Educating for Empathy by Nicole Mirra

Author:Nicole Mirra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

YOUTH PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH IN THE CLASSROOM: MY JOURNEY

When I graduated from UCLA, I took a job teaching 11th-grade English at a high school in one of the South Los Angeles communities in which I had been working with the council students. It had been 5 years since I last held a full-time teaching job; in the interim, I was exposed to theories that transformed my understanding of systemic educational inequity and transformative critical pedagogies. I had written a dissertation exploring the ways that fellow high school English teachers in this community integrated civic discussion and action into their literacy practice. And I had become immersed in the practice of YPAR and been forever changed by the opportunity to lead the council community. I had learned so much; my perspective on teaching had expanded exponentially. So, what was I going to do differently the second time around?

I considered the challenges that I would face as I attempted to bring YPAR to my classroom. Instead of the 30 students of the council, I would now have 150 students across my five English classes. Instead of the freedom I enjoyed in the council to develop curriculum geared solely toward the needs of my students, I now would have to consider the need to explicitly address standards and the pressure of a high-stakes standardized test that students needed to pass to graduate. And finally, instead of the ability to take students around the city and state to collect data, I now would have to remain largely inside the school building. The pragmatist in me reasoned that while I might not be able to re-create the unique learning environment of the council, I could still work within the constraints I faced to fashion something meaningful that would flip the way that research traditionally was conceptualized in the English classroom.

As a faithful proponent of the backwards design approach to planning, I began by developing the provocative questions that I wanted my students to weigh and debate with me throughout the year and long after they had left my class. I settled on two essential questions for ELA 11:

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