Youth Creative Agency Toward Art Museum Futurity: Re-imagining Inclusive Practices Through Youth Participatory Action Research

ABSTRACT

Teen-centric programs have proliferated in art museums across the U.S. and much of Europe, and scores of these programs target young people—and youth of color, specifically—as a way to grow museum audiences and relevance to a diverse public. However, few studies examine how teen-centric programs impact the youth involved and how they make sense of their experiences. In this article, teen and adult co-authors show how they used youth participatory action research as a critical pedagogical and methodological framework to (1) co-create spaces for youth participation and (2) generate youth narratives and research analyses within the context of an art museum teen advisory program in the U.S. The findings and reflections on practice offer critical insights on youth agency and the possibilities and limitations of inclusivity discourses within neoliberal art museums.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusion
• museum education
• teens
• youth participatory action research
• co-creation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Obama, “Remarks by the First Lady at Opening of the Whitney Museum.”

2 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals.

3 Szekely, “Multiple Perspectives on Teen-Centric Art Museum Programs,” 25–36.

4 Simon, The Participatory Museum and The Art of Relevance.

5 Szekely, “Multiple Perspectives on Teen-Centric Art Museum Programs,” 25–36.

6 Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited.

7 Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” 518–33.

8 Grande, Red Pedagogy.

9 Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” 518–33.

10 Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality.

11 Tzibazi, “Participatory Action Research with Young People in Museums,” 153.

12 Kraehe, “Arts Equity,” 267–78.

13 Cammarota, “The Cultural Organizing of Youth Ethnographers,” 45–8.

14 Anyon et al., “A Systematic Review of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in the United States,” 1–14.

15 Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes.

16 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.

17 Galman, Shane the Lone Ethnographer.

18 Creswell and Miller, “Determining Validity in Qualitative Inquiry,” 124–31.

19 Kraehe, “To Whom It May (Not) Concern,” 4–6.

20 Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited.

21 Ibid.

22 Simon, The Participatory Museum and The Art of Relevance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hearst Foundations and The University of Arizona.

Notes on contributors

Kendall Crabbe

Kendall Crabbe is a Faculty Supervisor for preservice art education students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Assistant Editor of Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association. Kendall is also a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Visual Culture Education at the University of Arizona. She employs participatory pedagogies in graduate, undergraduate, K-12, museum, and community-based contexts. Kendall’s scholarship focuses on youth participatory action research (YPAR) in the arts. Current projects include longitudinal research to center youth experiences, stories, and perspectives in co-created programs.

Oona Husok

Oona Husok is an undergraduate student studying at the University of Arizona College of Science. She has used the YPAR research method to investigate the effects of art education on youth development and agency. As a high school student, she interned and participated in the Teen Council as a dual member of the youth group and research team.

Amelia M. Kraehe

Amelia M. Kraehe, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the School of Art at The University of Arizona and co-director of Racial Justice Studio. Her scholarship, teaching, and public engagement focus on how the arts and arts education can challenge, but also reinforce, systems of inequality. She explores this seeming contradiction by investigating the ways in which the arts, as both a disciplinary discourse and as creative cultural practices, mediate social movements, ideological formation and transformation, identity and agency. She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Her forthcoming book is Race and Art Education (Davis Publications).