Youth participatory action research can turn your classroom into a site of meaningful, relevant civic learning, in which young people gain a sense of civic empowerment as they discuss, investigate, analyze, and speak with authority on issues that directly affect them and their communities. Through stories, examples, and the reflections of youth…

Background: The transition from primary to secondary school is a pivotal period in young people's lives and can significantly impact their mental health. However, the experiences of young people from ethnically diverse groups during this crucial period of physical, social and emotional development are under-researched, limiting the evidence base…

The connections between critical pedagogy, living theory and participatory action research (PAR) are discussed to explore their combined strength for empowering students, positively impacting on their attitudes towards their mathematics learning and creating social change in their primary-secondary mathematics transitions. This transition is…

This article examines the ways teachers, students, and teacher educators interacted in a unit around Christopher Columbus and other historical figures that have been given places of privilege within the dominant society. The authors trace how color-evasiveness and explicit engagement with race in the classroom intermingle with the implementation…

Background: Over the past several decades, understandings of civic knowledge and engagement have been enlarged in productive ways; the field has been transformed by contributions rooted in and showcasing critical, cultural, transnational, activist, and participatory approaches to the civic. Civic action research fits neatly amid these new…

This study focuses on pre-service teachers' views of the conditions that foster their participatory action research practices in secondary schools and on how these conditions can inform the development of a teacher education program for a participatory approach. By using the "Theory of Practice Architectures" as an analytical lens, eight…

This article presents an innovative way to engage schoolchildren in discussions on multilingualism and multilingual identity using research data they helped generate. Adopting an exploratory, participatory approach to research, our study uses digital data visualisations in interactive sessions aimed at engaging lower secondary students in identity…

Place-based knowledge, a legacy from our ancestors, is inherently sustainable. However, modern lifestyles have eclipsed this wisdom, leading to environmental issues such as land and water pollution. Similarly, the current pedagogical practices often fail to connect place-based knowledge. It resulted in a deviation of students' contextual learning.…

Researchers often point out a wide rift between school culture and students' home culture, especially for Adivasi students whose culture, language and knowledge systems are played down by the mainstream discourse. We believe that such deficit perspectives must be countered to work towards an equal and just society. For this purpose, in this study,…

This article presents a scoping review of literacy research that employs multilingual and multimodal literacy narratives and discussions as tools for enabling immigrant youth to explore their intersectional identities and experiences of inequality. It encourages a re-examination of emerging educational/societal issues, incorporating these…

In this study, we explore the following: a) How do secondary student teachers, engaged in collaborative action research, function as critical friends? b) What challenges do they encounter? How do they mitigate these challenges? and c) In what ways did meeting as critical friends influence the student teachers' learning to conduct collaborative…

The Intergenerational Reflections technique was developed to bring together the voices of connected stakeholders of different ages and positions--in this case, students and teachers--to create recommendations that build on both groups' perspectives. This article describes its use and results as piloted in the "Time to Teach about Gender-Based…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from considering a collection of narrative reflections written by six high school educators, all co-authors, who have integrated youth participatory action research (YPAR) into their instructional practice. Taken together, the written reflections shed light on teachers' reasons not only for…

The U.S. education system often functions as an adverse developmental context for Black students. Discriminatory policies and racist ideologies contribute to a series of cascading inequities in students' learning experiences. For example, years of data indicate an overrepresentation of Black students suspended and/or expelled from school.…

The COVID-19 pandemic and shifts to virtual learning drastically altered school environments, often leaving students without a say in the many changes happening in their lives. To understand how diverse adolescents experienced their school's climate during the COVID-19 pandemic and elevate youth voice in school decisions, we conducted a…