“This is for us, not them”: Troubling adultism through a pedagogy of solidarity in youth organizing and activism

ABSTRACT

Social studies education research lauds the importance of schools as spaces to practice democratic values while also largely ignoring the agency youth exercise to shape their lives in the present. This article explores how young people organize and enact democratic practices within youth-mediated contexts in schools by examining the pedagogy of solidarity that adults must enact to support youths’ visions of democratic life. This qualitative study examines youth organizers’ response to the murder of a Black man in their community and how adults acted in solidarity or against their civic action. The findings elucidate how youth organizing and action can be re-framed as democratic actions and what it takes for adults to make this epistemic and ontological maneuver. The article concludes with a discussion about implications for social studies research when centering youth agency, as well as an analysis of social education beyond the classroom and adult-centered understandings of democratic education.

KEYWORDS:

• Adultism
• civic education
• pedagogy of solidarity
• social studies education
• youth activism
• youth-adult partnerships

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues in critical educational contexts for their advice and input: Dr. Anita Chikkatur, Dr. Sarah Shear, Dr. Jesus Tírado, and Dr. Bretton Varga. I also want to thank the reviewers for the recommendations on literature that strengthened this manuscript. Lastly, I want to acknowledge the adults and youth represented in this article – your labor made our school community better, and for that, I am deeply indebted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Despite the American Psychological Association’s style guide recommendation that racial identities be represented in upper-case, I follow the model of Matias et al. (2014) to not capitalize white, in any form, unless it is within a citation or at the beginning of a sentence in an effort to contest white supremacy in academic writing.

2. RJCS did not disaggregate any racial identities despite the reality that these racial groupings have distinct experiences within RJCS. For example, the category of “Black” at RJCS included Black American, Liberian, Nigerian, and Somali communities. Likewise, most “Asian” identified youth were specifically Hmong. While there is no formal data to back up this observation from the district, it signals the context of racial groupings within the homogenizing effects of whiteness.

3. Twenty-five percent of young people were permitted to return to in-person instruction each day while the rest remained online.

4. The chant is a reference to the subdivision of police departments that carry out drug raids.