Inner City Kids: Adolescents Confront Life and Violence in an Urban Community

Chapter 7. From Dialogue to Action

7 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ From Dialogue to Action TO MOVE FROM CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE about our lives and the issues that concern us to mobilizing ourselves to tackle those issues is one of the principal aims of a PAR project. Yet there is no blueprint in PAR for how groups formulate plans for concrete action. Each project is unique, embodying the characteristics, personalities, questions, concerns, and contexts of a particular group. Therefore, how action manifests itself within a PAR process is dependent on, and mediated by, a set of variables that are malleable, often unpredictable, and directly linked to the multifaceted nature of human beings. In this case, such action was also limited and constrained by educational institutions , government bureaucracies, funding organizations, and other social structures. Equally important, the human beings in this PAR project were twelve and thirteen years old, which put a particular spin on the decision-making processes that led to the collective action generated in this project. The participants made decisions about what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and if doing it was going to have any effect on their lives by defining their concerns, developing the research tools to investigate those concerns, interpreting the data, and deciding whether to take new action or to move into further research. In this chapter, I discuss the gradual, cyclical movement that occurred when we switched from gathering information about the participants’ experiences living in their community (phase 1), to reflecting upon the information they had discovered in that process (phase 2), to the formulation of action and intervention plans aimed at addressing their concerns (phase 3). I present some of the tug-of-war we experienced between knowing that there were actions we could take, however limited they may be, and actually taking those actions. In so doing, I illustrate how PAR enabled us to implement new learning, further our research, and cultivate a sense of agency and activism among a group of young people committed to “makin’ it nice to live around here.” From Dialogue to Action: Resistance and Responsibility in Participatory Action Research We began the second year of the project with a new set of challenges. First, the research team was reconfigured. Due to other commitments, the majority of the team members who had participated during the first year of the project had to leave it and were replaced by three new team members. Second, during the summer of 1998 eight of the participants moved out of the area or were transferred to other schools in Ellsworth. The remaining participants were placed in three separate seventh-grade classrooms, all of which had different class schedules. Different schedules meant there were different teachers at different times of the day.1 Separate classrooms and new schedules also meant we had to find a new meeting place. No longer could we meet in Susan’s classroom. The only remaining space was the school cafeteria—not the most intimate setting for the project, but a space nonetheless. We managed to hold onto this space even when other school events were held in the cafeteria during our scheduled sessions. Notwithstanding our surroundings, on most Tuesdays we could be found huddled in one corner of the cafeteria constructing knowledge together. The levels and types of participation also changed during the second year of the project. We were no longer simply “talking about” the participants ’ concerns about the community. We were actually formulating ideas and learning how to take responsibility for what we wanted to see happen 168 ❙ From Dialogue to Action regarding some of the issues we had discussed the previous year. In addition , the participants were no longer under the guidance of Susan who had been a firm and powerful influence in their lives and who had been a part of many of the activities we engaged in during the first year of the project. Now the participants were “on their own” in many respects. They didn’t have a teacher present prodding, pulling, and challenging them, as Susan often did, “to honor their commitment to this project and do what they said they were going to do.” Although I certainly prodded, pushed, and challenged the participants at various points throughout the project, they knew that I was leaving at the end of the session. I may be back the next day, but I wasn’t an ever-present figure in their day-to-day lives...