UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State College of Education faculty member served as guest co-editor for a recent edition of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series discussing the use of speculative youth participatory action research (SPY-PAR).
Ricardo Martinez, assistant professor of math education, and co-editor Ezequiel Aleman, director and assistant professor at Universidad Tecnológica in Uruguay, presented issue 53 "Speculative Youth Action: Imagining Educational Futures Through Participatory Social Dreaming."
The issue explores how youth participatory action research (YPAR) — a research method that involves young people in all stages of research, from identifying problems to taking action based on their findings — and especially SPY-PAR, which encourages youth participating in research to speculate how different circumstances could result in different outcomes, can be a powerful tool for envisioning and building more just and equitable educational futures.
Martinez has worked with youth across the U.S. and in Uruguay and when discussing with his co-editor what they would include in their paper, they kept coming back to the same thing.
“What happened is, we were working with teachers in South America, and we were talking about YPAR, and they felt it was unattainable to them, as if it was only for the researchers,” Martinez explained. “We were confused, because the very definition of this work — is what the teachers were already doing. So, we began to speculate. That's why we're talking about speculative youth participatory action research to really create access to critical ways of engaging with youth and to question who gets to define the validity of creating knowledge.”
Martinez explained that there are four “organic origins” of SPY-PAR — acknowledging people who aren’t researchers are already doing great work, crafting alternate scenarios to allow for the power of speculation in creating new ideas, the impact history has on today and remembering to have fun.
He said they sought input from young students, parents, teachers, community members and artists in order to combat what he says is a tendency from researchers to “overtheorize,” which can be counterproductive. Involving these groups led Martinez and Aleman to create an analogy to help turn the young people into researchers themselves.
“That’s where the analogy of the spy began where youth are these secret agents,” Martinez explained. “They're going to save the world from this evil villain. They're going to do all this undercover work because historically, youth have done a lot of the work behind social movements. But then we started thinking about it and in many ways, adults are kind of like spies as they navigate the culture and the worlds of young people, because we need to make sure that we're not seen. Because too often, we say we're doing research with youth, but it's really just our research and the youth are there. So, this work is a recentering.”
They also wanted to focus on groups of people for whom current systems are not working or working as well as they should be. Martinez said it is important to amplify voices of those who have valid criticisms of current systems, as this will be the only way to know what improvements are needed and how to best achieve them.
He said speculation is important because what is merely an idea or thought today can often become reality in the future, citing a popular TV show as an example.
“That's where my colleague Ezequiel Aleman talks about mapping and remapping and creating these worlds,” he said. “You think of this new world, which is like a new map of the future. So then, how can we remap that fictitious world to the everyday life? I think of all the science fiction stuff like Star Trek having tablets — that was a speculation that came to the real world. What can we do to make that happen in our real life?”
But the main idea Martinez and his co-editor want researchers to take away is to not limit themselves to so-called “traditional” sources of information and instead get a broader subset of perspectives while still enjoying the work.
“Why do we always have to default to ‘Dr. So-and-So’ at ‘Prestigious University’?” Martinez said. “New knowledge comes from everywhere, and that's what we really want everyone to know — that knowledge comes from everywhere. If you're not already assuming that, then you are taking a deficit perspective on others.
“At the same time, we need to have levels of fun when doing this work, even when you're talking about something as deep and critical as racism,” he continued. “You can't always be upset. You can't always be hurt. Yes, we need time and space to be upset and talk about our hurt to heal — we also deserve opportunities to speculation and have fun in bring our dreams and desires to life. What we want people to take away from this is how is your research impacting lives after the ‘project’ is over? For us it begins with organic origins, acknowledge that they're capable, and then have some fun with them, because they'll remember those fun moments.”
The senior editor of the Occasional Paper Series is College of Education Distinguished Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Women's Studies Gail Boldt.