From voicing your opinion to politicised voice: a youth-led social justice class at an urban continuation high school

Abstract

This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame teachers, schoolwork and coercion in opposition to students, voice and liberation. The article examines how the youths distinguished ordinary coercive teaching from their own liberatory teaching, creating a coercive/liberatory binary that served as metaphor for a series of binaries shaping their approach to social justice education: teacher/student, adult/youth and schoolwork/voice. It concludes that although the social justice class accomplished many important aims, the reconstruction of and reliance on a coercive/liberatory binary within the project ultimately limited its effectiveness as a social justice education effort.

Keywords:

• social justice education
• liberatory pedagogy
• youth participatory action research (YPAR)
• student voice

Notes

1. For more detail on my data analysis methods, see Nygreen [submitted].

2. Unfortunately I did not have an opportunity to conduct follow-up interviews with students in the class to solicit their interpretations of the presentations. However, the three PARTY members consulted agreed with my interpretation that the teachers’ critical questions – even if justified – constituted a form of silencing to which Jackson students were by and large accustomed.