Connected Learning with Youth Voices

View this rich webinar about how and why preparing students for youth participatory action research (YPAR) leads to civic engagement, community improvement, learning, and literacy (cue the video to 16:52). Through this inquiry process, students gain an understanding of their communities and then can advocate for change.

In this conversation, fourth in a series, two secondary history teachers and educational researchers discuss what happens when students are civically engaged in social justice and advocacy. The teachers share fundamental teaching challenges and opportunities that a curriculum that engages with participatory politics offers them and their students in this digital age. The introduction ends and the conversation begins 10 minutes 35 seconds into the webinar. For the full webinar or podcast and related resources, visit Thinking Across Civic Education Work.

This collection of blogs, podcasts, articles, videos, and other media provides a variety of textual experiences you could use to give students a layered reading and writing experience related to Ferguson and Black Lives Matter. The collection creator, Paul Allison, poses two qustions: "How can we help students to connect around important issues of race and justice in our time?" and "How do we build curriculum, rituals, tools, and skills in modular, open, inspiring ways that will give students the permission to follow their passions, yet also invite them to go deep into important issues as committed and informed citizens?" While the collection focuses specifically on the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and its aftermath, it underscores the value of creating multimodal resource collections to encourage teachers and students to explore issues of social justice locally and more broadly.