Liberating Students by Increasing Student Voice and Advocacy

MATC Synthesis Paper

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in Teaching and Curriculum

Department of Teacher Education, Mighican State University

Christopher P. Brown

PID: 143706021

October 9th, 2022

LIBERATING STUDENTS 1

Introduction

The third hour bell rings, and students quickly shuffle to their seats. If it were any other

hour, it would require a second bell, chime, or signal to notify students that class is ready to start.

However, this is their hour and they’re awaiting my guidance. “Alright, Mrs. J was absent

yesterday, so can we get some help filling her in? What did we do while she was gone?” J is my

co-teacher, and we have always been in tune. Though she already knows the answer to this

question, it’s helpful for the students to practice advocating. “We finally got to send our emails

and then we talked about ethical research,” a student shares.

I first learned about Youth Participatory Action Research, also known as YPAR ( Nolan,

2022) in TE 818, Curriculum in its Social Context. The idea of using research to guide actions in

the classroom was familiar, having students lead the initiative was something I had not

considered. Right away this idea stuck in my head and I reached out to my professor for

additional resources, readings, and ideas on how to use Youth Participatory Action Research in

my classroom. At one point, I started sending emails to some of the leading researchers

developing YPAR to inquire about ways to use this initiative at a younger level.

Despite spending a significant amount of time researching YPAR before launching it in

my own classroom, I was not prepared for what it would do for my students. On the surface

students are asking the tough questions, and are investigating possible solutions for these issues.

One group has noticed that teacher “recommended” supply lists aren’t really recommended if the

class material is based entirely on having the supplies. Their group is working on solutions for

the question, “How can we help low-income students obtain resources that are necessary for

school?” Another group has partnered with a classmate who practices Hinduism. This student
has shared with her classmates that she has to bring her own lunch to school everyday because

the lunches offered never meet her vegetarian needs. She has shared that when she has to order

school lunches, her only option is to order vegetarian chicken nuggets. Their group is inquiring,

“Who decides what’s in a school lunch, and how can we make school lunches meet the dietary

needs of the students?”

Despite the long road ahead, there’s a lot of learning that has already occurred. It’d be

impossible to quantify all of the concepts that students have learned and applied at this point in

the year, but in an attempt to reflect on the benefits of YPAR, I’ve attempted to list out some of

our major topics.

● What are some issues that students observe within our school?

● What is research? How do we determine a question for research?

● What are indicators? How can we use indicators to evaluate a question?

● What are ethics? How do we ensure research is ethical? What are some examples

of past research that WAS NOT ethical?

● How is responsible for the decisions that affect my issue?

● What’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative data?

● What is triangulation of data?

● What are forms of activist art, and how can art convey a message?

As I previously mentioned, the questions above hardly scratch the surface on the kinds of

conversations I have had alongside my students this year. However, I wanted to list out some of

the key ideas in order to demonstrate that the skills my students are engaged with directly align

with the initiatives many states are pushing for.

LIBERATING STUDENTS 3

In 2009, The Common Core State Standards were first developed to ensure students had

the skills necessary for postsecondary education. By participating in YPAR, students in my

classroom inquire questions related to their own experience, collect data using protocols they

have developed, analyze this data for answers, and then take action using the data they collected.

All of these skills directly correlate to the work that I have done during my Master’s program at

Michigan State University.

Moving beyond curriculum, I also want to acknowledge the kinds of connections my

students have built, and their understanding of the systems in place that allow decision makers to

create policies that directly impact their education. In an attempt to build connections early on,

my students wrote emails to inform administration of their work. While I had intended on

focusing on the principal and assistant principal, students worked together and recognized that

there are other decision makers they needed to inform as well. For my students researching

school lunches, they reached out to board members who wrote back asking them to also inform

the director of the district’s school lunch program. Soon emails were being sent all around the

community to inform decision makers, and also to ask for other individuals they should notify.

Youth Participatory Action Research has significantly changed the dynamics of my

classroom, and the relationships I have with my students. For the entire hour, students are

making decisions on their next steps, checking in with me for feedback, and then enacting on

their plans. This level of student independence has allowed my students to practice advocating

and using their voice, a key piece in considering the ways educators can dismantle systemic

issues that occur in the classroom.

I learned of Youth Participatory Action Research early into my time in the MATC

program at Michigan State University. Despite this, it would take nearly a year of additional
work before I felt confident in my ability to engage with my students in this manner. The

artifacts I have listed below highlight my work as I wondered the question, “How can I raise up

the voices of my students?” It was my hope that YPAR would be the start of a conversation for

my district as we continue to work alongside students, families, and community members to

create a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse district.

My Commitment to Students and Their Diversity

I began my educational career in a Title I district in Lansing. As time progressed, I found

myself working on the other end of the economic spectrum, as I moved to work in Okemos’s

Public Montessori program. Though 10 miles apart, the stark differences between these two

experiences has exposed me to the deeply embedded systemic issues that continue to plague our

educational system. Since this discovery, I have been wanting to find ways to take action, bring

awareness to this issue, and work to make a more equitable experience for my students. Despite

this acknowledgement early on, I lacked the skills, and knowledge to understand these systems. I

also hadn’t considered what I was actually committing to. The first artifact of my portfolio serves

as the work I have put into understanding my commitment to my students, and the issues that

occur in my classroom.

Artifact one began as a simple task in TE 818: Curriculum in its Social Context. At the

start of the semester, we practiced writing out our teaching philosophies with a plan to return to

them throughout the semester to refine these statements. Lacking a deep understanding of the

inner workings of systemic racism, my initial philosophies relied heavily on my Montessori

LIBERATING STUDENTS 5

experiences. This would significantly change the more literature I read, and conversations that

occurred with my colleagues in the MATC program.

My teaching philosophy starts off stating my goal as an educator: To liberate my students.

Though I cited several pieces of academic literature, this goal came to fruition after reading

Larabee (1989). In this piece, Larabee argues that the foundation of our educational system is

built with too many goals, and very little work to achieve these goals. Each stakeholder in the

community appears to have a different perspective on why we educate students and through this

game of tug-a-war, systemic issues have grown. Thus, my singular goal stands to refine what

decades of educators have failed to achieve.

Following my goal of being an educator, I set out to consider the ways I will achieve this

goal. Again, I list several commitments, each backed by academic pieces I have read. Since

writing this philosophy, I have focused on one of these commitments in particular - working to

lift up student voices. The rest of my artifacts will highlight my work in following through on

this commitment.

Using Academic Literature to Address Problems in Practice

Artifact two was created during my time in TE 822: Issues of Culture in Classroom and

Curriculum. In this class I was tasked to review a vast amount of academic literature in order to

create a critical analysis related to the educational field. In my analysis I utilized data from The

University of Wisconsin Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (2021). This data

demonstrates a disproportionality of identity in children’s literature. Throughout my analysis, I

connect this data to other academic literature pieces in order to demonstrate that the issue of

identity also exists within informational texts, as well as possible impacts of this critical issue.

Shortly after my critical analysis was completed and the semester had concluded, I had

gotten word that my district was getting ready to adopt a new social studies curriculum for 6th -

8th grade classrooms. Inspired by my critical analysis, I asked my administrator to invite me to

these meetings so that I could ensure the curriculum aligned with our equity plan. During these

meetings we had several educational publishers come in to demonstrate the curriculum series

they had to offer, and we were provided with sample texts. Throughout each meeting I quickly

skimmed through each text with two questions in mind:

1. What is the frequency in which diverse identities are displayed in these texts?

2. What are the ways in which these identities are represented?

As I had anticipated, some of these texts offered little opportunity for students to see identities in

a positive light. Though my data collection was quick and informal due to time constraints, it

was fairly obvious which texts understood the importance of identity and representation in their

books. In one example, a textbook contained an entire unit discussing topics related to South

America. While the majority of the pictures related to the landforms, or other geographical

features, those containing imagery of South American people only utilized photos of

impoverished communities. These included small villages on the outskirts of the Amazon,

Brazil’s infamous favelas, and farm communities high in the Andes. Focusing solely on these

images creates a narrative that all families within South America are either impoverished urban

communities, or impoverished rural communities.

I was thankful for the timing between my critical analysis and my district’s curriculum

adoption committee. Working alongside my colleagues with an equity lens in mind, I was able to
LIBERATING STUDENTS 7

advocate for a curriculum that utilized research methods, and worked towards creating a

curriculum that was mindful of culturally sustaining practices.

Reflecting on Problems of Practice Through Inquiry

Following my Critical Analysis Paper, I enrolled into TE 808: Inquiry into Classroom

Teaching and Learning. During this course I participated in an action research project which I

have included as my fifth artifact. After writing about critical issues related to diverse literacy

texts, I decided to center my action research around a similar topic so that I could dig deeper and

understand the impacts of this issue in my own context. My course instructor suggested I utilize

Bishop’s (1990) explanation of sliding glass doors and windows to distinguish the ways in which

diverse texts offer opportunities for students to engage and understand the role of identity.

During my analysis, I noted that my students were aware of identity within texts they selected for

reading. Additionally, I was able to see my students wanted to read texts containing identities

that differed from their own but acknowledged there were hurdles in finding these texts.

Having these conversations with my students allowed me to better understand the ways

they perceived identity in texts, as well as the role it played in selecting texts to read. Using my

understanding from my action research I began connecting with my administrator and school

librarian and shared the data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. Alongside their data,

the CCBC provides a book search tool allowing educators to find texts of specific identities, by

those same identities.

Organizing Professional Communities to Address Problems of Practice

 The fourth artifact I have included in my portfolio contains a professional learning plan

that I created for my current context during my time in EAD 824: Leading Teacher Learning. To

create this plan I started considering the systems already in place in my school, as well as the

learning culture. After focusing on the strengths and areas of improvement for these areas, I

began to consider new systems to put into place to shift my learning community towards being

more cohesive and cooperative. My suggestions for professional development utilized two

systems, one for critical friend groups and another for action research. Acknowledging the need

for adults to have choice in their professional development, I wanted to provide experiences that

were meaningful towards the needs of the adult learners.

Planning for adult learning was a completely new experience for me, and something I

acknowledge I still have room to improve on. As I consider my goal of raising a student voice, I

want to better understand how professional learning can be utilized with students. I love the idea

of empowering students to provide feedback to teachers, and the learning culture this creates. If

schools are working to provide students with opportunities to learn and reflect, they need to be

able to demonstrate how this type of learning and feedback works in both directions.

After completing this course, my district was offering an opportunity to connect Okemos

to the Justice Leaders Collaborative (JLT) for optional training. By this time, my work in the

MATC program was halfway through, and I saw this as an opportunity to continue my work

beyond the classroom, both as an opportunity to continue my own professional development, but

also a time to build connections and collaborate with peers. It’s really easy for a teacher to stay

hidden within their own classroom all day, without finding ways to connect with peers. Joining

the JLT allowed me to learn alongside colleagues across my district and since this initial training,

I’ve pushed several of my close colleagues to attend the same training.

LIBERATING STUDENTS 9

Planning for Community Engagement to Increase Family Participation

My third artifact highlights my work to establish connections between my school and community

members. The Kinawa Schools Relation Plan was created during my time in EAD 822: Engaging

Diverse Students and Families. Work for this engagement plan began by understanding the

demographics of my school using data from the National Center for Educational Statistics

(2019), and using this data alongside data I pulled from the US Census Bureau (2020) to

understand the demographics of the greater Okemos community. Following this, I was tasked to

interview community leaders to ask what they felt were the best ways for schools and

community members to connect. Initially I sent out a large number of emails to contact a vast

array of community leaders. However, by the time the paper had begun I only managed to hear

back from two individuals. The first of these individuals was a politician running for a local

election and the other was a librarian working for the city library. After the paper was completed,

however, I was contacted by two additional individuals, one was the head of Okemos Parks and

Recreation program and the other was a rabbi at the East Lansing Synagogue.

In EAD 822, the most impactful part of this experience was contacting the local leaders.

At first it felt really strange reaching out and I questioned whether my interviewees saw my

request as a nuisance. In conversation, however, I learned that all of the individuals I interviewed

loved that I was reaching out and attempting to connect my school to the wider community.

Their feedback also provided me with a lot of insight on how to frame the way I think about

community engagement. I previously saw school to community connections through the

traditional lens - the school hosts events, and the community members attend as they can.
However, despite holding all my interviews separately, each individual shared the same

perspective for community engagement. If school’s want to connect to community members,

then the school has to consider the ways in which it can reach out and be where the community

members are rather than wait for the community to come to the school.

Next Steps - Creating Curriculum Centered on Student Voice

The final artifact, artifact six, demonstrates two emails written by my students. As a

culmination of all my efforts in the MATC, I have spent the last 4 months pushing my students to

consider the power they hold, and the ways they can use their voices to make connections across

the community for change. These two emails act as the small visible tip of the iceberg floating

above the water’s edge. While these two groups of students decided to reach out and contact

members of the community beyond Okemos Schools, I have several groups of students focusing

on how to cause an immediate impact within the school. One group of students emphasized the

need to consider the litter on our school grounds. During COVID-19, our school has expanded

our lunch programs to allow student flexible seating outdoors. As a result, the amount of trash on

our grounds has exploded. Starting with data, the students approached the situation from two

perspectives: where the trash is most concentrated, and what types of trash are most frequently

littered. As a result of their efforts, they found that cookie wrappers were the most littered item,

and it occurred near trash cans. They concluded the wind was blowing a significant amount of

trash out of the can and are now working to change the ways the school prepares cookies to

reduce single-use plastic.

LIBERATING STUDENTS 11

The reality is, I could spend another 10 pages writing about the work and learning my

students have begun through their YPAR groups. I have been absolutely blown away by my

student’s initiative and ability to make change throughout the community. Even in groups who

have only begun scratching the surface, I found they have learned about how school policies are

made, and who makes these decisions. I see YPAR as the capstone to my capstone, but also the

beginning of a new journey. I’m far from perfecting the ways in which I engage with my students

as it relates to activism. However, throughout this year I frequently stop and ask students to

provide me with feedback on how we can improve our YPAR experience. As I consider the ways

I can continue and grow as an educator working against systems of injustice, much of my work

in this initiative begins through YPAR - as I continue to help my students find their voice.
 Works Cited

Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing and

Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3rd ed.)

Cooperative Children's Book Center. 2021. Books by and/or about Black, Indigenous and People

of Color (All Years) - Cooperative Children's Book Center.

Larabee, D. F. (1989). The American high school has failed its missions.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019). [ Washington, D.C.] :[NCES]

https://nces.ed.gov/

Nolan, J. E. S. (2022). YPAR Hub. UC Berkeley. (n.d.). YPAR Hub. yparhub.berkeley.edu/

U.S. Census Bureau. (2020). S1501 Educational Attainment. https://data.census.gov/