Feith, Espinoza & Schey, 2020). In Edie’s case study, Edie highlighted the essence of a humanizing YPAR engagement in the English classroom. In it, they forward the value of integrating youth activist literacies, multimodality, and youth research for the purpose of collective liberation. As Edie notes, “...they really chose to put their own spin on it...my heart grew ten times in size when students really made the project their own …” (Edie, summary statement, 2019). This valuing of youth’s literacies highlights the potential of centering value as students choose to both center and outline 230 that value for themselves. Edie notes, in the excerpt above, how youth take ownership of their own learning process, and the value of youth learning and teaching as participatory literacies. In this way, Edie models support for the community’s desires, forwarding learning that is relevant, and centering respect for youth’s knowledge and talents--which forwards everyone’s humanity. In seeking to decolonize education research, Patel (2016) continues the important conversation that the education research community must engage if we are to do the work of actually being useful to communities that so many conduct research on, instead of research alongside. In the first chapter of her book, Decolonizing Educational Research, the author argues a few key considerations the education research community must reflect upon: 1) the various ways that education research perpetuates coloniality 2) the myriad and problematic continuation of education researchers’ engagement in relation to land, people, and practice 3) the deeply rooted connections between the persistence of colonization and educational outcomes. In Patel’s view, “research and researchers who have succeeded have been validated through settler colonial structures of schooling and consequently are answerable, minimally, to working to dismantle those structures” (p.74). In making this statement, Patel urges those of us within education research to deeply consider the concerns, welfare, and interests of those communities with whom our work is centered and should be central. She speaks to the quality and rigor of our work as being defined and assessed not solely within the settler colonial system of education, but within the communities that so much of education research further marginalizes, while seeking to support. Scholarship that centers decoloniality over deconstruction sheds light on the nature of knowing such concepts as quality and rigor, which previous studies had not addressed in these ways. This study serves as one example of research, teaching, and learning that humanizes everyone in the process. Yet, further work is needed that is accessible to teachers, community 231 organizers, youth workers, and community members. Moreover, possibilities emerge for collective movement that could redefine quality and rigor within participatory action research as informed by Indigenous scholarship. In the LYV YPAR community space, the emphasis was on bringing youth into the community center for a no-cost, community leadership, and youth research project. Thus, returning the community center back into the hands of the community. In this project, each season was led by youth inquiry and desire for action. As adult facilitators, our job became to connect youth with community artists and leaders who could provide expert knowledge in whatever action would forward their public projects. This furthered the building of relationships outside of the community center walls, and brought the community into the space. This troubling of who and what the community center space could both become and who it would be for were both intentional building moves as we forwarded the youth program. Though each of the three seasons were taken up across years where youth came in and out of the community space, the guiding thread across was the facilitation of youth research beginning and ending with youth’s ownership of the process and the product. Across the chapter highlighting youth research, the three youth projects highlighted foreground building toward collaboration across both self -work and peer work, which foreground multimodal curating. From collaborative communication to relevant awareness-building, youth’s inquiry projects moved from co-researching to forwarding action that engaged youth in participatory literacies. Finally, youth co-researchers sought opportunities to move fully into the CCR framework, not by redesigning the wheel, but by seeking to contribute to grassroots organizations that had long histories of supporting communities at the center of youth inquiry. From reaching collaboration to moving toward coalitional collectives in action, youth co-constructed in multimodal composing as participatory 232 literacies. For example, as a collective in 2017, we resisted and refused narratives of harm and partnered with existing grass-roots organizations. Moreover, we were deeply invested in the inquiry for myriad personal reasons, which may have informed our involvement in collaborating with coalitional collectives. Further, we collected and designed a multimodal inquiry that was intended to be shared with a community that was grappling with its own healing from a similar issue. In doing so, we sought to share our knowledge, both from existing research, and from local survivors that would provide an opportunity for healing as the larger community began returning to town with tense feelings over the previous year’s scandal. Thus, not only was our knowledge both critically informed by national data, but also sought to take up local knowledge, while also collaborating with various existing organizations where we could get the word out to the returning community about additional resources across the community. Conclusion: The Call to Action Current scholars in education should seek to learn from the various Indigenous scholars whose work is central in decolonizing education research. In this study, I argued for a (re)imagining of quality and (re)conceiving of rigor alongside our communities with which we research through asserting the possibilities of coalitional civic resistance. Further, I posit that the three tenets of relationality, respect, and responsibility become powerful agents towards connecting communities of practice, praxis, and purpose while providing for insightful and innovative research that positively affects change, as envisioned by youth and their communities (especially IBPOC youth and communities). In considering how best to come into a community and learn with them, it is necessary to look at what those before us who have done the work of making powerful moves toward educational justice have to teach us. Myles Horton and Paulo Freire in their book talk, We Make the Road by Walking (1990), emphasize the need to learn 233 from the communities that we serve. Horton, quoting Lao Tzu, states that we must “Go to the people. Learn from them. Live with them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have” (pgs. 247-248). In conclusion, I argue that movement toward humanizing participatory action research, guided by the Indigenous principles of relationality, respect, and responsibility furthers collective movement toward a deeper and more nuanced understanding of education and literacies research. Thus, coalitional civic resistance redefines our role as literacy researchers and teachers. Finally, we must attend to building more reciprocal and sustainable relationships with youth and communities, those whose desires must guide our research and teaching, for it is really them to whom we are most responsible. 234 REFERENCES Adams, S. R., & Brooks, K. (2014). 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K., Staples, J. M., Vasudevan, L., & Nichols, R. E. (2015). Cultivating research pedagogies with adolescents: Created spaces, engaged participation, and embodied inquiry. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46(2), 186-197. Yin, R. K. (2013). Validity and generalization in future case study evaluations. Evaluation, 19(3), 321-332. Yull, D., Blitz, L. V., Thompson, T., & Murray, C. (2014). Can we talk? Using community- based participatory action research to build family and school partnerships with families of color. School Community Journal, 24(2), 9-32. 244 APPENDIX A: YOUTH COMMUNITY JOURNAL PROMPTS Week 1: How do you envision community? Week 2: Who is part of your community? Week 3: What role do you play in your community? Week 4: What do you desire for your community? Week 5: What support do you need to enact your desire for your community? Week 6: What story do you want to tell about your community? Week 7: How would you incorporate your desire into your story? Week 8: Is what ways can you continue forwarding action for your community? 245 APPENDIX B: QUESTIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLABORATORS 1. In what ways did you enact a community identity as a young person? 2. What support did you have in enacting this identity? 3. What modes do you work across today to enact this identity? 4. What role do you believe youth should play in addressing community concerns and desires? 5. In what ways are you involved with supporting youth in their community engagement? 6. How could you continue to support youth in their community engagement? 7. What surprised you about youth’s stories? 8. What similarities did you see to your own adolescence? 9. What differences did you note? 10. How do we continue to work together collaboratively? 246 APPENDIX C: QUESTIONS FOR YOUTH MENTOR/ADULT CO-RESEARCHERS 1. What role do you play in LYV? 2. How do you envision this role growing? 3. In what ways do you envision supporting youth growth in their roles? 4. In what ways did you enact a community identity as a young person? 5. What support did you have in enacting this identity? 6. What role do you believe youth should play in addressing community concerns and desires? 7. What surprised you about youth’s stories? 8. What similarities did you see to your own adolescence? 9. What differences did you note? 10. How do we continue to work together collaboratively? 247 APPENDIX D: QUESTIONS FOR YOUTH CO-RESEARCHERS 1. What role do you play in LYV? 2. How do you envision this role growing? 3. In what ways do you envision being supported in role? 4. In what ways do you enact a community identity? 5. What support do you have in enacting this identity? 6. What modes do you prefer working in or across to enact this identity? 7. What role do you believe you should play in addressing community concerns and desires? 8. What surprised you about the other youth’s stories? 9. What similarities did you see to your own adolescence? 10. What differences did you note? 11. How do we continue to work together collaboratively? 248 APPENDIX E: ENGLISH TEACHER PARTICIPATORY MULTIMODAL INQUIRY PROJECT You will develop a teacher inquiry question, an area of your teaching or your student’s learning that you want to learn more about, specifically related to teaching English. This project is intended to be modified to fit your classroom/pedagogical needs/d esires. Given that this is meant to be modified, there are plenty of opportunities to forward one of three major areas: critical literacy, multimodal literacy, and youth participatory action research (YPAR) -- which is based on your choice/interest/context. You know your context better than anyone, except for your Mentor Teacher. As such, there are many parts that will be unfolded across the year to support rolling this project into the larger assessment for your second semester of the internship year. For this semester, we will focus on the parts that you need to accomplish across the fall semester, while keeping a planning eye on the rest of the internship year. /25 (See below) /10 (See below) /5 (See below) /30 Community Asset Map (rubric forthcoming) /30 Rationale for Design (rubric forthcoming) Participatory 25 10 5 This is a full on YPAR project, where you and youth are engaged from first inquiry all the way through Community Asset Mapping, and Rationale for Design (including 12 youth co-authors’ voices/writing) This is a teacher-led action research project, where you and youth are engaged from first inquiry all the way through Community Asset Mapping (based on your design), and Rationale for Design (including 6 youth artifacts); you determine the inquiry focus, the research focus, and the action focus (though this still has real-world implications) This is a teacher-led action/research project, where your planning reflects that action/research from first inquiry all the way through Community Asset Mapping (based on your design), and Rationale for Design (including 3 youth artifacts); you determine the inquiry focus, the research focus and/or action focus (though this still has real-world implications) 249 Multimodal 25 10 5 This is a full on Multimodal mini- unit, where you and youth are engaged from first lesson to final assessment (all multimodal--with various student choices) all the way through Community Asset Mapping (which is represented through an interactive arts-based or digital map), and Rationale for Design (including all of your lessons having a multimodal component & 12 youth multimodal artifacts) This is a mostly Multimodal mini-unit (combined with your main focus), where you and youth are engaged from first lesson to final assessment (all multimodal--but limited student choice, or only a single assessment) with some aspect of multimodal literacy, as you see fit; the Community Asset Mapping (which is represented through an arts-based or digital map), and Rationale for Design (including most of your lessons having a multimodal component & 6 youth multimodal artifacts) This is a mini-unit which integrates some aspects of multimodal literacy (as complimentary to your main and secondary focus), where you and youth are engaged across some lessons with with some aspect of multimodal literacy, as you see fit; the Community Asset Mapping (as complimentary to your main and secondary focus), and Rationale for Design (including some of your lessons having a multimodal component & 3 youth artifacts) Critical Literacy 25 10 5 This is a full-on critical literacy mini- unit, where you teach youth to engage with the critical literacy lens of your choice (Feminist, Marxist, CREE, etc…) from first lesson to final assessment all the way through Community Asset This is a mostly critical literacy mini- unit (combined with your main focus), where you teach youth to engage with the critical literacy lens of your choice (Feminist, Marxist, CREE, etc…) across most of your lessons; all the way through This is a mini-unit which integrates some aspects of critical literacy (combined with your main focus), where you teach youth to engage with the critical literacy lens of your choice (Feminist, Marxist, CREE, etc…) across 250 Mapping, and Rationale for Design (including all of your lessons having a critical literacy component & 12 youth critical literacy artifacts) Community Asset Mapping, and Rationale for Design (including most of your lessons having a critical literacy component & 9 youth literacy artifacts) some of your lessons; the Community Asset Mapping (as complimentary to your main and secondary focus), and Rationale for Design (including some of your lessons having a critical literacy component & 3 youth literacy artifacts) For the fall, you will complete this project in a few parts: Part 1, due October 11 (starting in class September 27) Your Inquiry Question: Readings: Readings from class (include page #) Readings from outside of class (include citation) #1 #2 #1 #2 Part 2, in class Oct. 25 (starting in class Oct. 18) Community Asset Map Design for your context (rubric forthcoming) Part 3, due Dec. 6 (starting in class Nov.1) Rationale for Design (rubric forthcoming) Implementation Plan Describe your very specific implementation plan for how you will implement these ideas in your teaching before Dec 1. Be so specific that someone else could 251 read this and try it out in your classroom. Feel free to insert specific lessons or a unit plan or whatever is necessary to show your plan. Data Collection (You can choose video, student work, or other artifacts) Video Data What do you want to video record to help you see how effective your strategies are or analyze in relation to the ideas you mentioned above? Be specific about what lessons/time points and what/who you want to record. What will you hope to see when you look at the video, in connection to your inquiry question? Student Work What kind(s) of student work will be helpful to collect in order to better understand how effective your ideas/strategies are? 252 What will you hope to see when you look at the student work? Other Artifacts Are there other artifacts (such as teacher materials?) that might be helpful for you? Part 4, due Dec. 6 Bring your video data, student work, and/or other artifacts (i.e., anything that you have collected) to class on Dec. 6 to analyze and work with a partner to sort through each other’s data. With your partner, view each other’s data and follow the steps. STEP 1: During the first 5-10 minutes, each partner will share and briefly describe the information that is to be analyzed. STEP 2: Each person may pose two or three questions that he or she may have about the work that is to be analyzed. These could be clarifying questions (e.g., What happened when you did X? This is not the time to ask evaluative questions (e.g., Why did you do X? Why not Y?) STEP 3: (Evaluative Questions) Each person will ask each other these questions, and write the responses based on your conversation in the corresponding box. Based on the data, what specific things did you notice that you did well? Based on the data, what specific things do you notice that you could have done better? In looking at the student work and/or other artifacts what level of thinking was required of the students? Did any of the work require the students to engage in criticality? What kinds of recommendations might you make to improve the overall quality of the 253 assignment(s)? What went well concerning the assignment(s)? Based upon the assignment’s objectives, does the artifact(s) indicate that the learner met the objectives? Any gaps? STEP 4: Now, share what you learned from this experience with the whole group. Each pair will have about 5-10 minutes to share. Try to generate helpful ideas about how/what you might use this experience to shape future lessons, activities, and classroom experiences with your students. Finally, you will upload (to D2L) both your chart and reflections based on your conversation with the whole group. This could take the form of bulleted point ideas. Part 5, due Dec. 11 (Digital Carousel) Showcasing your work. Inquiry Carousel The inquiry carousel is designed to center the topics that as a group was researched. As a group, consider what you learned and what you would like to highlight for the class. Now, please prepare a poster-board, or perhaps, a digital representation of your groups’ discoveries. Consider the poster board or digital display of your first bulletin board or digital display evidencing how you would get students interested in the topic. Prepare to present your poster board or digital display before your classmates who are eager to see what you focused on and what you learned. Your poster board may include pictures, quotes from the readings, understandings and questions, assessments, rubrics, and/or reflections. Your poster board can be creatively decorated as well. Prepare to speak briefly with peers about your poster. You will be placed in groups of four. However, someone from each group will present on behalf of the group as other group members rotate to view classmates’ presentations. 254 APPENDIX F: VENUS’S COMMUNITY ASSET MAP SURVEY 1. In what ways do you draw on technology to engage with popular culture in your teaching? ■ I use things like nearpod to help students engage in notes and the content I am teaching, quizalize and kahoot to help show mastery of content by making it game based, and flippity for classroom tools and teaching resources. ■ When I can, I incorporate recent videos, documentaries, and articles in my lessons. Students can engage with these texts in many different ways. Additionally, I am lucky enough to have computers in my classroom, so they have access to a host of resources through that form of technology. I encourage my students to use their phones for academic purposes in the classroom as well. ■ I feel the students are inundated with too much technology, so I try a bare-bones approach. I do use the Clever touch to instruct -- like a chalkboard...but also like a computer screen to access information. ■ In my class, there are 2 primary ways that we engage with popular culture. One is to show some kind of meme or video in English and have students respond with the target language skill that they are trying to acquire in Japanese, such as their opinion. The second way I engage with popular culture is to show students things that are popular in Japan. ■ I try to find memes/humorous videos that relate to the subject matter that it teaching to make dryer topics more interesting and relevant to my students. ■ YouTube videos, twitter ■ I use a lot of YouTube videos ■ Smart boards are used for visual aids, as interactive lessons. Cell phones are not encouraged, but can be useful when laptops are not available 2. What do you understand multimodality to be? (This included a definition of multimodal in case people were unsure.) ■ Through multiple methods ■ Relaying information through various media, rather than just one. ■ any variation of technology: Like computer, cell phones, ELMOs, clickers, etc ■ I understand multimodality to be a variety of ways of introducing material so that a wide variety of students' learning modes can be accessed. ■ Using different modes/styles in teaching instruction, such as video, images, hands-on activities, etc. ■ The incorporation of multiple modes of production with student learning 255 ■ Using different forms of technology to engage different people ■ using and know how to use different medias to communicate 3. How are you already incorporating multimodality in your classroom? ■ I teach things in multiple ways ■ I have written and oral instructions for all assignments. I have had requests to create demonstration videos before. Some assignments involve reading, some involve writing, and some involve creating with technology. ■ As I mentioned before, I try to minimize this in class. Outside of the class, they are to use it for typing and researching ■ I attempt to provide visual (pictures & text), auditory input, as well as practice with student output in terms of written and spoken responses. ■ I use a lot of memes and videos, as well as offer students the chance to make these as well. ■ Asking students to create in non-traditional ways, ie drawings, maps, and recreation of setting elements ■ I try to use more traditional mediums-drawing, handwriting, collaging, etc-with newer mediums like websites, voice memos, etc. ■ Students and teachers communicate verbally, through typing, video, acting out/ reading out loud, gallery walks/ art 4. How are you intentionally planning your lessons to be multimodal? ■ I plan for all learning types when I teach ■ I strive to engage as many students as possible through a variety of activities and resources. I have started using Google Classroom, so students have access to the course resources wherever they have access to the internet. ■ I do not intentionally plan it to be this way, unless the need is there. ■ I plan lessons for each unit that practice language acquisition skills (reading, writing, listening & speaking). ■ I Spend a lot of time researching different ways that teachers have taught a lesson that I’m teaching to see what kinds of fun/different things they do. I’m typically looking for something outside of a lecture, which usually ends up being multimodal. ■ By creating opportunities for students to create using modes other than writing, and by offering them texts that are not solely linguistic by nature (use of videos, podcasts, drawings, photos, and poetry) ■ Choosing the best multimodal outlet for my student’s needs for each objective 256 ■ As a special education teacher, I know that all students learn differently, so when planning my lessons I take this into consideration. Some students are visual, some verbal, some need to move around 5. In what ways are you incorporating student choice and interest in your lesson planning? ■ I ask for student feedback when using things and students respond with understanding when teaching ■ Each marking period, we do an independent reading assignment, where the students select the text that they read. I have also done projects where the end goal is centered around a certain topic or standard, but how the students demonstrate their understanding is up to them. I will ask for student input and feedback about what they would like to see from the class. ■ Sometimes, students need to have variety to know what exists outside themselves in order to make a choice. Really think about this. I can be moved to learn about something that someone suggests because I have never learned of it before. ■ I work to find out what the students are interested in surrounding a topic of study and attempt to provide lessons that utilize that information. For example, recently my students had to write about a famous person in Japanese. They chose the person that they were interested in. It was fun for me to learn who they chose. ■ I am still pretty young and understand the current pop culture, as well as their references and humor, so I just combine my own current knowledge of pop culture with getting to know my students on a more personal level to make sure that my lessons are relevant and interesting to the student ■ By giving students at least two options of creating for larger projects ■ I ask the kids what they like & go from there ■ I take student's interests into consideration. I try to incorporate novels and reading material that students have expressed interest or that I know will create interest. I like to include movies, art/visuals, different ways of reading or viewing a text, d ifferent ways to express their ideas about a text 6. How are students given space to express their identities in the classroom? ■ I have done a classroom mural where students represented themselves artistically ■ I allow my students to paint on the walls - each student gets a brick. For creative and free writing, I do not restrict their topics, and I allow colloquial language in these assignments as well. ■ They have voice -- trust me. In their opinions expressed, in the way they read (assigned or required), in where they choose to sit, in how they write, etc.. 257 ■ Yes. ■ I try to create a welcoming environment in my classroom by modeling respectful and inclusive behaviors. I also allow them to sit wherever they’d like, work with whomever they’d like, introduce themselves to me in whichever way they’d like on a private stud ent interest survey, etc. ■ Through narrative writing and acceptance of their natural language/speaking tendencies ■ Students help plan the major assignments, so they get a say in what is fair ■ Through art, video, acting out, there are many ways and options students are given to express themselves. I also allow students to give suggestions for ideas I have not included. 7. In what ways do you incorporate technology in the classroom? ■ Note taking, student work, typing papers, and many more ways that I can't think of at the moment. ■ I create a digital lesson plan that the students have access to. They use computers or phones to participate in various parts of the lesson. We use videos and film clips to demonstrate content as well. I also allow students to use audiobooks when available for a text. ■ As mentioned above. I encourage you to look at how education can still have meaning and influence without the saturation of technology. This, is where many people have lost their faith in self as teachers because they see technology having more influence than themselves. I am not anti-technology, which is what most would label me simply for my comments. What I am is a person who understands that learning is not reliant on technology. When we "put all of our eggs in one basket," we end up with a disaster. ■ There are so many ways that technology is used in my classroom. Two primary ways are my use of the Internet (videos, digital dictionaries & resources, Google Japan, etc.) to provide information to students and by having students gain skills in using Japanese on the computer (by doing things like typing in Japanese and finding resource material that aids in their learning.) ■ I use the computer a lot. I play audio clips of short stories, I find images and videos relevant to the subject matter, I allow them to create things whenever possible, etc. ■ Videos, online posting ■ Mostly just google doc & YouTube ■ technology is incorporated in many different ways through laptops, cell phones, smart boards, and videos 258