Navigating youth participatory action research as school-based civic learning: Toward teacher-student co-agency

Youth participatory action research (YPAR), which engages students in meaningful inquiry and action on self-generated topics, holds great promise as a critically relevant approach to civic learning. Yet the integration of this liberatory practice into the hierarchical structures of official schooling poses complex dilemmas. This article examines how teachers facilitate YPAR amid the schedules, hierarchies, and spatial constraints of schools. Drawing on an ecological conception of teacher agency, we analyzed, through interviews, focus groups, and classroom artifacts, the perspectives and experiences of educator-participants in a professional learning community that supports YPAR as a classroom-based civic learning practice. Findings show the importance of teacher agency in navigating constraints related to time, hierarchy, and space in schools. Teachers retemporalized learning by sequencing time for sustained inquiry, reworked power by redistributing authority while negotiating institutional demands, and reconfigured space by assembling classrooms, hallways, and civic venues to amplify student voice. These adaptations created conditions in which student inquiry could thrive amid the constraints of specific school contexts. We argue that, in school-based YPAR, student agency is enmeshed with teacher agency and that treating youth as “citizens of the now” requires that schools be organized for student-educator co-agency.