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Collaborative data analysis: examining youths’ literacy practices in YPAR

Joanne E. Marciano (Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA)
Alecia Beymer (Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA)

English Teaching: Practice & Critique

ISSN: 1175-8708

Article publication date: 23 March 2022

Issue publication date: 17 May 2022

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine how youth from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds came together to collaboratively analyze data they collected across two research projects in a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative, a less understood aspect of YPAR. Specifically, this study discusses how youth enacted collaborative data analysis to foreground lived experience and experiential knowledge while enacting critical literacy practices and building toward an open and reflective form of relationality.

Design/methodology/approach

The examination of youths’ data analysis practices is situated in a larger qualitative research study of the Central City Youth Participatory Action Research initiative, a six-month, community-based, out-of-school program. This study discusses the relational and humanizing practices of youth through collaborative data analysis practices.

Findings

This study focuses on two small-group research teams, examining how youth enacted critical literacy practices and humanizing modes of learning through relational practices as data analysis. This study discusses two themes in the findings: making sense of data through personal experience and negotiating researcher roles as stancetaking in collaborative data analysis

Originality/value

In analyzing students’ collaborative data analysis practices across the small-group YPAR projects they enacted, this study contributes new understandings about how youth analyzed data to examine aspects of educational equity important to them.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Chezare Warren for his contributions in codesigning and cofacilitating the CCYPAR initiative and Tashal Brown, Durrell Jones, Amieris Lavender, Christina Restrepo Nazar and Darrius Stanley for their work in the CCYPAR initiative as graduate student research assistants. The authors would also like to thank David Kirkland and the Kellogg Foundation for their support of the CCYPAR initiative, ETPC’s editors, the anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback and the youth participants in this project who so generously shared of their lives and experiences.

Citation

Marciano, J.E. and Beymer, A. (2022), "Collaborative data analysis: examining youths’ literacy practices in YPAR", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 209-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-04-2021-0027

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited

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