Even though we were kids, it felt like we did have a voice: Childhood counternarrative development and maintenance into emerging adulthood.
Abstract
Abstract“Even though we were kids, it felt like we did have a voice”: Childhood counternarrative development and maintenance into emerging adulthood David L. Gordon, Jr., MSSA We are socialized into a world in which multifarious forms of oppression are so typical that to contest them requires a departure from the accepted logics of social domination (King, 1968/2010). As long as the stories we subscribe to support the maintenance of a coercive hierarchy, it remains difficult to establish equitable social structures (Baszile, 2015; Hasford, 2016). By eliciting and centering marginalized stories, we are better equipped to challenge the rules, roles, and expectations based primarily on dominant groups' stories (Delgado, 1989). Developing counterstories or counternarratives is a necessary link between critical dialogue and critical action (Hammack & Pilecki, 2012; Rapa et al., 2018). Beginning with adultism as a common experience, the current study explores how children construct liberatory counternarratives through critical dialogue during a youth participatory action research (yPAR) program and how they apply those counternarratives to critical action as adults. I address four research questions in this dissertation: 1) How do youth participating in an afterschool participatory action research program utilize critical dialogue to construct counternarratives in relation to the capacity of youth to participate in social spaces? 2) To what extent are those counternarratives replicated or expanded to address forms of oppression based on membership in different marginalized groups? 3) To what degree are those counternarratives maintained into emerging adulthood? and 4) To what extent do these young adults bridge their childhood counternarratives into critical action? To address these questions, I analyzed data from multiple years of ethnographic fieldnotes and childhood exit interviews collected during a long-running yPAR program with 9 to 11-year-olds. Emerging adult data was obtained through individual semi-structured interviews with young adult former yPAR participants, as well as one group interview. Childhood exit interviews and emerging adult interviews were analyzed using the Listening Guide (Brown & Gilligan, 1993; Woodcock, 2016). The discerned results suggest that children in the yPAR program utilized dialogue in collaboration with adults, who leveraged love, hope, faith, humility, and critical thinking to support children. Through this critical dialogue, children could name power disparities, forms of oppression, or assumptions about them as children, as well as reframe aspects of their relationships with adults, providing alternative perspectives/interpretations of their capacity to engage in social spaces and challenging existing assumptions about children. Upon naming and reframing these dominant narratives, children could leverage the critical dialogue utilized in the yPAR program to articulate their own counternarratives that directly contradict certain dominant narratives about the role and capabilities of children. We observed that children broadened some of these specific counternarratives into generalizable life precepts that could be applied to other forms of oppression. Further, we also observed that emerging young adults continued to reiterate childhood counternarratives about who can contribute to social change efforts, whose perspective has value, and the importance of elevating marginalized voices. Finally, we observed that emerging young adults incorporated their childhood counternarratives into their own current involvement in social action by highlighting the importance of listening, collaboration, advocacy, and understanding why they believe the rationales they support.