Ethical Commitments in Community-Based Research with Youth

ABSTRACT

This article offers an ethnographic account of a formally organized group of students who worked to influence policy in their schools and the adults they encountered in this activity. I also address my role as an observant participant to highlight a series of emergent “ethical opportunities” that created contexts for mutual human development. This account is intended to contribute to a discussion of the developmental role of contradictions highlighted in cultural-historical activity theory. In particular, I seek to highlight opportunities afforded by community-based research for all involved to respond to contradictions as learners, rather than arbiters of ethical practice.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the student representatives of the SAB for welcoming me and offering me trust when they may have been wiser to keep their doors closed. Likewise, I thank Institute colleagues and leaders for welcoming me and creating the conditions for me to develop this research unencumbered. Thanks to Shelley Goldman, Ray McDermott, Francisco Ramirez, and Roy Pea for guidance throughout the research project, particularly at the most challenging moments. Thanks also to Ron Glass and Michael Cole for their encouragement to write about ethics in community-based research and for reviewing various versions of the text.

Notes

¹ All names are pseudonyms.

² The California Association of Student Councils was established by the California Department of Education in 1947. It is a student-led organization that provides “leadership development for elementary, middle, and high school students and their advisors in California and across the world” (http://www.casc.net/about/).

³ I learned of the removal of the student delegate and this change in staff through the interview with the Executive Director and through informal conversations with students and adults before beginning data collection. Student representatives indicated that one staff person was fired and one resigned, but I have not confirmed those accounts with the District.

⁴ For a discussion of the distance between tokenism and active participation, see Hart (1992).

⁵ At the Institute, the model was youth–adult partnership, and this was a point of negotiation for the SAB during this trust-building period, as evidenced by multiple comments across events during meetings in the 1st year of the study.

⁶ The intent to gain voting rights for students on the School Board goes back at least as far as the SAB’s inception. A pamphlet published by the newly formed SAB of 1976 posed the same goal (Wong & Abrahamson, 1976).

⁷ At one point, I was home with my spouse talking through the decision I needed to make, and I became violently, physically ill—an atypical response to stress for me. I raise the point here to emphasize that navigating ethical terrain touches the relationships that make community-based research possible, and it is a visceral, embodied experience.