Engaging multilingual youth in action research about language policy can support biliteracy development, communication and research skills. Best of all, it can inspire them –– and us –– to become advocates and change agents seeking better educational opportunities for everyone.
Keywords: Multilingual YPAR, Critical Consciousness, Seal of Biliteracy, Translanguaging, Language Policy, Equity
What can we learn from multilingual youth about being or becoming biliterate in high school?
It will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that U.S. schools struggle to serve multilingual students (Ovando & Combs, 2018; Ruiz-de-Velasco et al., 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). Nor is it a surprise that developing biliteracy skills and bi/multilingual identities is a good thing for all kids, and especially for students who enter school already knowing languages beyond English (Rolstad et al., 2005; Steele et al., 2017; Umansky & Reardon, 2014). Luckily these days, it’s more and more possible to develop biliteracy in school, as dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs are expanding (Palmer et al., 2015) and all states now offer a “Seal of Biliteracy” that recognizes students’ biliteracy on their diplomas (https://theglobalseal.com/). But we still have far fewer bilingual programs, or frankly supports of any kind, for multilingual students in secondary schools than in elementary schools (Menken, 2013; Ruiz-de-Velasco et al., 2000). Most laws and policy mandates focus on younger English language learner (ELL) students.
High school students who need support to learn English may encounter English language development (ELD) courses, which can be wonderful, supportive spaces for them to grow their biliteracy –– but can sometimes stand in the way of them accessing desirable electives or college-bound coursework (Callahan, 2005). Those who wish to further develop their first language may find world language coursework, especially if their home language is Spanish. While a growing number of world language programs now offer sections or sequences specifically designed for heritage language speakers, unfortunately most world language courses are still designed for English-monolingual students and focus on basic grammar and vocabulary (not generally helpful for home or heritage speakers). Most often, students have to navigate school and English-monolingual instruction on their own, perhaps with Google translate on their phones. Biliteracy development or affirmation of their multilingual identities has simply not been a priority in US high schools.
The current political climate has brought a number of additional challenges as we work to support multilingual youth in secondary schools. The banning of books that represent Latinx identities and immigrant struggles and experiences; the elimination of federal regulations that for many years protected schools as safe spaces from immigration enforcement; the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and hostility in public discourse; federal aggression towards immigrant communities; an executive order declaring English to be the “official language” of the United States; severe reductions to the Office of English Language Acquisition in the federal Department of Education; and the threat to federal funding for programs that support students labeled as English Learners… it’s been a lot. And these recent developments are all contributing to increased marginalization and invisibility for multilingual and immigrant youth both in school and beyond. These additional challenges show up as barriers to student school success, painting a bleak picture.
What can educators do?
We propose one way to engage multilingual youth in proactive, empowering, educative work to not only support their own academic success but also promote positive change and linguistic justice in their schools, districts, and communities, even through these troubling times. We invite you to jump on board the movement to engage youth in inquiry toward transformation: Youth Participatory Action Research –– YPAR –– for multilingual youth.
Why engage multilingual youth in inquiry projects? Youth are often seen as objects of policy rather than agentic policy-makers or shapers and “youth collective action tends to be absent from perspectives on young people held by policy makers, education researchers, and youth development practitioners” (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2006, p.xviii). By contrast, youth organizing and activism can be transformative for schools and communities, as well as for youth themselves (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2006; Renée Valladares et al., 2024).
While there are growing examples of youth engaging in policy, there are far fewer examples of multilingual learners engaging in language policies in schools. Education for these youth too often focuses on their perceived deficits and need to learn English, rather than what incredible perspectives and capacities they –– as multilingual and often transnational students –– might bring to schools. So far only a handful of researchers have studied how YPAR can support multilingual students to explicitly address language policies (e.g. Cushing-Leubner & Eik [Diggs], 2018; Rosa, 2018). The field needs more examples, and we hope you will consider this your invitation. We need to listen to the brilliance of our multilingual students when making decisions in our schools; they are the experts on what they need to thrive!
This article will introduce you to YPAR and to the Critical Consciousness Framework. After defining YPAR through the Critical Consciousness Framework (and explaining the Critical Consciousness Framework with the example of our YPAR project), we’ll end with recommendations and tools you can use to engage youth in action research to work toward critical consciousness in your context.
What is YPAR?
YPAR draws on community-based Participatory Action Research from Latin American social science traditions (Lomeli & Rappaport, 2018), Paulo Freire’s idea of praxis (Freire, 2000), and Critical Youth Studies (e.g., Tuck & Yang, 2013). At the core of the work is to value and center the knowledge and experiences of minoritized and racialized youth who experience schools every day, and to support youth to work toward actionable change. School decision-making processes usually exclude youth voices; yet youth so often wind up living with the consequences of adult decisions. The idea is to help marginalized students examine power and reimagine their reality through inquiry –– through posing and seeking answers to their own questions –– and then share their vision with adult decision makers –– with potential for their ideas to impact policies, or at least adult perspectives on issues. It is important for adult facilitators of YPAR to interrogate their own motivations in collaborating with youth so that in practice, YPAR isn’t merely performative or tokenizing students’ input, but rather results in genuinely listening to, responding to, and considering how to implement real change based on the perspectives, recommendations, and research findings of youth.
In the project we’re going to describe below, our multilingual youth were invited to explore possible pathways to biliteracy for high school students in their district. (See Figure 1 for an example of “questionstorming.”) They interviewed stakeholders in their community, visited nearby bilingual programs, and read about program designs and research. Then they reimagined ways their school and district could better support biliteracy development. They presented their findings in the form of a plan to their teachers, school and district leaders, and their school board. Engaging youth as researchers allowed students to learn new skills, practice new language, and find new voices as they became advocates for new possible policy worlds.
Introducing the Critical Consciousness Framework
Paulo Freire defined critical consciousness as “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against oppressive elements of reality” (2000, p. 37). To develop critical consciousness, we must strive to understand and name the structures of power that shape our historical, material, and social conditions. We engage together in a cyclical inquiry process, or praxis: we reflect, dialogue, and take action; together in community, we listen carefully and learn to recognize the sources of oppression, and then we find ways to challenge it. In this way, developing critical consciousness and engaging in praxis can serve emancipatory goals for youth and their teachers and communities.
Building from a history of scholarship and education for liberation, Palmer et al. (2019) proposed the following actions we can take to move towards developing critical consciousness (see Figure 2):
- Interrogating power: Calling out oppression and pushing those in power to notice injustice, transform, and remedy systems.
- Historicizing: Deconstructing mainstream explanations/erasures of the past; foregrounding local histories.
- Critical listening: Embodying a relation of curiosity and attention, reciprocity, and responsivity.
- Working through/engaging with Discomfort: Experiencing and learning from the inevitable unsettledness in recognizing, reflecting on, and/or addressing social injustice.
Since 2019, educators and researchers have begun to take up these four actions in different contexts, and we are beginning to learn about their impact (Heiman et al., 2023). Specifically, as communities of students and teachers engage with these actions, learning spaces become spaces of solidarity and acompañamiento (Sepúlveda, 2011), in which youth feel seen and oppression is faced in community rather than alone. Learning spaces also become spaces for translanguaging (García et al., 2017), in which all feel comfortable drawing on their full repertoire of communicative practices –– across all the languages they speak. Finally, they become affirming spaces for all identities (Heiman et al., 2023).
The Caminos Project
(Source: https://rulerapproach.org/about/what-is-ruler)
Mountainview High School (MHS, pseudonym), a small public school in the Denver Metro region, has an innovative curricular model serving approximately 300 students in 9th through 12th grade, with 16% of the population identifying as Latino or Hispanic. Forty-eight percent of the student population has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or 504 plan (Colorado Department of Education, 2024). On Wednesdays, the school has an early release for students to engage in community experiences. Our workshop was one such community experience. In addition to high school “community experience” credit, our students received college credits for Youth Research. Students on our team were in grades 9th to 12th and came from a diversity of identities, including both Latinx students and white students (bilingual, heritage speakers, or taking Spanish as a world language). Laura (author two), a high school educator and doctoral student, and Maya (author three), our undergraduate TA and a recent graduate of another district high school, co-facilitated the weekly workshop, inviting high school participants into the co-design of the time, space, and inquiry increasingly as the year progressed. (See Figure 3 for an example from one such workshop.)
We will next explore how taking up the above actions toward critical consciousness supported our work with multilingual students in the Caminos Project.
Interrogating power
“Is this a common issue?” Michelle (author 4) asked Deb (author 1) one day. She was referring to the challenges her bilingual, Latino son, a high school senior at the time, had faced attempting to achieve a Seal of Biliteracy at MHS. Despite having participated in a DLBE program through eighth grade, and living in a family with the means and capacity to jump through administrative hurdles, Michelle’s son nearly missed out on achieving the Seal. His family had to pay a fee and drive him across town to take a special exam, hurdles Michelle doubted many of his heritage Spanish speaking Latinx classmates would be able to do. As a bilingual education scholar, Deb affirmed this was unfortunately a far too common experience. Many heritage speakers of non-English languages find themselves struggling to fulfill the requirements for the Seal of Biliteracy, despite their impressive levels of biliteracy, due to administrative hurdles, language bias, or standardized assessments. According to Subtirelu and colleagues:
In general, students who speak English natively are granted a path to earning the Seal through their world languages curriculum that requires clearing fewer bureaucratic hurdles and that expects a lower level of second language development than the path offered to students, especially nonnative English speakers, who might wish to use their proficiency in a home or heritage language to demonstrate their biliteracy. (Subtirelu et al., 2019, p. 381)
While the state of Minnesota has been working hard to overcome exactly these limitations in their Seal of Biliteracy policies (Davin et al., 2018; Schwedhelm & King, 2020), in Colorado such inequities remained in place for Michelle and her son. Michelle, a scholar of activism and policy change, invited Deb to begin a youth action research project to investigate this issue and develop potential solutions; in short, she said, “Let’s ask the students.”
Michelle and Deb, in their conversation, were interrogating power –– identifying and describing an inequitable situation and calling for action to rectify it.
Historicizing – affirming identities
History played a major role in our team’s curriculum; it is what inspired the youth, connecting their present work to a long history of advocacy. During the first quarter of the workshop in Fall 2023, the youth learned about the history of bilingual education in the US and Colorado. In the spring, they toured our university campus with the director of the Latinx History Project, learning about key events that took place here during the Chicanx Civil Rights Movement. Every week, Maya gave a mini-lesson and led discussion on a crucial event or person in Chicanx and Latinx history. Maya is a Chicana undergraduate student majoring in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences whose family is connected to Chicanx activism and bilingualism in Colorado and New Mexico (see Figure 4 for her presentation to youth about her background). When asked to provide ‘author information’ for a conference presentation in 2024, she wrote:
“As someone who grew up speaking both English and Spanish academically and with family…I hope to be an example of a success in bilingual education and show just how helpful supporting students’ needs truly is. I hope to inspire Chicano students and help them realize that they are the descendants of some of the greatest scholars history has to offer.”
Like Maya, several youth also made connections between the project and their own families’ histories. Maya helped create a space where students could play with identity negotiation through historicizing, building solidarity in our work not just with those in the room, but with elders and ancestors, both Chicanx and Latinx and allies who had come before us.
Critical listening
Students engaged in critical listening as they interviewed elementary, middle, and high school students, parents, school leaders, and bilingual educators. They connected with each stakeholder, showing curiosity and connection, seeing their own experiences reflected back or challenged. Critical listening also took place in their classroom observations and interviews where students noticed which languages were/weren’t being used in which contexts, and they saw which languages were present/absent on walls and curricular materials. Critical ‘listening’ involved all the senses.
Students were also quite astute at inference; they listened critically to what adults were not saying, attended to responses that went beyond what was asked, and often inferred what was being communicated by how it was said. As a result, ultimately the policy recommendations that students developed and presented were far more expansive than we (the adults) were expecting, given our initial invitation to explore “high school biliteracy pathways.” For example, as part of their presentation at a bilingual teachers’ conference in Colorado, students interviewed bilingual educators; they heard educators expressing a need to feel supported and to work in community. Subsequently, in developing their policy recommendations, students added requests for more bilingual personnel and suggested creating planning and sharing time across different high schools.
Engaging with discomfort
Whether they were heritage or native Spanish speakers, graduates of dual language programs, or Spanish world language learners, students were largely uncomfortable using Spanish to do research, and even more uncomfortable to present. As we read court cases on bilingual education and learned about language ideologies, students became more committed to working through their discomfort. They made language goals, supporting each other to stay in Spanish as much as possible and discussing the historical and sociopolitical factors that shaped why this was difficult to do in academic spaces. Heritage speakers expressed that being given space to explore the history of bilingualism and their own linguistic and cultural identities gave them more confidence in their bilingualism. As we prepared each presentation –– at our local bilingual conference, at a national education conference, and for their local school board –– students insisted on incorporating both languages, even though this was still uncomfortable. Through historicizing and translanguaging, students affirmed their identities (as bilinguals); this infused them with the confidence to engage with discomfort (using Spanish in academic spaces) and ultimately to interrogate the power of English hegemony.
What happened? Youth recommendations!
Youth in the MHS Caminos Project collected a range of data, and analyzed and synthesized the data to ultimately come up with five broad recommendations:
- Improving Support for Multilingual Students in all spaces at ALL district High Schools
- More Bilingual Staff and Course Offerings at ALL district High Schools
- Districtwide Initiatives to Support Bi/multilingualism
- High School Dual Language Strand
- Supports for Bi/multilingualism at our school, Mountainview High School
The youth defined each broad recommendation, pointing to the data that led them to it, and then followed each with sub-recommendations that outlined specific suggestions for new initiatives or policy changes. For example, for #1, “Improving Supports… in all spaces”, their specific policy/practice recommendations were:
- A Linguistic Inclusion Policy for assignment and testing accommodations for bi/multilingual students
- Bi/multilingual resources in libraries and classrooms
- Bi/multilingualism present in the physical space of the school
- More bi/multilingual newsletters, communications, and flyers
- Inclusion of bi/multilingualism in school extracurriculars (music, sports, not just clubs for multilingual/multicultural students)
- Consistent school-based support and promotion of the Seal of Biliteracy
Their full report, including their methods, recommendations, and justifications, was written up and shared orally with the MHS faculty, with school and district administrators, with the district school board, and as a poster in a research conference at our university. The group received feedback on their work and ideas during these presentations, and a subset of students continued in the project for a second year working with Laura and Maya to write findings into a policy memo for the National Education Policy Center, which is currently in revision (Meinzen et al., forthcoming). While the uptake of students’ ideas by school and district adults remains complex due to many factors, the youth themselves were deeply impacted by the experience, and several have shifted career goals to include education or bilingualism.
Tools to try YPAR/inquiry in your school
An invitation to co-construct space and inquiry together is a powerful one. Multilingual YPAR can be a transformative way of enacting culturally sustaining pedagogies and democratizing your classroom and school. Building solidarity and identity negotiation within the messiness of our co-constructed bilingual space, plus having an authentic pathway to take action, enabled our students to further develop their own critical consciousness and their understandings of themselves as language policy actors, not to mention their data collection, analysis, and synthesis skills –– and their biliteracy! Through multilingual YPAR, students engaged in the process of their own becoming, meaning making, and critical consciousness development.
How can you implement something similar in your context?
- Check out resources on school-based YPAR (https://www.schypar.org/), building youth power (https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/newsletter-youth-power-052124) and the National Equity Project’s resources on Youth-Adult Co-Design Partnerships (https://www.nationalequityproject.org/resources/youth-adult-codesign).
- Check out Carleton College’s multilingual YPAR resources available in English, Spanish, Somali, and Hmong (https://participatoryactionresearch.sites.carleton.edu/).
- For more YPAR resources, check out the YPAR Hubs at UC Berkeley (https://yparhub.berkeley.edu/home) and UC Davis (https://ypar.cfcl.ucdavis.edu/).
- Find partners –– community organizations, multilingual families, universities, CLDE/dual language departments.
- Brainstorm structures in your school where YPAR with multilingual students could happen: a club, an advisory, a heritage language class, a capstone project.
- Let students do a needs assessment and craft the questions they are interested in exploring; try the “question formulation technique” or QFT (https://rightquestion.org/)
- Support students in their inquiry process with tools for research, connections with stakeholders, funding for research trips, etc. For tools to support student inquiry and organizing, check out resources at the Commons Social Change Library (https://commonslibrary.org/)
- Support students in deciding their product: how to disseminate their findings to an authentic audience in a powerful way –– what audience, venue, and method of sharing? A school board meeting, a faculty meeting, a city council meeting? A presentation, video, mural, newsletter, social media campaign, etc.? Some examples of teachers’ and multilingual students’ products can be found on the School Based YPAR website (https://www.schypar.org/general-2).
In our Caminos Project, as facilitators we wondered what happens when we co-create a bilingual space together with students. We found that by sharing and hearing stories, grounding our work in local Chicanx history, and negotiating our individual and collective identities –– in community and in public –– we all furthered the development of our critical consciousness. The methodology of YPAR helped us radically center bilingual students’ co-construction and agency, as well as drive together towards an authentic goal and shared dream. Students’ development of critical consciousness around their bi/multilingual identities became one sustained enactment of linguistic justice.
We hope you will try Youth Participatory Action Research with your students!
References
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