Research
My research focuses on Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) with 3rd-5th graders, and how adults can help children develop power analysis (the ability to engage with power and how it shapes our lives and societies).
Imagining More Just Futures: A Create Study of a YPAR Project With Upper Elementary School Aged Children
This zine discusses the first CPAR project I co-facilitated as part of Imagining More Just Futures. It narrows in on one idea in CPAR that turned out to be particularly challenging for us to scaffold for the elementary members of the researh team: "that all people and institutions are embedded in complex social, cultural, and political systems historically defined by power and privilege” (Torre, 2009). I discuss what we came to understand as places children struggled with in their understanding of this idea, and parts of this idea that we particularly struggled to explain or help children understand.
The Power Rainbow: a tool to support 3rd–5th graders in analyzing systems of power
This paper discusses a methodological and pedagogical tool we (myself and Anna Lucia Kirby) developed at Imagining More Just Futures to facilitate power analysis during critical research projects like CPAR: The Power Rainbow. This tool built on the project described in the zine above, and draws on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1979) as one way to think about multi-level structures, including systems of power. We discuss how The Power Rainbow helped us, as adult facilitators, provide child research team members a framework for exploring systems of power, specifically one that they could apply to their chosen research topics.
building/growing a movement: teaching power in an unjust world
The Power Rainbow was incredibly useful, but was far from perfect. After the second year of camp described in the paper above, we were left with a number of questions: 1) How do other educators support elementary aged children in thinking about systems of power/power analysis?; and 2) How do they link identity and power? These questions led to an interview study, and this paper which zooms out to explore these questions broadly: How do critical, out-of-school-time social justice educators, support 3rd-5th graders in thinking about systems of power? The paper breaks down the answer to this question by revealing how educators link power and identity, how they approach power as a central focus, what they find challenging about exploring power, and specific things educators consider when exploring power with 3rd-5th graders.
