Berkeley Review of Education

This project examined the experiences of six Ethnic Studies students who simultaneously engaged in two youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects, one in school and one out of school. The in-school project was situated within an urban high school that had a predominantly Latinx student population. The research explores the relationship between program context and student experiences of YPAR and was guided by the following question: How do students who are simultaneously involved in two YPAR projects experience an in-school YPAR endeavor along with an afterschool YPAR project, and what are the possibilities and limitations of such interventions? This qualitative case study utilized ethnographic methods, interviews, and a survey to better understand the youth experiences. Findings illustrated that students preferred YPAR to both an Ethnic Studies classroom and a traditional classroom. However, within YPAR, the students preferred the out-of-school endeavor as it offered more freedom to conduct their work. This research demonstrated the challenges of implementing YPAR within schools. Students noted how traditional classrooms reinforce hierarchical schooling, the in-school YPAR project operated as a form of bounded inquiry, while the out-of-school endeavor provided a space for open inquiry.

This article aims to think beyond schooling as the terrain on which educational liberation might be achieved. Based on ethnographic research with students who have been pushed or pulled into alternative education, I explore how schooling operates through mundane forms of spatial domination that attempt to track, force, and contain the movement of Black and Brown young people within and between places, and across a carceral-education landscape more broadly. Through a Black feminist geographic lens, however, I read below patterns of forced disappearance to consider the ways students disappear themselves. Young people’s persistence in moving freely within and away from sites of spatial domination charts the possibilities for educational liberation beyond formal schooling.

In January 2018, the mayoral-controlled Hartford Board of Education voted to officially close four mostly Black and Latinx schools as part of a district reorganization for “excellence.” This decision followed a decade of market-oriented reforms of school choice and closure promoted as a reform lever to improve academic achievement in a district under a school desegregation order and settlement. As part of a broader case study, this article draws on framing theory and the concept of accumulation by dispossession in order to compare stakeholder responses to the proposed closure of two schools in Hartford, Connecticut, at a moment of shifting public funds towards urban redevelopment. This article argues that stakeholders’ framing of responses connected to the form of school closure and their frame resonance, or effectiveness to connect with each other and the audience, related to status and identity in the district. This study supports the need for deeper understanding of how families, educators, and community partners experience school closures in urban contexts and how these groups provide alternatives to permanent school closure. The study also notes a particular form of school closure: desegregation by dispossession.