Today’s Changemakers Creatively Resisting: An Art-Based YPAR Project by Black Student Union Leaders

In this article, we claim that art-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a necessary catalyst to transforming school culture by inviting young people into participatory, equity-driven school leadership. Over the course of the academic year, by engaging the arts, Black Student Union (BSU) organized three unique activities to foster transformative anti-racist action and presented at two research conferences (ARNA and SIEEJ). At ARNA’s 2025 international hybrid conference, three high school Black Student Union (BSU) leaders, along with their teacher co-advisor, presented virtually on “Building Community After School.” The presentation examined how student club members employed three art modalities — digital media, travel, and narrative — to promote a high school club’s anti-racist mission. The presentation showcased 3 key solutions of our YPAR project: “documenting difficult dialogues and practicing our discourse beyond BSU.” The research team presented two artistic BSU-created videos, and student presenters facilitated a dialogue from an established BSU club activity. For SIEEJ, we conducted another YPAR cycle to improve our action-oriented event. To answer JPRM’s call to crowdsource art-based YPAR methodology, we present the culmination of our accomplishments from the 2024-2025 academic year, along with the challenges and lessons learned. We offer our methodological insights to promote social justice action, hoping that practitioners can glean some strategies to apply in their creative YPAR contexts. Our methodological findings are organized into four parts: knowledge generation, research collection & discussion, findings & analysis, and action. We outline how the BSU high school leaders prepared for the research conferences (our action-oriented events) while simultaneously running a high school club (our YPAR praxis).