Youth Participatory Action Research as School Counseling Praxis: A Scoping Review

Abstract

In a systematic scoping review, we analyzed empirical and conceptual writings on youth participatory action research (YPAR) in schools. YPAR has emerged as an empowering and youth-centered approach to group work whereby school counselors and students collaborate on researching, creating, and sharing projects about social ills impacting their lives. Reviewing YPAR literature, this article identifies knowledge gaps regarding the use and benefits of YPAR in school counseling practice.

Keywords

youth voice school counseling YPAR educator-counselor

Introduction

Across the last few decades, youth participatory action research (YPAR) has been used in K–12 education to amplify youth voices and push toward systemic change (Foster-Fishman et al., 2005; Mirra, 2020; Ozer et al., 2013). YPAR positions youth as developers of their educational experience who create solutions to problems that directly impact them (Cammarota & Romero, 2011). This includes youth and adults collaborating as equals in changing schools, developing spaces that value students’ various identities, and positioning students as experts in their experiences and how systems impact their worldview. Through YPAR in schools, youth engage in an action-based research process in which they identify a research topic, plan for and collect data, digest research findings to produce a product, and collaboratively design the dissemination of data to effect change on a real-world issue (Langhout & Thomas, 2010; Smith et al., 2010). Unfortunately, research exploring the use of YPAR in school counseling practice is limited because YPAR has predominantly been studied in teacher education/teaching (Edirmanasinghe et al., 2022). Therefore, this study engaged in a scoping review of YPAR research to assess how YPAR might benefit school counselors.

YPAR in Education

In education broadly, scholars have encouraged educators to utilize youth voice in their decision-making processes. Engaging youth voices in educational leadership can support students’ development of skills needed to participate in democratic governance of their schools and communities while also helping educators better understand how their own decisions are impacting youth (Lac & Cumings Mansfield, 2018). In YPAR, methodologists assume that youth affected by an issue hold expertise about their own community (Rodríguez & Brown, 2009) and are best able to research the social contexts that may limit opportunities for their success (Cammarota & Romero, 2011). Through YPAR, adults leverage their own power and influence to provide youth with tools to conduct research and share their findings with decision makers (Ozer et al., 2013).

Most YPAR projects include shared characteristics that make them unique to other research methodologies and educational pedagogies. First, youth who participate in YPAR projects are those who are directly affected by the issue or problem being explored in the project (Ozer et al., 2013; Rodríguez & Brown, 2009). The second characteristic, stemming from Paulo Freire’s (2018) work on problem-posing education, is that the process centers the knowledge and expertise of youth who identify with historically oppressed identities (Bertrand et al., 2020; Bettencourt, 2020). YPAR projects also encourage youth and adult facilitators to look beyond the individualization of problems and instead focus on the systemic injustices that impact students in schools. Finally, YPAR is an action-oriented process where the research results in sharing solutions with policy makers to alleviate the issue (Bertrand et al., 2020; Cammarota & Fine, 2008).

Research in education suggests YPAR supports myriad student outcomes. YPAR participants have reported increased engagement in their community and confidence in their voices being included in decisions (Foster-Fishman et al., 2005; Wang, 2006). YPAR fosters critical consciousness in youth and belief that they can change circumstances that affect their ability to succeed in school and their social contexts (Anyon et al., 2018; Cammarota & Romero, 2006; Toraif et al., 2021). Youth advocacy skill developments, including relational empowerment, collaboration skills, and mobilizing community, are outcomes associated with YPAR (Langhout et al., 2014), as are bolstered academic development in math and science (Edirmanasinghe, 2020), English (Mirra, 2020), and social studies (Rubin et al., 2017). The dissemination of YPAR projects has occurred through various mediums, including by school administration (Kohfeldt et al., 2011), in partnership with family and community (Fisher-Borne et al., 2021), and online platforms (Ozer, 2016). Creative approaches to YPAR include engaging in project creation and dissemination through performing hip hop music (Levy & Travis, 2020), photovoice (Edirmanasinghe, 2020; Williams et al., 2020), and communicating findings and implications online via blogging, vlogging, and displaying participant artwork depicting relevant findings (Cook et al., 2020; Enright & Gard, 2018). Moreover, in recent years, scholars have used YPAR as a healing space for youth to unpack the sociopolitical stressors they experience (Goessling, 2020). Although YPAR is useful in developing youth’s self-identity; decreasing stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms; and instilling social change within youth’s environments, YPAR research in school counseling is still generally limited (Cook & Krueger-Henney, 2017; Smith et al., 2010, 2014). The approach has potential to be used by school counselors to activate youth as change agents in school ecosystems (Ieva et al., 2021) and help process the experiences in a sociopolitical context (Goessling, 2020), but a deeper understanding of YPAR in school counseling work is necessary.

School Counseling, Systemic Change, and YPAR

School counselors are leaders in their school buildings, encouraged by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA, 2022) to promote equity and access to all students through a comprehensive school counseling program. As school leaders, school counselors forge collaborations with various family and community partners to support their work toward systemic change (Bryan et al., 2019; Young & Bryan, 2018). However, most scholarships focused on family–community–school partnerships do not describe how school counselors can partner with youth directly. Although ASCA (2019) encourages school counselors to collaborate with all members of the school community (including youth), no models in school counseling include intentional partnerships with students to develop solutions to systemic issues in schools.

Further, school counselors historically have influenced the school climate because of their responsibility to work with and support all students (ASCA, 2022). School counselors hold space in places where decisions related to student needs are made. Because of school counselors’ work with all students and their positions in leadership spaces, they can provide youth access to present their needs to those who have the power to help address them, a seminal component of the YPAR process (Anderson, 2020; Cammarota & Fine, 2008).

Due to their unique educator–counselor identity, school counselors understand the developmental needs to consider in the planning and implementation of YPAR in school contexts. In particular, school counselors understand the school setting and how to navigate the micropolitics and logistics that may impact the implementation of counseling through various educational tasks (Levy & Lemberger-Truelove, 2021). School counselors’ training in microskills that support processing enables them to help students as they gain critical consciousness. YPAR participants not only learn skills to advocate for their own needs they also go through a cathartic process of understanding their challenges in schools from a systemic perspective, focusing less on how they can fix themselves to alleviate issues and more on how to use their voices to eradicate barriers that impede their success (Cammarota & Fine, 2008).

The essence of the YPAR process is for adults to co-collaborate with youth to develop systemic change. Without a facilitator who is willing to reflect on their own privilege, oppression, and biases, YPAR can further promote adultism, or the unearned privilege and power given to adults solely because of their age (DeJong & Love, 2015). In recent years, school counseling scholars have encouraged counselors to adopt antiracist practices that dismantle racist practices through constant reflection on their own biases, feedback loops between schools and families, and leveraging of their positions to develop new culturally sustaining systems and structures (Holcomb-McCoy, 2021; Mayes & Byrd, 2022). Critical consciousness, the ability to identify sociopolitical contradictions within oneself and the systems within which one functions to actively dismantle oppression (Freire, 2018), is foundational within both YPAR and antiracist school counseling (Mayes & Byrd, 2022). To prevent performative approaches to YPAR, the school counseling scholarship must highlight intentional YPAR practices that treat students as active collaborators toward systemic change and engage youth in exchanges of knowledge where both the adults and students are treated as experts in resolving issues in schools (Edirmanasinghe et al., 2022). Although the research in school counseling is limited, we share the findings of a scoping review that explored how YPAR could be used in school counseling.

Purpose of the Study

In this study, we sought to engage in a systemic analysis of existing YPAR and school counseling studies to distill recommendations for research and practice that furthers youth action research in the profession. Specifically, our question for this review was: How can school counselors use YPAR practices and paradigms to support students?

We employed a scoping review, an approach commonly used with smaller fields of study to “summarize and disseminate research findings; and identify research gaps in the existing literature” (Pham et al., 2014, p. 5). Scoping reviews are utilized as precursors to systematic literature reviews to clarify concepts and identify knowledge gaps, and also can be used to confirm the relevance of inclusion criteria and potential questions (Munn et al., 2018). Although conducted for different purposes compared to systematic reviews, scoping reviews still require rigorous and transparent methods in their conduct to ensure that the results are trustworthy (Levac et al., 2010).

Our author team represents a handful of researchers writing about YPAR in school counseling. As such, we have familiarity with YPAR in school counseling; however, the paucity of literature draws attention to a need to clarify which students are engaged in YPAR in school counseling (ages, levels), why school counselors choose YPAR (intervention, organic, and response), what implementation looks like, what might be happening for students as they experience YPAR, what students might learn about themselves, and what skills they gain in the process. Given that YPAR in school counseling is relatively new, a scoping review emerged as a logical approach to analyze available qualitative, quantitative, and conceptual articles.

A Scoping Review

Literature on prior scoping reviews (Aafjes-van Doorn et al., 2022; Litherland & Schulthes, 2020; Pham et al., 2014) provided us with the following steps and procedures to utilize in this inquiry: (a) identifying the research question, (b) identifying relevant studies, (c) selecting studies, (d) charting the data, and (e) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results. In the subsequent sections, we detail our scoping review procedure following these steps. We were not able to find any scoping reviews in school counseling.

Stage 1: Identifying the Research Question

Our construction of the literature review for this article further supported the claim that research on YPAR is limited in the school counseling field. Given this gap, we chose to engage in this scoping review to deepen understanding of the potential for YPAR to influence the school counseling profession. This review was guided by a singular research question: How can school counselors use YPAR practices and paradigms to support students?

Stage 2: Identifying Relevant Studies

To undergo our review, we used the search term sets (a) “school counseling” and “YPAR” and (b) “Youth Participatory Action Research” and “school counseling” for our identification of relevant studies for the years 2010–2021 in several databases (i.e., EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, and PsychInfo). The fourth author collected and organized articles (in a shared Google folder) around these search terms for the other authors to review and select from. Specifically, we defined eligibility criteria to support our selection of studies from this initial list. After removing duplicates from the original list, results yielded 47 manuscripts. We held a team analysis meeting and decided to expand the search to include the sets (a) “education” and “YPAR” and (b) “Youth Participatory Action Research” and “education,” resulting in 1,037 articles, 922 after removal of duplicates. This expansion to education more broadly allowed us to capture any YPAR articles that shared conceptual arguments, research, or practical recommendations relevant to the role, responsibilities, and student developmental outcomes for school counselors.

Stage 3: Study Selection

To ensure all articles were relevant to YPAR in school counseling, we required that selected articles were peer reviewed and that YPAR was either facilitated by school counselors or relevant to the work of the school counselor (i.e., a school-wide intervention rooted in YPAR facilitated by a principal) in the United States, and took place specifically in a K–12 setting as an intervention with students. The study selection process resulted in a total of 22 papers to be included in this review. See Figure 1 for the selection process and Table 1 for the list of incorporated articles.

Figure 1.

Manuscript selection process.

Table 1.

YPAR Scoping Review Selected Articles.

	Selected Articles
1	Brion-Meisels, G., & Alter, Z. (2018). The quandary of youth participatory action research in school settings: A framework for reflecting on the factors that influence purpose and process. Harvard Educational Review, 88(4), 429–454.
2	Cammarota, J. (2017). Youth participatory action research: A pedagogy of transformational resistance for critical youth studies. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 15(2), 188–213.
3	Chou, F., Kwee, J., Lees, R., Firth, K., Florence, J., Harms, J., Raber, M., Stevens, T., Tatomir, R., Weaver, C., & Wilson, S. (2015). Nothing about us without us! Youth-led solutions to improve high school completion rates. Educational Action Research, 23(3), 436–459.
4	Cook, A. L., & Krueger-Henney, P. (2017). Group work that examines systems of power with young people: Youth participatory action research. Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 42(2), 176–193.
5	Cook, A. L., Levy, I., & Whitehouse, A. (2020). Exploring youth participatory action research in urban schools: Advancing social justice and equity-based counseling practices. Journal for Social Action in Counseling & Psychology, 12(1), 27–43.
6	Cook, A. L., Ruiz, B., & Karter, J. (2019). “Liberation is a praxis”: Promoting college and career access through youth participatory action research. School Community Journal, 29(2), 203–224.
7	Edirmanasinghe, N. (2020). Using youth participatory action research to promote self-efficacy in math and science. Professional School Counseling, 24(1).
8	Edirmanasinghe, N., & Blaginin, K. (2019). Demystifying the research process: A career intervention with Latinas. Professional School Counseling, 22(1b).
9	Edirmanasinghe, N. A., Levy, I. P., Ieva, K., & Tarver, S. Z. (2022). Youth-led participatory action research in school counseling as a vehicle for antiracist SEL. Theory Into Practice, 61(2), 199–211.
10	Garnett, B. R., Smith, L. C., Kervick, C. T., Ballysingh, T. A., Moore, M., & Gonell, E. (2019). The emancipatory potential of transformative mixed methods designs: Informing youth participatory action research and restorative practices within a district-wide school transformation project. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 42(3), 305–316.
11	Gonell, E., Smith, L. C., Garnett, B., & Clements, E. (2021). Practicing youth participatory action research for school equity: A pedagogical model. Action Research, 19(4), 632–655.
12	Hipolito-Delgado, C. P., Stickney, D., Kirshner, B., & Donovan, C. (2021). Fostering youth sociopolitical action: The roles of critical reflection, sociopolitical efficacy, and transformative student voice. Urban Education.
13	Levy, I. P., Cook, A. L., & Emdin, C. (2018). Remixing the school counselor’s tool kit: Hip-hop spoken word therapy and YPAR. Professional School Counseling, 22(1).
14	Ozer, E. J., & Wright, D. (2012). Beyond school spirit: The effects of youth-led participatory action research in two urban high schools. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 22(2), 267–283.
15	Roxas, K. C., Gabriel, M. L., & Becker, K. (2017). “Mexicans are like thieves and bad people, and we're not really like that”: Immigrant youth use photovoice to counter racism and discrimination. Journal of School Counseling, 15(19).
16	Scott, M. A., Pyne, K. B., & Means, D. R. (2015). Approaching praxis: YPAR as critical pedagogical process in a college access program. The High School Journal, 98(2), 138-157.
17	Smith, L., Baranowski, K., Abdel-Salam, L., & McGinley, M. (2018). Youth participatory action research: Agency and unsilence as anti-classist practice. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 4(2), 176–186.
18	Smith, L., Bratini, L., & Appio, L. M. (2012). “Everybody's teaching and everybody's learning”: Photovoice and youth counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, 90(1), 3–12.
19	Smith, L., Davis, K., & Bhowmik, M. (2010). Youth participatory action research groups as school counseling interventions. Professional School Counseling, 14(2), 174–182.
20	Stickl Haugen, J., Neverve, C., & Waalkes, P. L. (2019). Advocacy in action: The use of photovoice in school counseling. Professional School Counseling, 23(1).
21	Voight, A., & Velez, V. (2018). Youth participatory action research in the high school curriculum: Education outcomes for student participants in a district-wide initiative. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 11(3), 433–451.
22	Williams, J. M., Byrd, J., Smith, C. D., & Dean, A. (2020). Photovoice as an innovative approach to group work with Black youth in school settings. Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 45(3), 213–225.

Stage 4: Charting the Data

Germane to scoping review research (Greidanus et al., 2020), we used a descriptive-analytical method to chart the data around a set of five common components: abstract review, framework, objectives/outcomes, product, and recommendations. The abstract review allowed us to denote whether the articles were conceptual or empirical. The framework defined how or in what context YPAR was used. We sought to identify the objectives/outcomes of each paper and the youth product that came from the YPAR work. The recommendations described in each paper were also reported. Within columns of an excel spreadsheet, we reviewed and took detailed notes on our assigned articles. Following this step, we then reviewed each other's work to verify that all 22 articles (listed in Table 1) were adequately reviewed, and met to discuss findings.

Stage 5: Collating, summarizing, and reporting the results.

Finally, the contents of each of these papers were collated, summarized, and reported out around the five components. The results section summarizes the information collected in the charting process and presents interpretations. Table 2 summarizes these findings, but we elaborate on them below.

Table 2

Summary of Scoping Review Data by Charting Strategy

Abstract Review	Framework	Developmental Outcomes/Objectives	Products & Recommendations
• Conceptual (8) • Intervention (14) • Qualitative (7) • Quantitative (2) • Mixed (1) • Case examples (4)	• Methodology (2) • YPAR in classrooms (5) • Group process (9) • Photovoice (6) • Counselor education (1) • Advocacy & youth voice (22)	• Social/emotional (7) • Academic (4) • Career (4) • Holistic (2) • Transformative Resistance (2) • Professional development (2)	Products
			Manuscripts and books, posters, letters, photos/art exhibits, songs/lyrics, town halls, PowerPoint presentations
			Recommendations
			• Advocacy and systemic change • Student voice • Engaging family and community • Administrative support • Group process • Building student relationships • Flattening hierarchy • School counselors as co-facilitators • YPAR elective coursework • Transformative resistance

Results: How Can School Counselors Use YPAR Practices and Paradigms to Support Students?

The scoping review of 22 YPAR articles was guided by a singular research question: How can school counselors use YPAR practices and paradigms to support students? Our results are organized by how our data were charted: (a) abstract review, (b) framework, (c) objectives/outcomes, (d) product, and (e) recommendations.

Abstract Review

Results from our abstract review analysis indicated that the 22 articles included both conceptual and empirical approaches and utilized a variety of methodologies. The conceptual articles (n = 8) made a range of arguments for the use of YPAR in schooling: an approach that positions youth as leaders in actualizing systemic change (Cook & Kruger-Henny, 2017), a means to promote college and career readiness (Cook et al., 2019), a hip hop or photovoice group process that supports Black and Latinx youth’s social/emotional development (Levy et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2012; Williams et al., 2020), an antiracist method to promote social/emotional learning across a multitiered system of supports (Edirmanasinghe et al., 2022), an approach to restorative practices (Garnett et al., 2019), and a research method (Brion-Meisels & Alter, 2018). The empirical articles consisted of qualitative (n = 7), quantitative (n = 2), and mixed methods (n = 1) evaluations of the impact of YPAR processes on youth. A handful of other articles (n = 4) illuminated the practical application and evaluation of YPAR through illustrative case examples.

Framework

Results from our scoping review suggest that YPAR can be applied through a variety of contexts relevant to school counseling practice, preparation, and research. With regard to school counseling practice, a total of five intervention studies described how YPAR can be used within classroom spaces to support students’ development. These included school elective classes (Ozer & Wright, 2012; Voight & Velez, 2018), school counselors joining teachers in classrooms for developmental lessons (Smith et al., 2018), or YPAR as teacher-led classroom pedagogy (Cammarota, 2017; Gonell et al., 2021). Each of the studies actively taught students to use YPAR as a methodology to identify and develop solutions to social injustices in their lives.

A mix of empirical and conceptual articles (n = 9) explained how YPAR can be used as a framework for a group counseling process. Of these group-centric papers, a handful (n = 6) used photovoice to analyze school policies, share untold stories, identify barriers to academic achievement, examine community issues, and/or process race-related stress (Edirmanasinghe, 2020; Edirmanasinghe & Blaginin, 2019; Roxas et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2012; Stickl Haugen et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2020). Photovoice is a YPAR method where youth take and/or curate photos to promote a critical discussion about social issues impacting their community and, by focusing on their community strengths, develop solutions to reach policy makers (Williams et al., 2020). One study explored the training and supervision of school counseling practicum students as they implemented YPAR at a high school (Cook et al., 2020). Regardless of the physical school space (classrooms, counseling offices, school-wide, etc.), two articles conceptualized YPAR as a transformational methodology that allows youth to be mixed-methods researchers poised to instill changes in their community (Garnett et al., 2019), while also being a mechanism for school counselors to evaluate the effectiveness of their group counseling interventions (Smith et al., 2010). Last, each article evaluated in this study highlighted how the products youth create while engaging in YPAR function as an advocacy tool and center their voices in explaining social phenomena and fostering critical consciousness (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Chou et al., 2015; Gonell et al., 2021).

Outcomes/Objectives

Every article in this scoping review had implications for school counselors as they aim to bolster youth’s social/emotional, academic, and career development. Six of the articles explored in this study posited that YPAR is an effective medium for aiding students’ social/emotional development. Specifically, school counselors can apply YPAR to address race-related stressors inside and outside of school stressors (Edirmanasinghe et al., 2022; Williams et al., 2020) and poverty-related stressors (Smith et al., 2018); to promote emotional processing, well-being, and connectedness (Levy et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2010, 2012); and to decrease anxiety, stress, and/or depression symptoms (Levy & Travis, 2020). According to studies considering youth’s college and career development (n = 4), school counselors can use YPAR to grow college-ready research skills and critical consciousness (Scott et al., 2015), career self-efficacy (Edirmanasinghe & Blaginin, 2019), and leadership skills (Ozer & Wright, 2012), and to explore issues of college access (Cook et al., 2019). Studies tending to students’ academic development (n = 4) found that school counselors may use YPAR to approach retention issues in mainstream and alternative education (Chou et al., 2015); to assess reading achievement, bolster attendance, and address problematic discipline referral rates (Voight & Velez, 2018); and to support students’ critical thinking (Stickl Haugen et al., 2019) and self-efficacy in STEM (Edirmanasinghe, 2020). Two articles pointed to the use of YPAR to simultaneously promote students’ social/emotional, academic, and/or career (i.e., holistic) development (Hipolito-Delgado et al., 2021, Williams et al., 2020). For example, the school counselor’s use of YPAR to amplify student voice can impact student’s socioemotional and academic development (Hipolito-Delgado et al., 2021).

Despite YPAR’s potential to foster academic, social/emotional, and career development, focusing on transformative resistance is also important for school counselors. Transformative resistance is the process by which students not only research and discuss societal ills that produce oppression but also create plans for systemic change (Cammarota & Romero, 2011). YPAR is evidenced as a process to reflect on and actively disseminate projects that call for systemic change (Cammarota, 2017). Incorporating YPAR in group work as emancipatory education (Gonell et al., 2021) can help youth gain skills to push back against larger systemic inequities (Levy et al., 2018). Last, two articles discussed how YPAR functions as a model for designing group counseling curriculum (Cook & Kruger-Henny, 2017), and that through facilitation, school counselors can develop their own multicultural competency (Cook et al., 2020).

Products and Recommendations

Next, our analysis explored the different projects and tangible products youth created after engaging in YPAR. The results indicated that school counseling professionals can benefit from the myriad possibilities for creative products that YPAR offers. The qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and case example studies we reviewed suggest a YPAR process can culminate in youth’s creation of manuscripts and books, posters, letters, photos, exhibits, songs/lyrics, town halls, and PowerPoint presentations for stakeholders. The malleability of YPAR can allow school counselors to engage all youth, based on their interests, in the identifying, researching, processing, and developing of solutions to social ills impacting their lives.

The articles in this scoping review also made recommendations for practice that can impact the ways YPAR is implemented in school counseling. Based on our findings, we encourage school counselors to implement YPAR in their school counseling programs to focus on advocacy and systemic change, showcase student voice and stories, engage family and other members of the educational community, develop YPAR-based elective coursework, and engage in transformational resistance to remove oppressive school structures. If other school building educators are using YPAR, school counselors can function as co-facilitators to support the group counseling process. The youth-centered and group process nature of YPAR makes it an important intervention for flattening hierarchies within school systems and building relationships with students. Our results suggest that school counselors may experience pushback when implementing YPAR. However, given their focus on centering youth voices, school counselors may need to implement YPAR without administrative support.

Discussion

We organized the results of our analysis by the following categories for each of the 22 articles reviewed: (a) abstract review, (b) framework, (c) objectives/outcomes, (d) product, and (e) recommendations. Germane to the scoping review process, our analysis sought to understand how YPAR might impact school counseling.

Our review of abstracts suggested that the majority of YPAR studies (n = 14) were empirical studies of YPAR in practice, which is especially encouraging given that less than 0.1% of school counseling literature is intervention research (Griffith et al., 2019). Of note, although the majority of YPAR literature suggests it is an ideal means to amplify youth voice (Foster-Fishman et al., 2005; Mirra, 2020; Ozer et al., 2013), seldom were youth products themselves published. To truly center the voices and experiences of young people who undergo YPAR processes, and in an attempt to spur systemic change, school counselors must create avenues for youth’s products to be published as solutions to inequities. Overall, YPAR presents an encouraging avenue to further develop intervention research in the field of school counseling.

The objectives of YPAR studies aligned quite closely with the objectives of school counselors, to tend to the academic, social/emotional, and career needs of youth (ASCA, 2019). For example, evidence that youth who participate in YPAR experience academic (Mirra, 2020), social/emotional (Smith et al., 2012), and career development outcomes (Cook et al., 2019) make YPAR a natural fit for the school counseling profession. The studies analyzed in this scoping review described YPAR as an intervention that can build developmental capacities within youth, but failed to identify whether or not the systemic changes youth sought after actually manifested. This is particularly relevant given the role of school counselors in advocating for systemic change (ASCA, 2019). Speaking to this reality, Cammarota (2017) identified transformative resistance (the act of moving youth beyond discussing emotional turmoil to carrying out actionable change) as a missing ingredient in YPAR. Transformative resistance is less present in the school counseling-related YPAR literature, and is a necessary next step for school counselors that must occur through the dissemination of youth’s products. YPAR serves as a medium to carry out our profession’s leadership and advocacy anchors, which call on school counselors to partner with youth, their families, and communities in organizing opportunities for dissemination toward systemic change (Bryan et al., 2019; Young & Bryan, 2018). Two articles in our review explained using YPAR to simultaneously promote students' social/emotional, academic, and/or career development (Hipolito-Delgado et al., 2021, Williams et al., 2020), suggesting that studies assess the impact of school counseling interventions on youth’s holistic development. Considering development, YPAR studies centered on the intersectionalities of youth’s identities were missing in the literature. YPAR research does discuss processing race-related stress (Williams et al., 2020), but consideration for youth’s gender and sexuality are not as present.

Results from the framework analysis indicated that YPAR is malleable to be used in various capacities within a comprehensive school counseling program (ASCA, 2019). In particular, this review evinced the power of YPAR as a group counseling framework (Edirmanasinghe, 2020; Edirmanasinghe & Blaginin, 2019; Roxas et al., 2017; Smith et al., 2012; Stickl Haugen et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2020), which is distinctly valuable for school counselors because they can leverage their process skills to unearth and discuss youth’s emotional experiences toward enacting transformative resistance. In fact, school counselors’ ability to engage in educational tasks through the lens of counseling situates YPAR as a practical enactment of the school counselor as educator–counselor (Levy & Lemberger-Truelove, 2021). Further, results of this scoping review suggest that, as educator–counselors, school counselors can integrate YPAR practices across relevant educational tasks like small groups, classroom instruction, collaboration, and consultation, and to enact advocacy and leadership. Finally, the review of products and recommendations further supports YPAR as a creative and flexible model for school counselors to put youth in positions of power to develop and share solutions to real-world problems (Anderson, 2020; Kohfeldt et al., 2011; Ozer, 2016).

Limitations

Among limitations to the current study, the field of YPAR and school counseling is small and, as mentioned in our literature review, the bulk of YPAR literature exists in teacher education and practice. This reality impacts the replicability and generalizability of results for school counseling practice, encouraging the future implementation and evaluation of YPAR interventions by school counselors and school counselor educators. Given the education-discipline nature of YPAR studies, most articles described facilitation that was content focused, creating barriers for understanding process-focused YPAR work done by school counselors. Although our review demystified this in part, more research is needed exploring YPAR as group process driven. A final limitation is that the qualitative nature of YPAR, and the reality that YPAR is often administered in settings with smaller population sizes, makes it difficult to publish related research in academic journals in the counseling field. Exploring this further, we note that true YPAR work should be led by youth’s voices, knowledge, and research. However, given the ways that knowledge is documented in school counseling (i.e., peer-reviewed journal publications), space is limited for youth to make, and be credited for, contributions to the evidence base. Thus, none of the studies in this current review truly captured the research that youth conducted.

Practical Implications

Although most of the extant research positions YPAR as a group counseling method, this review suggests that YPAR might, in fact, pervade school counseling tasks and function as a broader ideology. It is clear that YPAR can be implemented in small-group, large-group, and classroom settings, and may be used as a school-wide intervention or to engage families and communities. Through our review, we defined tenets or beliefs for supporting youth’s holistic development that can impact the provision of counseling services. These tenets are as follows: (a) Youth as Producers of Evidence, (b) Honoring Internal and Communal Knowledge, (c) Amplifying Youth Voice through Group Process, (d) Conjoined Developmental Domains, and (e) Transformative Resistance.

First, a fundamental belief from YPAR researchers is that youth are producers of evidence. Therefore, as school counselors engage in their comprehensive programs, they can solicit direct input from youth. Questions like “What variables should we be measuring?” or “What are the salient issues impacting my cohort that need to be addressed?” can and should be answered in collaboration with youth. School counselors may convene a small group intent on identifying and developing solutions for issues within the school building that impact students directly. Tending to different stages of development, school counselors might engage elementary school parents in dialogue about programming. If this is to take form practically, we suggest that the YPAR process and the analysis of documents that youth create during YPAR interventions be incorporated into training and professional development of school counselors. Although rare, some journals have published YPAR work that is co-authored by youth (Rocha et al., 2022), encouraging school counselor educators to dream of ways that youth’s research can be highlighted and disseminated to practitioners.

Second, YPAR honors youth’s internal and communal knowledge. In essence, YPAR is less about teaching youth how to research, plan projects, and disseminate knowledge and instead to trust that they (and their communities) already have tools for enacting these practices. By allowing YPAR to be a significant part of the school counseling program, school counselors commit to position youth and their communities as leaders in its design, implementation, and evaluation. Heeding the same advice, it is ethically imperative that school counselor educators honor youth’s internal and communicable knowledge in the design of YPAR research studies.

Third, we are calling for school counselors to return to their group process skills across all of their work in schools. School counselors who operate with YPAR as an ideological frame will always see themselves as group practitioners, relying on their dialogical and group facilitation skills to gather groups of students, parents, teachers, and/or administrators together to collectively identify and solve concerns facing the educational community. This tenet calls on school counselors to remember that we thrive in the here-and-now and in our abilities to assist others in finding their own answers or solutions.

Fourth, a YPAR-identifying school counselor works with the belief that a student’s academic, career, and social/emotional development cannot be siloed. A fragmented approach to schooling where students enter classrooms for academic development, then meet with school counselors for social/emotional work and career counselors for postsecondary support ignores the perpetual interrelatedness of these developmental domains. Although certainly not the only approach for addressing this interrelatedness, YPAR offers school counselors an intervention that simultaneously benefits all of students' development. For example, when school counselors lead a photovoice YPAR small-group focused on the lack of healthy food options in students’ communities, youth can process difficult experiences around their own health and that of their communities and families (social/emotional); develop research skills and critical consciousness (academic); and learn creative, presentation, or advocacy skills through project planning and dissemination (career).

The fifth belief is that of transformative resistance. Although school counselors are gifted facilitators that support youth in understanding their emotional lives, we cannot leave students without solutions. YPAR projects themselves aim for transformative resistance (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) where the goal is not just to research and critique injustices, but to aid youth in developing projects that challenge injustice. If YPAR projects only go so far as to unearth research about injustices in youth’s lives, school counselors risk promoting self-defeating resistance (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), a place of immobilization and lack of motivation for social justice. YPAR positions youth and their school counselors to collaboratively develop solutions towards systemic change.

Conclusion

This article reviewed existing YPAR research to draw implications for the school counseling field. More research is needed to understand the impacts of YPAR on the school counseling profession, but school counselors clearly can benefit from using YPAR as a youth-centered approach for holistic development and for systemic change. As we collectively work to advance the field of school counseling through the practical use of interventions or design of research studies, we must do so with youth in collaboration. It is our hope that school counselors and school counselor educators see YPAR as a viable tool to support youth in finding their voices, their options, their wisdom and courage.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ian P. Levy

Author Biographies

Ian P. Levy, Ph.D. (ORCID 0000-0002-4798-0224), is an assistant professor of school counseling at Manhattan College in the Bronx, NY. Email: ian.levy@manhattan.edu

Natalie Edirmanasinghe, Ph.D. (ORCID 0000-0001-7934-2350), is an assistant professor at California State University—Long Beach.

Kara Ieva, Ph.D. (ORCID 0000-0001-6190-5071), is a professor at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ.

Chelsea Hilliard, Ph.D., is a school counselor and at the time of this study was a doctoral student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA.

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