Maria K. McKenna

A Critical Geographic Approach to Youth Civic Engagement Reframing Educational Opportunity Zones and the Use of Public Spaces

The article draws on work in Critical Geography Studies and Photovoice methodology, to illustrate the ways in which youth in an inner city conceptualize neighborhoods and public spaces. We utilize youth’s photographs, narratives, and maps to tell a story of youth’s lived experiences and argue that these experiences are vital sources of knowledge about how an unequal distribution of resources affects them. It is important, we argue, to not only hear student voices but also prepare them to become critical, independent thinkers, who can use multiple literacies as affordances for creating changes that help nourish them. This means fundamentally rethinking how as educators we listen to and walk with youth as they reframe the ways in which we might use public parks, neighborhood schools, community centers, and sidewalks as pedagogical and political spaces.

A Review of Research Connecting Digital Storytelling, Photovoice, and Civic Engagement:

The purpose of this review is to expand understanding of the ways culturally, ethnically, and racially diverse youth have begun to reimagine urban and rural spaces using digital storytelling and photovoice, two methods that often fall under the broad field of youth participatory action research. To explain the conditions under which these methods favor movement toward socially just ideas and actions, we also build on and extend research in critical youth empowerment to call attention to the relational nature of the kind of work that positions youth as coresearchers and democratically engaged citizens. Of importance are the availability of safe, nurturing spaces that foster youth engagement, the quality of relationships between youth and adults, and the extent to which decisions and actions remain in the hands of youth. Finally, this review considers the implications for further research and what it could mean to reimagine schools and communities as spaces where youth have a voice as civically engaged citizens.

Introduction: A “Conversation” and the Problem of Positioning

What follows is a text about the ways in which purported experts come to define the parameters of what counts as a discussion around school reform. In order to fully situate the text that will follow—this book filled with student research and writing about how we might think about schooling in the United States—we will break this introduction chapter into three sections. The first seeks to situate the text in theory that aims to re-allow student voices into the process while also providing some description of the context for the student writing. The second examines the historical strands of our current system, suggesting that what we’ve lost is the public sense that the community is empowered to engage in educational policy debates. The final section will situate the text in the realm of pedagogy as we three seek to seriously think about the role of teaching and teachers in the realm of positing possibilities for education.

Pulling Ideas Apart: Complicating the Questions

This closing chapter, rather than concluding in a traditional sense, seeks to re-engage the value of the process of a conversation about education policy. In order to provide some manner of reflexive practice, student authors are revisited. Some of the authors of previous chapters have stepped, since the inception of the project, into classrooms of their own and now face realities that felt far away and theoretical as they worked to become expert in the writing process. Other authors, those still in college, work through what it meant to work through (endure?) a conceptual shift from student to student-becoming-expert. In the end, we find that the value, not surprisingly, of this manner of work lies in the thoughtful and difficult moments of exploration into and through difficult and ongoing problems. We find, with our co-authors, that the work of making sense of the various and sundry strands of the educational policy debate, ought best engender questions and discussion over proclamations and posturing.

An Editorial Intervention: Mushfaking

This brief interlude seeks to frame the subsequent three chapters of student writing, suggesting that the best mode for understanding the student product and processes may be the notion and practice of Mushfake discourse. In this understanding, students came to make do in the clash between their prior schooled lives and the proposal of new models for education rooted in theory beyond their own experiences.