Addressing inequity through youth participatory action research: Toward a critically hopeful approach to more equitable schools

Hidden curricula in schools

Hidden curricula exist in institutions of all kinds. The concept refers to the tacit ways that institutions operate, often according to historical assumptions and beliefs that they may no longer endorse and that are often based on class-based assumptions as well as gendered and racialized biases. Broadly, the concept of hidden curricula in schools refers to the implicit ways that schools operate and how professionals within them socialize students (see e.g., Carl, 2017). The phrase “hidden curriculum” was first coined by Jackson (1968); he notes that much of what students learn in school is not included in the formal, espoused curricula. This hidden curriculum is “transmitted tacitly through the social relations and routines that characterized day-to-day school experience” (Giroux, 1981, p. 284).

The hidden curriculum has come to include the subtle messages of schooling that, according to many (e.g., Anyon, 1980; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Carl, 2017), continue to reproduce the hegemonic status quo in the United States. An example of this hidden (or not so hidden) curriculum in perpetuating class structures is how schools reflect the broader, economic conditions available to students (Carl, 2017; Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p. 132). Students from racial and minority backgrounds tend to be concentrated in chaotic schools that emphasize rule-following, and the schools’ “minimal possibilities for advancement mirror the characteristics of inferior job situations” whereas schools in affluent areas tend to offer more opportunities for student participation and creative instruction (Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p. 132).

The overt as well as tacit advantages associated with attending an elite, independent school is one reason why parents pay to send their children to such schools. By design, these schools are meant to help students receive myriad benefits, including well-connected alumni networks and other forms of social and cultural capital. Attending one of these schools can cost between 20 and 50 thousand U.S. dollars per year (National Association of Independent Schools, 2015) with around 80% (Bassett, 2013; NAIS, 2015) of the students paying the full tuition. This is just one indication that these schools represent parents of wealth and power and, in many cases, white privilege. As independent schools began to admit students from a variety of social, cultural, and racial backgrounds, assumptions that developed from histories of serving privileged white families can negatively impact a newer, more diverse student body.

For example, in schools, the structural and organizational influences on what is learned and taught are influenced primarily by middle- and upper-class white values and experiences. Formal writing curricula, for example, may include a writing prompt that asks students to write about a recent vacation taken during a break from school. This assumes that all students have taken a vacation and ignores the embarrassment that students might face if teachers unknowingly ask students who have not taken a vacation to share their written response aloud with the class. For example, some students in the schools we work may write about a recent trip to Europe, and other students who did not have that experience may feel marginalized, less than, or judged. What makes this an example of a hidden curriculum is that formal curricula and class activities are influenced by social class structures that privilege certain groups of students and marginalize others. Thus, our operational definition of hidden curriculum includes the ways that schools (and other institutions) marginalize and oppress certain groups of students through organizational and institutional processes that presume an upper-class, white experience. Such marginalization is often unintended, but the consequences are real.

Through our YPAR work in these schools, we attempt to make visible and address structural and organizational values that harm groups of students. Participatory action research processes in which local stakeholders work together to identify, study, and then use data to address these structural and organizational processes (i.e., hidden curriculum) is one way to make schools more equitable. This is done by encouraging students and teachers on YPAR teams to first identify and then critically consider the impact of normative policies, events, academics, and experiences on a range of school stakeholder groups. Thus, as we work with school teams to make these marginalizing practices more visible, we help facilitate discussions based on critical identity theories as discussed in the next section.

Critical identity theories

Critical race and feminist theory have been at the epicenter of the development of the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality refers to the idea that identities are shaped by multiple factors and dimensions within interlocking structures of oppression (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill-Collins, 2000; McCall, 2005). Within the context of majority-white, elite schooling contexts, students of color and students from different class backgrounds as well as homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-binary students are often actively and tacitly marginalized. Critical theories of identity are helpful in understanding how to approach identity so that action research methods do not re-inscribe stereotypes and monolithic versions of social identities.

This identity work is the center of the YPAR work we facilitate in schools. Engaging with critical theories of identity can help students cultivate their own sense of agency, as there are multiple identities that students from non-majority backgrounds navigate (Porter & Maddox, 2014). It is important to add that critical identity work should be engaged in powerfully with all students, including those from white, elite, and privileged backgrounds because all students need and deserve to have their identities contextualized and complicated.

In addition to thinking about the complexity of identity, we encourage the schools we work with to adopt a resource orientation and/or anti-deficit thinking, including a focus on funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) and anti-deficit thinking (Valencia, 2010) to counter criticisms of the static, non-intersectional nature of many identity theories. YPAR is built upon a systematic, relational, and data-based engagement with students and teachers to understand the depth of resources, skills, realities, contexts, histories, needs, and knowledge(s) that exist in students and schools. Our methodological and conceptual approach involves raising consciousness by examining critical identities and conducting YPAR, as discussed in the next section.

Critical consciousness and YPAR

A fundamental idea central to the development of youth as change agents is that of critical consciousness or awareness. This concept stems from Paulo Freire’s (1970) theory of “conscientização” (p. 35) or critical consciousness, which includes developing an understanding of the power relations within social relationships and societal structures. Helping students to “see” and understand these inequitable power relations (i.e., hidden curricula) in their schools is a part of the YPAR process and is facilitated through the development of critical identities theories discussed previously. In addition to examining identity theories, youth-led research projects are another way that we work with teachers and students to create the conditions for them to facilitate awareness that can lead to critical consciousness in their own circles.

A central premise of YPAR includes that young people often have new and innovative ideas and solutions that can improve the life and function of their own schools. Furthermore, participatory action research contends that everyone has knowledge and can leverage their knowledge and skills when positioned as researchers (e.g., Torre & Fine, 2006). When students’ educational experiences are marginalizing, othering, and/or reproducing harmful inequities and identity-based scripts and norms, YPAR presents opportunities for students to be involved in generating local, school-based change by addressing concerns that are important to them and their peers, thereby contributing to school-based efforts to reform (Bautista, Bertrand, Morrell, Scorza, & Matthews, 2013; Morrell, 2006; Ozer, Newlan, Douglas, & Hubbard, 2013; Powers & Allaman, 2012). Furthermore, YPAR is one tool students can use to excavate hidden curricula in schools that include taken-for-granted assumptions, practices, norms, and values that unintentionally marginalize, minoritize, and silence certain groups of students.

In practice, the YPAR process involves a school-based team of students and teachers who are supported by university researchers and the school administration. Together, the team works to research issues that the students identify as problematic in their schools. The primary research decisions are made by the students, and as university research facilitators, we help to inform their decisions through offering technical-methods support so that the research is as rigorous and valid as possible while also remaining student-led and organic to their discovery and learning process.

In the next section, we discuss one example of a YPAR team project in which student researchers examined a hidden curriculum of racist and misogynistic practices in their high school. In this example, we overview the methods the YPAR used as well as present their findings.

Research context and focus

The YPAR team consisted of five high school students, all self-identified as heterosexual black or mixed-race females, and two high school teachers. The second author was involved as one of two university facilitators called on at strategic moments to help with technical aspects of research design, protocol development, and development of a strategic plan to share findings. The students were compelled by their experiences of social exclusion and embarrassment to study heterosexual male dating preferences at their school. These students were interested in this topic for a variety of personal reasons, including that each one felt left out of, as well as minoritized and demeaned by, the dating scene and sets of male behaviors at their school. The students on the YPAR team believed, based on multiple years of experience and the reports of their non-white peers, that their skin color was the key influence on why the young men were not interested in them and why they were not invited on any dates or to the prom. The two teachers who were involved self-identified as black (one self-identified as male and the other as female) and given their tenure at the school for over a decade each, agreed with the students’ assessment of their marginalization and that it has been an issue at the white-dominated elite school since they could remember.

The YPAR team’s research focuses on an examination of what skin color, if any, heterosexual male high school students felt more attracted to and why. The members of the YPAR team and the university researchers spent many hours discussing the students’ experiences and reading academic and popular media articles relevant to the topic. Based on their experiences and those of their classmates from similar backgrounds, the students believed that the males would find females with lighter skin more attractive and that the lighter-skinned female students would also be considered more “datable.” The research team had many informal data points relevant to this phenomenon and yet wanted to co-construct a research project that could help them, and ultimately others, to engage data that speak to these issues. Research team members remained open to being disproven and designed the study to allow for data to emerge that would support an open and inductive process in order to resist finding what they imagined at the outset.

YPAR methodology

To study this phenomenon, the students developed the central goals and research questions to guide their project, designed a multi-prong, sequential approach to data collection and analysis, and vetted their ideas, survey, and interview questions informally by teachers and peers. Together, the team members designed a mixed methods survey that had fixed choice questions and open-ended prompts that explored what kinds of appearance heterosexual male students at their school found to be the most attractive. This was the first data collection method used, and the team used the analysis of survey data to generate themes that were then followed up on in individual interviews for more context and depth. Once the survey data were analyzed, the students informally interviewed a subset of randomly selected peers to explore survey responses as individuals in the aggregate. These interviews proved generative to the learning process, as they allowed for the student researchers to delve into the trends identified in the survey and better understand a range of students’ lived experiences. Finally, throughout the duration of the study, the female researchers engaged in informal observations examining social events and social media through a lens related to the guiding research questions: What are the range of ways that dating preferences are evidenced? and What influences young males’ dating preferences?

For the survey, the students compiled yearbook photographs of high school students from other high schools. The process of selecting the photographs to include in the survey was challenging because the student researchers wanted to try to control for factors other than race such as pose, lighting, and so on. To do this, the YPAR team members included photos in which individuals made eye contact with the camera and in which the face was visible and not covered by hair or shadows. While one of the goals was uniformity, the YPAR students acknowledged that there was bias in the selection process of photographs. They commented that they were attempting to select students of different races and ethnicities and who they believed others would consider attractive, which they knew reflected stereotypes and heteronormative preferences. The members of the YPAR team themselves stated that in the process of selecting photographs, they found it was easier to select “attractive” lighter skinned females than darker-skinned females. As they shared these reactions and realizations, the university facilitators and high school teachers engaged the team members in discussions about the concepts of internalized racism and colorism within black communities, which was both validating and constructively disruptive for the students because of the norms they had internalized and found themselves wrestling with throughout the project. This suggests an autobiographical dimension to the internalized racism hypothesis they were researching with others at their school. As one way to explore this, the team members, including students, teachers, and university facilitators, wrote and shared a memo that focused on their social identities and possible biases and assumptions that stem from them.

After much deliberation and discussion, the members of the YPAR team chose photographs of 20 female students and grouped them according to skin tone. These groupings related to skin tone were for internal purposes, and on the survey the photographs were displayed randomly through the use of a random number generator. Once the photographs were selected, the team worked to standardize them as much as possible. This process included making sure that all of the photographs were in black and white and that they were all the same size and had the same kind of shape and border. In addition, the team used multiple software programs to ensure that the lighting, contrast, rotation, facial angles, and resolutions of the photographs were the same or as similar as possible.

As learning unfolded through analyzing the surveys, discussions, and their observational fieldnotes, the students made a conscious commitment to writing weekly researcher memos about this experience. As a team, they used these memos to facilitate research team discussions about the role of their own biases in shaping the research, the findings, and the community responses. They did so by reading each other’s memos prior to each of the bi-weekly meetings and discussing points of convergence and difference. This kind of focused, shared critical self-reflection is a hallmark of participatory action research (Ravitch & Carl, 2016).

The survey was administered to all male students at the school, and 150 valid surveys were used in the data analysis process. These students were asked to rank the photographs in order from the most attractive to least attractive. The survey also included what the YPAR youth researchers called “decoy” questions about social and media-related news of interest to high schoolers so that the students would not guess what the survey was designed to assess. In addition to broad questions about attractiveness, the survey also asked students to indicate the female students that they were most likely to date.

The student researchers randomly interviewed a total of 20 students, including males and females, from a range of racial backgrounds. The interviews were informal and lasted approximately 30 minutes. Participants were asked questions about preferences in friends, romantic partners, hook ups, and so on. Because of the sensitive nature of the content, the interviews were not recorded, and the student researchers took notes and wrote memos following each interview. These interviews were a useful way to explore the survey results, to complicate them, and to better understand, in personally contextualized ways, the why of these stated preferences.

YPAR research findings

In terms of the survey results, the lightest skin tone group was uniformly found most attractive, and the darkest skin tone group was uniformly found least attractive, which confirmed the YPAR team’s hypothesis. All skin tones follow the same general trend, which includes the lighter the skin tone the more attractive the students were ranked. Furthermore, the students found consistency between the females who were considered attractive and datable. The female students who were ranked as the students “most likely to be dated” were all white students and a majority of them had blonde or light-colored hair. The students were also interested to know if attractiveness rankings differed according the race of the male. They found that non-white males ranked darker-skinned females as less attractive than white males did.

The interviews helped the YPAR team have a more contextualized understanding of the survey results. Of particular note was that the YPAR researchers learned about their peers prior schooling experiences and how they related those experiences to being in a majority-white space that was, as one young male student characterized it, “white normative.”

The members of the YPAR team, based on all data points, concluded that as darker skinned females move out of more racially homogenous home communities into a racially white-dominated one, their perceived attractiveness fell precipitously in this new context. This understanding of the relative and contextual nature of these issues helped to underscore the role of a white-dominated setting on students of color. The student researchers believed that school administrators and teachers must be made aware of this phenomenon because it adversely affects the experiences of females in diverse institutions. The team’s data-based findings, combined with their researcher identity and data collection memos, confirmed Breland’s (1998) study that contends that both African Americans and European Americans use European standards of beauty (i.e., whiteness) to determine attractiveness. The student members of the YPAR team were interested in conducting future research about how this phenomenon would affect darker-skinned females’ academic performance, mental health, sense of self, social skills, ability to interact with males, and ability to befriend and interact with other females. Unfortunately, none of these future research topics were continued because of time constraints, though the recommendations were given to the teacher research leaders should they wish to continue them with the next group of YPAR researchers.

Dissemination efforts and action steps

The YPAR team scheduled frequent formal conversations with teacher leaders, their advisors, and the school principal throughout the research process. The principal, who was consulted at the outset of the project for his approval and was kept in the loop throughout the research, showed brave leadership to allow the students to publicly take on such a potentially controversial research topic with the goal of creating a consciousness-raising intervention for the entire school community.

As a result of the ongoing and open communication with the school principal, two major things happened. First, the students hosted multiple information sessions during which they shared their results with various stakeholder groups, including students, teachers, school counselors, and coaches. The other primary action that resulted from the research is that the YPAR team recommended to the administration, with data presented in a formal presentation, that the existing public rituals be publicly stopped with messages to the community as to why. The main public ritual in question, which was the precipitating event to the study, was one in which the “most popular” male students discussed female students in objectifying ways during semi-public discussions in the dorms that were then purposely made public through social media on specified days prior to the prom in order to publicly announce who will ask whom to the prom in rank order. Both heterosexual male and female students played into this, and everyone on campus tacitly accepted this ritual, including the adults at the school, many of whom knew about it but allowed it to continue. Put another way, the school, both consciously and unconsciously, promoted a hidden curriculum that marginalized black female students, tolerated the degradation many females at the school, and created a hostile and unsafe environment of misogyny, racism, and heterosexism that was tacitly allowed to continue year after year. The YPAR research made the clear point that this ritual was one of the most obvious and egregious examples of the kinds of entrenched and protected attitudes that harmed students from a range of backgrounds. Furthermore, the ritual spoke to a theme in their schooling experience: black girls were “invisible” to the white and black males when it came to dating. The research team argued that this ritual, which was as one student stated, “has been known about and totally tacitly accepted by adults no matter what they say,” be deemed sexist, racist, and inappropriate by all adults at the school, and stopped permanently.

After conversations with the principal, the YPAR team presented their findings to the entire student body, teaching and counseling faculty, coaches, and to selected Board and Parent Task Force members. These presentations to the faculty, coaches, and board/task force members were very well received and taken seriously. The adults were impressed by the quality and rigor of the students’ research, and they were highly engaged in asking clarifying questions and then were very receptive to and supportive of their findings and recommendations. Their support of the research findings included that the ritual described above was not allowed to continue, and specifically that a set of clear directives and repercussions were developed for and shared with the entire student body. The presentation to the student body, however, was not so well-received.

As the student researchers presented their findings, replete with images, data summaries, and matrixes, students from many different racial, cultural, and sexual orientations accusatorily questioned the YPAR team in pointed and sometimes hostile ways during the presentation. Many student audience members shared that they felt the YPAR team “made the findings up” and “created ridiculous self-serving results.”

Student members of the audience interrupted and mocked the researchers’ presentation and accused them of at worst, lying, and at best, creating a research study that fulfilled their own needs and served their own hypotheses. Members of the audience showed highly agitated resistance, which was seen in their facial expressions (e.g., eye rolling, laughter, calling out) and heard in a cacophony of comments such as “Ya’ll just made this shit up” and “this is a bunch of angry feminist propaganda.” These are some of the ways that the male students (of all races) sought to undermine and discredit the research. Other students, namely those active in an LGBTQ affinity group, protested that the “research is so heterosexist and so it’s null and void,” rather than coming together to develop future studies that could examine multiple sexual orientations and identities that could be built upon this first study, which was the message the YPAR team shared several times throughout their presentation. Still others said that the ritual was “an important tradition” and should therefore stay intact. Specifically, a number of the heterosexual white males in the room were quite hostile to the research team to the point that the adults in the room stepped in multiple times and, ultimately, stopped the presentation.

As a result of how poorly this presentation was received, which provided insight into the severity of sexism on the campus, and to help to protect the student researchers and all students involved and indicated in the research, the school decided to bring in external facilitators to lead small group sessions on the topic of internalized racism and sexism in order to continue to drive the learning within the student body. There were five such sessions held with smaller groups of students over a nine-week period. The YPAR team, in conjunction with the diversity coordinator, then disseminated a second survey two months after these sessions in order to gage what students learned from the overall intervention. We did not have access to the second survey results but were told that they evidenced important and transformational learning and perspective-taking gains in many of the students in focus. At the end of the school year, the advisors checked in with their students one by one to see how they felt, what they learned, and what next steps they felt were needed. The following year there were multiple assemblies and talks that focused on these and related issues.

Student researchers’ reactions

This research was especially personal for the student researchers. As they analyzed the survey results, one student researcher commented: “We’re not surprised cause they show it every day, but seeing it on paper is super painful.” After conducting an interview, one student researcher told the team, “It was not what I expected, they see stuff really differently.” A fellow YPAR team member then noted that the boys she interviewed were “earth-shatteringly honest about how society shaped their preferences but not ready or willing to do anything about it.” The student researchers expressed surprise at how many of the boys had “never even considered how media and social dynamics have shaped their taste in girls.”

This research process was edifying and in some ways liberating for the YPAR researchers; it was also an emotionally fraught and difficult experience. One team member stated that in the interviews with the girls of color, they learned a great deal about how “every single girl said she feels embarrassed and humiliated, and ashamed, about by the attractiveness rankings” and “it’s like each of us thinks there’s something wrong with us.” As the study progressed, the research team meetings (like many we have conducted elsewhere) became therapeutic. Students found the writing and sharing of memos helpful to their research and to help them not suppress all of their personal emotions.

In addition to the painful results found in the survey and interviews, the presentation to the student body was a difficult experience. One YPAR student shared that she felt “disappointed in our fellow students who did not want to hear the truth.” Another student researcher commented that she was “happy that we raised everyone’s awareness whether they agree now or not.” Still another shared that she felt “relief that the dirty little secret of that ritual is out in the open and it stopped.” Another YPAR student referred to the project as “my swan song, a gift to my alma mater.” In general, the YPAR students appreciated how the administration responded by taking the student response seriously and bringing in external facilitators. All five of the YPAR team members stated that they felt a growing sense of agency in relationship to these issues and shared that they now, as one student put it, “understand the importance of using data to show up inequality wherever I go.”

As we discuss in the concluding session, although there were positive outcomes and personal transformations that resulted from the research, there were actions that the school and university facilitators could have done to help mitigate the negative experiences that these students experienced.