Activist Research and Student Agency in Universities and Urban Communities

Unlike school-aged youth attending well-resourced suburban schools, working-class poor students attending inner-city public schools are oftentimes denied the opportunity to develop a sense of agency within their schools and communities. In this article, the author addresses one way that educators and researchers can encourage young people to engage in participatory processes of teaching and learning aimed at developing personal and collective agency. In addition, she describes how a group of university-based students participated in on-the-ground experiences that contributed significantly to their understandings of how individual and collective agency energizes teaching and research processes. The author embeds those discussions within the framework of a participatory action research project she engaged in with a group of middle school adolescents in the northeast region of the United States.