People in Project:
Alfredo Artiles (Graduate School of Education)
Antero Garcia (Graduate School of Education)
Ramon Martínez (Graduate School of Education)
Project Description:
We will create a transformational space for the (re)construction of opportunity policies and practices, the (Re)Makery Studio, where high school youth of color learn and work in partnership with interdisciplinary Fellows—art, humanities and social science scholars. This diverse intergenerational community will focus on disparities in high school discipline and generate alternative solutions informed by the knowledge and lived experiences of youth of color. Participating youth with disparate ability levels, racial, linguistic, gender, national origin and socioeconomic backgrounds will be recruited. In the (Re)Makery Studio, the work will be organized in two phases, namely inquiry and deliberative policy reformulations. First, youth will be introduced to an interdisciplinary toolkit containing epistemological and methodological practices and resources from the humanities, arts, and social sciences. In collaboration with interdisciplinary Fellows, participating youth will (re)frame an aspect of discipline disparities and generate inquiry questions. Youth will use their movements through everyday routines at school, home, streets and other community spaces to collect and analyze evidence germane to school discipline policies and practices. The evidence will be anchored in their own cultural ways of knowing and lived experiences. This way, youth’s inquiry findings will offer alternative understandings and (re)presentations of what counts as disruptive behaviors, discipline problems, orderly environments and responses to discipline infractions. Second, with the support of the research team, youth will convene school leadership to forge critical dialogic spaces by putting in conversation their findings with the official school disciplinary policies, data and practices. The design of these deliberative spaces will be based on the scholarship on formative interventions (Engestrom, 2019). These dialogic spaces will be the catalyst to reformulate discipline policies and practices and imagine alternative futures for youth of color. Plans to pilot the solutions will be generated. We envision the (Re)Makery Studio to be a pilot demonstration project.
