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.
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