NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: South Slave Region

Tags: social sciences, education, youth

Objective(s): To study trends of youth disengagement from regular schooling.

Project Description: The goal of this project is to study trends of youth disengagement from regular schooling by examining; a) how to truly build equity in public education for the most marginal of young people, b) how to fully include youth, especially typically marginalized youth, in Canada’s 21st Century educational pathway, and c) how a preliminary focus on teacher education and youth engagement will help to create more equitable and socially just teaching and learning environments. The research team will address the dearth of empirical, theoretical, and practical work into effective practices for engaging marginalized youth in the training of teachers in Canada. Building up a small and suggestive body of evidence of the efficacy of doing so (Donohue et al., 2003; Cook-Sather, 2002, 2006; Youens & Hall, 2006), this project will fill knowledge gaps in: a) research relating to effective practices for including marginalized youth in public/teacher education, b) processes for engaging youth and educators in curriculum development and implementation, and c) impacts on leadership and innovation potential for public education in doing so. The interdisciplinary research team will: 1. Develop and document a process for engaging marginalized youth in curriculum development and delivery in Faculties of Education, public schools, and Ministry of Education settings; 2. Initiate and document an innovative educational curriculum development process that partners educational stakeholders in ways that center around youth using methods by, with and for young people; Develop and document an assessment of potential impacts of the new curriculum on equity in education through a youth-led, ethnographic study; 3. Develop an ongoing scholarly network for research, policy and practice in the area of equity in education through a youth-led, ethnographic study; 4. Develop an ongoing scholarly network for research, policy and practice in the area of equity in public education in Canada to mobilize this new knowledge to academic, community and school audiences. Six to eight youth recruited from Phoenix Alternative School in Fort Smith will participate as part of the activities of the project. In addition to face-to-face participation in three one-day workshops in the physical sites the research team offer bi-monthly full group meetings using various digital media (e.g., Skype, Elluminate Live!) to engage broader dialogues about processes, challenges, and successful navigations of the school system. It is expected that youth will be engaged in project activities for 30 hours during each of Phase 1 and 2. Two or three pre-service teachers from the B.Ed program at Aurora College will be asked to participate in curriculum development during Phase 1. Three one-day workshops will be conducted at regular intervals through the semester with bi-weekly skype and/or telephone conference meetings in between for a total of 30 hours for the project. In Phase 2, two to three veteran teachers from the High school will act as mentors to the two to three pre-service teachers enrolled in the teacher education program. The mentor teachers will guide the pre-service teachers during their internship in implementing the youth-designed curriculum. The pre-service teachers will be asked to engage with the youth in an online social networking community for the project as an ongoing means of communicating and relationship building between planning sessions. It is expected the on-line networking will occur every teaching day for about 15 minutes for a total of 75 minutes a week for the six week practicum. The research team will accommodate the participants’ wishes as to times and locations for interviews during and after the implementation. Interviews are expected to take not more than one hour for a total of two hours for the project. Participants will set their own schedules for social networking. Analysis of the interviews, observational field notes, and texts (social networking conversations, video, curriculum, lessons, etc.) will be completed by the research team including pre-service teacher and youth participants. The research team use trusted methods of reflexive analyses in three forms -thematic, narrative, and social organization - from verbatim transcripts and texts (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Atkinson & Delmont, 2005). Observation, interviewing, and textual analysis will be inter-related and checked back to the daily practices of youth and educators (Smith, 2002). Analyses provides empirical and theoretical insights with a sufficient degree of transferability to comparable contexts. Rigour in field work and analysis relates to the trustworthiness of findings (Lincoln & Guba, 2007) addressed in critical ethnography by asking “Does it indeed look and work this way?” Rigour will be carefully considered, in a manner appropriate to qualitative research (Fossey et al., 2002; Twohig & Putnam, 2002) with attentiveness to research practice through documentation, reflection, sensitivity to context, and team interpretation. Dr. Tilleczek directs a Qualitative Research Lab at the University of Prince Edward Island with state-of-the art equipment for data collection and analysis. Data will include 3 half hour interviews with each participant; observational field notes of workshops and classroom teaching; documents including curriculum documents, lesson plan and teaching materials; on-line texts generated by social networking conversations; and video tapes of classroom teaching and youth-led workshops. The youth participants, pre-service educators, in-service teachers and administrators will be engaged in a two-phase project that will advance the following skill sets: (a) development of research skills including searching, assessing and retrieving literatures, organization and maintenance of research materials, research ethics protocols, recruiting for field work, collection/compilation of data, and data transcription; (b) development of educational practice skills such as curriculum development and delivery, digital media literacy, as well as facility in working with and for young people and educators, and (c) development of knowledge mobilization, communication and collaboration skills. Communication and collaboration skills that youth are expected to develop include: (a) team building and communication processes (on-line and face-to-face); (b) conference preparation and delivery skills, and (c) research report writing skills as well as skills for writing for non-academic audiences. Each group of participants will be offered a debriefing seminar where the research team will provide an overview of the findings for oral or written discussion. Participants and community members will be informed of the results through the debriefing seminar and written statements will be sent to local newspapers. Participants and community members will also be directed to the project website where all project reports and publications can be accessed. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from March 13, 2014 to December 31, 2014.