Tag Archives: youth

Adding on an activist identity

Marissa’s two (very interesting) blog posts brought to light many good points and questions about identity and how that is negotiated for people who occupy multiple roles.  Marissa mentioned the types of roles that were discussed at the USER-S meeting last month, namely Teacher, Researcher, and Student.  I did not attend the USER-S meeting and instead spent the day at the annual conference of NYCORE (the New York Collective of Radical Educators) and with that in mind, I would like to complicate the discussion a bit by tacking on yet another possible identity, that of Activist.  While activism may be contained in the roles of Teacher, Researcher, and even Student, I believe it is important to also highlight this aspect of our potential professional selves as separate but integral to the rest.

I believe that many of us would agree that much of our work as doctoral students and teachers is meant not only to create or expose knowledge, but also to eventually change existing social structures in order to trigger the evolution of a more just and equitable world.  In the Santos article that we read, he concludes by saying that “social emancipation is, thus, every action aiming at denaturalizing oppression (showing that, besides being unjust, oppression is neither necessary nor irreversible) and conceiving of it in the proportions it can be fought with the resources at hand”.  Part of this process of emancipation or activism as he describes it is the realization that both knowledge and action are “precarious” and that the worth of a way of knowing or a particular action should not be how famous it is in the larger institution of academia, but rather the practical good that it might accomplish in the world.  As a teacher/research/student/activist who would like her future work to not only add something to the literture of Disability Studies, but also make a difference in the lives of indivual kids with disabilities, this article served as a reminder to maintain that Activist idenity in the forefront of my mind while exercising my Student identity, because it may be that the most useful knowledges for my stakeholders may not necessarily come from the Great Theorists.  What I took away from the NYCORE conference and the readings was that I should not suppress my Activist identity.  On the contrary, it should inform all of my other roles just as my Teacher/Student/Researcher roles inform each other.

Human and Critical Geography and NYC City High School Student Mobility

I am most drawn to third section in The Changing Social Spaces of Learning by Leander, Phillips, and Taylor. The connection between human and critical geography in better understanding how young people experience and move between space has been of interest to me. I am in the process of conducting some critical participatory action research with my students (see my stakeholders forum) with a focus on how my students experience their communities, specifically how they see the strengths and areas for improvement in their communities. This work started off asking students to describe outdoor spaces that they spend time in and how they see that environment and the behaviors that people engage in. While reading this piece, many ideas and questions resonated for me so I will include some here to help me document my thinking:

  • As adults, we/I make a lot of assumptions about what my students will find interesting and connect with…as much as I try to make the research participatory, I find that my own motives and ways of thinking gently nudge the direction of research…can we ever be truly open to all voices? 
  • What are my students understanding of community, neighborhood, identity, and social life? How do they define/identify  their community and how do they experience community in the neighborhoods where they live and the spaces they move between? How is their identity tied/not tied to their neighborhoods?
  • How do young people feel they are perceived in the different spaces they move from, through, to? How are these spaces gendered, classed, raced and do they experience that and in what ways? On what level are they aware of this?
  • How much autonomy do young people experience and what influences this? I wonder a lot about my students who travel to my school in Manhattan from all 5 boroughs…do they have different levels of autonomy and how do they leverage this? How does autonomy and mobility compare to young people that attend more neighborhood high schools?
  • How much agency do young people have in urban environments to make decisions about how they use spaces?
  • How can I use more mapping/memory maps to better learn about the places my students value and why these places have value?
  • How are students living in different parts of the city experiencing different levels of opportunity/privilege and a sense of value?…I love this Breitbart (1998) point…                  “Young people who live in declining parts of the city are profoundly aware of the influence that their local environments exert. They can literally see and feel the contraints that dangerous and/or inadequately provisioned neighborhoods place upon them, and they can appreciate the opportunities that safe places, with ample resource provide…These spaces send messages to young people about how an external world values or fails to value the quality of their lives (p. 308)

All of these ideas and questions are significant to me as a lot of my work attempts to connect students to their local environments and engage them in some sort of action research around a topic that is important to them. We obviously talk a lot in education about connecting students to the local and meaningful and it is through this connection that we build more critical and engaged learners and citizens.