ARISE to the Challenge: Partnering with Urban Youth to Improve Educational Research and Learning

This paper examines Action Research into School Exclusion (Project ARISE), a twoyear research partnership between K-12 students and university researchers. Based on the principles of participatory action research (PAR), the project intentionally brought together university researchers, K-12 students, and pre-service teachers to bridge research and practice for the purpose of improving learning across these three constituencies. This project sought to better understand and improve the schooling experiences of youth at risk for exclusion from school through disciplinary action. Using several sources of qualitative data, this paper demonstrates the application and value of the partnership at multiple levels of educational practice. INTRODUCTION Despite mounting research on urban schools and the high-poverty, high-minority students they serve, long-standing problems in K-12 urban education persist and have, in some cases, worsened. As much educational research is seen as impracticable by school practioners, one significant issue identified as a barrier to urban school improvement is the disconnection between research and practice (Stringer, 2007). This is due, in large part, to the incongruent “manner in which both theoretical and practical knowledge are conceived in relation to each other” (Roblyer & Edwards, 2000, p. 467). Many university-based educational researchers do not experience the particular challenges of the people they are studying and are not grounded in the everyday schooling conditions that influence the issues they are investigating. Researchers customarily enter the field in the role of “experts,” having already defined the problem(s) in their own terms. Subsequently, they “define [their] results in terms that academics create and less so in terms of the issues and perspectives of the people who are the subjects” (Córdova, 2004, p. 34) of their research. As a result, academic research can lack relevance and effectiveness in the local school context and with the populations being served there. University-based research and academic researchers play a significant role in the training of teachers. Particularly in the case of new teachers entering high-poverty, high-minority urban schools, research suggests that this training is often sorely inadequate (Ladson-Billings, 2001; Lynn, 2007; Owens & Konkol, 2004; Webster Brandon, 2003). What academic researchers often fail to do in both of these interrelated endeavors—research and teacher training—is to frame the work around the perspectives of their most essential stakeholders i.e. the K-12 students. In the vast majority of schooluniversity research partnerships, students serve as “data sources” and/or recipients of teacher practice; they are rarely genuine partners in educational improvement. This researcher and author views it as a tremendous squandering of expertise. Both universitybased researchers and their teacher education students could learn a tremendous amount from young people’s unique and valuable insights into the conditions of schooling, (Brown & Galeas, 2009; Brown & Rodriguez, 2009). This paper examines Action Research into School Exclusion (Project ARISE), a two-year research partnership between K-12 students and university researchers. The project sought to better understand and improve the schooling experiences of youth at risk for exclusion from school through disciplinary action. Based on the principles of participatory action research (PAR), the project intentionally brought together university researchers, K-12 students, and pre-service teachers to bridge research and practice for the purpose of improving learning across these three constituencies. This paper demonstrates the application and value of this partnership at multiple levels of educational practice. CONTEXTUAL CONTEXT The Role of Youth in the Work of the Academy The involvement of youth – whether voluntary or involuntary, direct or indirect – has been essential to university-based educational research and practice since the early 20th century (Tyack, 1974). However, their participation has largely been characterized by a lack of control despite being the primary focus of this work. Some adults – e.g., parents and teachers – have also experienced a relative lack of power in educational endeavors within the academy. However, the silencing and objectification of youth has been particularly severe due to hierarchical power relations in schools and society, as well as the embedded cultural beliefs about children and adolescents. As Buckingham (2000) asserts, young people are denied the right to selfPERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION SUMMER 2010 | PAGE 4