MAKING THE CASE FOR INTEGRATING YOUTH-PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH INTO RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIPS

Education research-practice partnerships, or RPPs, focus on improving the use of research evidence through building deep partnerships between research-side and practice-side participants and conducting studies on pressing problems of practice. Young people are often the ones most impacted by the problems of practice taken up by RPPs, such as chronic absenteeism, disciplinary disproportionality, or barriers to academic achievement, for example. As such, RPPs are well positioned to elevate and integrate youth voice in their collaborations, so that young people’s insider expertise can be meaningfully included, and the overall research process can be strengthened. At the same time, while RPPs commonly aim to include a range of education stakeholders, youth voice is not always a part of these collaborations.

Other community-engaged research approaches also seek to restructure how research is conducted, aiming to be more collaborative and contextually-driven. Participatory action research (PAR), for example, seeks to democratize knowledge production and broaden ideas of expertise, by engaging community members as co-researchers, rather than research subjects. Relatedly, youth participatory action research (YPAR) positions young people as experts who, with support from adult allies, design and direct research studies informed by their lived-experiences.

There are a variety of ways to engage youth in RPPs, with YPAR offering one approach to elevating youth voice that may be uniquely aligned with the goals of such partnerships, given YPAR’s focus on positioning youth as experts and supporting them to conduct research. As such, adopting practices or principles of YPAR can help RPPs more authentically engage youth earlier in the research process, be more inclusive of all stakeholders, advance goals of democratizing knowledge production, and challenge adultism, the societal system that values adults over youth, in school settings.

While including youth perspectives is an evergreen issue in collaborative research, it is especially important in the current tenuous and often-contested federal funding landscape, especially as it relates to impacts on young people. Under these difficult conditions, there is a need for greater synergy and strategy amongst equity-oriented researchers working to improve education, so that RPPs can withstand these challenges and continue collaborative work to support students. It is also essential that RPPs provide opportunities for youth leadership and engagement in action-oriented research during a time in which some impacted students are feeling energized to take a stand in response to government measures, but may have limited ways to do so because of their age (e.g., being unable to vote).

In this article, we explore why youth voice generally, and YPAR specifically, may be of interest to those enacting RPPs and offer practical approaches by which to elevate youth’s roles in these partnerships. Inviting these additional voices as partners in such work can open powerful new pathways for transformational change in RPPs focused on improving outcomes for youth.

CONTEXT: HISTORY AND ORIGINS OF YOUTH-PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH

Community-engaged research encompasses a variety of specific approaches to conducting collaborative scholarship. Under this umbrella of community-engaged research approaches sits youth participatory action research (YPAR), which is a unique form of action research that involves young people partnering with adult allies to conduct studies on topics of their own selection and design; to facilitate their own methodology; and to use their results to advocate for action in their schools and communities. As such, YPAR elevates young people as experts who possess important lived-experience and perspectives. This provides a valuable way for young people’s voices to be heard, particularly as it relates to issues that directly impact them.

Recent systematic reviews have highlighted the growth of YPAR over the last two decades, as well as the outcomes associated with youth participation. For example, participation in YPAR has been found to support young people’s feelings of empowerment, leadership skills, social-emotional development, and academic competencies. YPAR can also be an impactful way to create change in community settings, like schools. In YPAR, youth generate locally relevant research evidence about issues they care about. Youth-generated evidence can then be used by education decision-makers and practitioners to better understand and address the issues that directly impact youth.

CONNECTING YPAR AND RPPs

Research-practice partnerships present a promising innovation to both expand who participates in research and how research is utilized in practice settings. Youth-participatory action research provides an opportunity to both strengthen and expand these efforts, through its inclusion of youth voice and youth-generated evidence. As such, we see an important opportunity for education leaders enacting RPPs to learn from and consider adopting YPAR approaches, as a means to elevate the role of youth to that of co-researchers in these collaborations.

While YPAR and RPPs are both forms of community-engaged research, youth are not always fully engaged in RPPs. RPPs vary in their composition (e.g., who is involved) and focus (e.g., what is the scope) and these various contextual factors may make it more, or less, feasible to involve youth, based on the RPP’s capacity. For example, RPPs often begin with meetings of adult researchers and stakeholders (e.g., principals, teachers, district staff, etc.) and it is in these initial meetings that a starting research agenda may be set. Youth may not be included in these initial conversations, and instead, may be primarily involved as research participants, in studies designed by adults. While there are some examples of RPPs who have successfully integrated youth voice into these collaborations, opportunities remain for increasing the role of youth in RPPs.

Further, there are challenges to integrating systematic evidence generated by youth in schools. However, RPPs are well-positioned to overcome some of these obstacles, because of their explicit attention to and central aim of supporting the use of research evidence. Within the use of research evidence (URE) field, scholars study the conditions and strategies that promote the use of evidence by practitioners and decision-makers (Tseng & Nutley, 2014; Weiss & Bucuvalas, 1980). However, most of this research focuses on the use of adult-generated research evidence. YPAR can offer one way for RPPs to more meaningfully engage young people and integrate youth-generated evidence throughout the research process, capitalizing on RPPs’ focus on research use.

In addition to offering a roadmap by which to bring youth voice into RPPs, the field of YPAR can also provide guidance on how to address power imbalances within RPPs. Much RPP scholarship has outlined the importance of relationships, including highlighting relational challenges in these partnerships. YPAR scholarship often includes specific discussions about power, which is aligned with, but expands on, existing RPP research. Because in part of adultism, building authentic youth-adult research partnerships can be fraught. As such, many YPAR scholars have written about their approaches both to challenge adultism and grant youth power within YPAR itself, as well as use YPAR as a means by which to combat adultism in schools, offering additional relational insight for RPPs.

CASE EXAMPLES

To illustrate what it can look like to integrate YPAR into RPPs, we share two case examples from our own experiences below: First, Jennifer shares about her experiences of leading a YPAR project in an RPP, and secondly, Brian shares about another RPP’s efforts to integrate YPAR findings into district structures.

(I) Integrating YPAR into an Existing RPP

From 2018 to 2022, when I (Jennifer) was a graduate student, I helped to facilitate a new RPP between a Southern California research university and a local, Title 1 middle school, under the supervision of my PhD advisor, Dr. Stephanie Reich. This RPP was sparked by a philanthropic donation from a community member, wherein the researchers and practitioners did not have a pre-existing relationship. During the first year and a half of the RPP, we focused on problems of practice as identified by the school’s principal and Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS) team, which consisted of teachers, counselors, and other administrators. In our joint work, administrators and teachers often mentioned a desire to better include student perspectives in school improvement efforts. However, there was not a clear pathway by which to engage youth in the RPP and school stakeholders had limited capacity to create new student leadership mechanisms on campus.

It was this challenge that led us to consider conducting a YPAR project, which I could lead. My advisor and I first broached the topic in January of 2020 with the school principal, reflecting what we had heard regarding the interest in greater student involvement in school decision-making and explaining what YPAR was, as well as how we thought it could help elevate youth voice on campus. Notably, we only suggested the idea of a YPAR project once we had a better understanding of the school’s needs and interests, as well as strong relationships built with adults on campus, since conducting a YPAR project would grant us greater access to youth than we had in our previous studies, and necessitated trust. Additionally, given the time consuming nature of YPAR, we only wanted to raise this idea when we knew the school trusted us to honor our commitments (as I would be leading the YPAR study) and not over-burden them in the process.

After months of collaborative discussions with school- and district stakeholders, a plan for a year-long YPAR study, to run from 2020 to 2021, was collectively designed. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, and the subsequent retirement of the school’s principal in May of 2020, shifted our plans. After negotiations with the new principal in the fall of 2020, we adjusted our plan, to instead run a 12-week YPAR project in the spring of 2021. We worked collaboratively with school stakeholders to design a recruitment strategy for the study that would engage diverse youth on campus; 14 youth participated in the study consistently. Participating youth met with the adult research team (myself and a team of undergraduate research assistants, some of whom had attended the participating middle school) twice a week, with all meetings held online, and youth joining by computer or phone. During these meetings youth spent time getting to know each other, learning about the research process, collaboratively identifying a topic to study, selecting their specific research question and methodological approach, analyzing their data, preparing to disseminate their results, and determining how to use their findings to create change on campus.

The youth decided to focus their study on school food, with three primary goals: improving the quality of school lunch food, improving lunchtime seating options for youth, and reducing food waste on campus. We collaborated with the school’s cafeteria manager and a district nutrition specialist to design a study centered on elements of the school food program that were changeable (i.e., not things mandated by federal policy). The student researchers decided to conduct observations on campus, to determine what food was being thrown away the most, and to distribute an online survey, which included questions about youths’ school food behaviors and preferences. Once data was collected, it was analyzed collaboratively (e.g., the youth tallying their observational notes) and a plan was determined for sharing results back with school stakeholders. This included doing an online presentation for a team of school decision-makers, including administrators and teachers, and drafting a written report for broader dissemination. For more information about this project, please see Renick & Reich, 2023.

Throughout the process of facilitating the RPP, I also communicated regularly with other school stakeholders who were involved in the RPP about our progress. For example, the principal was notified when the youth selected their research topic, so she could consider how that fit into her overall school goals (e.g., having more youth eat the school food was also beneficial to the school financially). In addition to integrating the youths’ research into broader school improvement efforts, talking consistently with school stakeholders about the YPAR process helped them imagine other ways in which they could increase student voice on campus (e.g., the following year, a teacher on campus worked with us to do some classroom-based YPAR). After attending the youths’ presentation, a number of school leaders also expressed how impressed they were by what the youths had done, helping to plant seeds for future opportunities for youth leadership.

(II) Integrating YPAR Evidence into District Structures and Routines

I (Brian) have been part of my RPP’s YPAR work for the past seven years, from helping implement youth voice workshops to now supporting current YPAR research and efforts to integrate YPAR findings into the district’s structures and routines. Since 2018, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have been engaging in an RPP, funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and support from a Youth Voice 4 RPPs award from the National Network for Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP), to advance SFUSD’s equity goals and address inequalities related to student chronic absenteeism. The formation of this RPP builds upon over 20 years of collaborative work between UC Berkeley professors Dr. Ozer and Dr. Stone with SFUSD. The SFUSD-Berkeley RPP aims to better understand and address student absenteeism by integrating youth voice, and more specifically, youth-generated evidence from YPAR into district improvement routines and structures.

For decades, SFUSD students engaged in YPAR to inform innovative solutions at their school sites and the district. SF Peer Resources, a social justice organization and elective class that supports student voice and peer mediation, is just one of the spaces that has historically engaged students in YPAR (see this 2022 brief for more info).

Since 2018, our RPP, in partnership with SF Peer Resources, has been implementing youth voice workshops in high school and middle school Peer Resources classes. The purpose of these workshops was to not only provide technical support for current YPAR projects, but also to broker YPAR evidence to district-level decision-making spaces and initiatives like addressing chronic absenteeism. During the workshops, youth critically analyzed chronic absenteeism data and school climate data from SFUSD. They compared district administrative data on school climate with findings from their own systematic research and determined common themes and misalignments.

Through our RPP, youth in SFUSD continue to conduct YPAR research on a diverse range of topics related to equity and student engagement, including classes and curriculum, safety, academic support, mental health services, transportation, and school facility conditions. The YPAR findings add richness to our understanding of the complexities of various educational inequities. Aside from the issues and challenges, youth also generate data around what works to keep them engaged (e.g., better relationships with peers and adults, more student voice in school policy, increasing visibility and access to school and district resources, engaging classroom curriculum, creating more welcoming and inclusive spaces for various student identity groups like LGBTQ+, English Learners, and youth with disabilities).

Together with our core RPP partners from the SFUSD Research, Planning, and Assessment Office (RPA), we are planning to routinize the integration of youth-generated data with administrative data during data conferences with school and district leaders. By integrating youth-generated data with administrative data, we begin to humanize student engagement and attendance, as well as better understand the dynamic contexts youth are navigating. Further, we are in the process of developing an interactive online YPAR data dashboard that captures the institutional memory of all the YPAR projects conducted within the district over the last 10 years. The dashboard will serve as a knowledge brokering tool that youth and adults can utilize to access youth-generated data to inform their work.

LESSONS LEARNED AND CONSIDERATIONS

These two cases provide tangible examples of the possibilities and processes for incorporating YPAR into RPPs. As the first case demonstrates, even if an RPP is not initially structured to include youth as researchers, there are possibilities for changing these norms and creating new routines that allow for deeper youth engagement in the partnership’s research. In this case, the integration of YPAR required increased time from the university-based researchers, but after the first round of YPAR, capacity was built amongst adult school stakeholders that allowed them to continue some of this work themselves. This case also provides an important example of the synergy between YPAR and RPPs, both in terms of procedures and outcomes. Establishing a YPAR group on campus helped address a broader problem of practice at the school, which was that there was a desire for more youth voice in decision-making. Additionally, given YPAR’s focus on generating evidence for the purpose of action, the research the youth conducted was then a part of the larger RPP’s efforts to improve the school environment.

For the second case example, youth voice and YPAR were a common interest and motivating factor for the formalization of the SFUSD-UC Berkeley RPP and their shared research agenda. The RPP partners were aware of the breadth and depth of YPAR work happening in the district and found it important to leverage the work that was already happening, in order to enrich their understanding of attendance patterns and root causes. The RPP had a clear plan to analyze administrative attendance data and was intentional about considering the new insights gained when youth lead data-based inquiry through YPAR. It can thus be helpful to reflect on opportunities to be strategic in partnering with, learning from, and nurturing and sustaining existing youth voice and YPAR structures across schools/districts.

In reflecting across the cases, the integration of YPAR into these RPPs provided additional opportunities for attending to power and relationship dynamics that could be beneficial for those wishing to explicitly consider how power manifests in research collaborations. This can be a welcome critical extension for leaders enacting RPPs to think about the relationships in these partnerships not just as a means to an end (e.g., collaborative research), but as an outcome in and of itself, which we observed in our partnerships. As such, the field of YPAR has many lessons learned and practical applications to offer RPP actors who wish to continue working to advance equity and address power imbalances in schools.

YPAR is just one innovative form of youth participation among a wide range of strategies and approaches. For example, other forms of youth participation may include youth-centered design, youth advisory boards, arts-based approaches like photovoice, youth as evaluators, youth consultants, etc. What is unique about YPAR, however, is the production of youth-generated evidence that RPPs can utilize alongside other forms of evidence. These approaches, along with YPAR, require varying levels of institutional capacity, resources, and base levels of adult readiness for meaningful youth engagement. There is no one size fits all strategy. Based on educational context, RPP research agenda scope, and other potential factors, integration of youth voice within your RPP may look very different from the case examples provided. To continue this conversation and provide further insights and resources for youth engagement in RPPs, the NNERPP Youth Voice Subnetwork has committed to a youth voice series in NNERPP Extra (beginning with this article on sustaining students and teachers as change agents in RPPs in the previous NNERPP Extra issue, continuing with our examination here, and with more articles planned for future issues).

Further, there are a number of publicly available YPAR resources, like UC Berkeley’s YPAR Hub, which features sample curriculum and IRB applications for YPAR, for those wishing to explore how to involve youth more centrally in their RPPs. UC Davis’s Community Futures, Community Lore site also features guides for conducting YPAR. Researchers and practitioners can also join the YPAR Network, a professional network that aims to refine YPAR practice and expand impact. Further, NNERPP’s Youth Voice Subnetwork offers a community to workshop strategies for integrating youth into RPPs and has created a repository of resources for the NNERPP Knowledge Clearinghouse. There is much YPAR already occurring in schools across the country, and many RPPs exploring a variety of approaches to youth voice, creating a multitude of opportunities for cross-learning and collaboration.

Ultimately, we think YPAR offers a valuable way to elevate youth voice in educational settings that is uniquely well-aligned with RPPs, given its focus on the generation of evidence to create change. As such, we hope that more RPPs explore YPAR as they continue working to improve and transform education.

Jennifer Renick is Assistant Professor of Ecological/Community Psychology at Michigan State University, and Brian Villa is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

References

Tseng, V., & Nutley, S. (2014). Building the infrastructure to improve the use and usefulness of research evidence in education. In K. S. Finnigan & A. J. Daly (Eds.), Using research evidence in education: From the schoolhouse door to Capitol Hill (pp. 163–175). Heidelberg: Springer.

Weiss, C. H., & Bucuvalas, M. J. (1980). Social science research and decision-making. Columbia University Press.

Suggested citation: Renick, J. & Villa, B. (2025). Making the Case for Integrating Youth-Participatory Action Research into Research-Practice Partnerships. NNERPP Extra, 7(4), 10-18. https://doi.org/10.25613/1NAM-9V58