“They Taught Me More than I Taught Them:” Situating Youth as the Experts in Learning Spaces

This month, in honor of LGBTQ+ Pride, we’re featuring a guest writer for our blog. Andre Zarate is a friend of 228 Accelerator and we are honored to bring you his reflections on research he conducted with queer Filipinx youth. This writing will be brought to you in two parts, so stay tuned for the second half of his piece, which will be posted in the second half of June!

For the past three years, I have been working on my doctoral studies in educational and organizational leadership the centers the significance of organic critical literacies (Campano et al., 2013) and formulating a research study that embodies multiple truths about myself: my intersectional identity as Filipinx and Queer; my love for the brilliance and authenticity of our queer youth; and my passion for collectivist and collaborative inquiries. In my parallel work with the 228 Accelerator, I am often reminded of how necessary it is to understand yourself is necessary when engaging in liberation work. It reminds of this quote from “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977): 

“This focusing upon your own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”

As founder of 228 Accelerator, Caroline Hill, has often said to me: 

“Heal yourself first. So you can heal others.

Free yourself first. So you can free others.”

And so, after much reflection, I decided to center my dissertation on queer Filipinx youth. Together, the youth and I launched an inquiry to learn about our ancestral roots as a way to return home to ourselves. In the process, I looked at ways they used their imahinasyon to make sense of their pagkakakilanlan ng bakla (queer identities) and Filipinx identities. As a result, the youth and I, named as Queer Kapamilya, launched an inquiry that used imagination strategies to think about a world that includes ourselves in the future. For the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on the creation of the learning space, which centered the voices of the youth and situated themselves as experts in this process. Most importantly, I ceded power as the “teacher” of the space and allowed more room for the youth to lead. 

What We Did

This work is situated as a youth participatory action research project (YPAR), a methodology that centers the youth as researchers in the form of knowledge construction, data collection, and even data analysis (Mirra et al., 2016). Youth play an important role in the co-design and co-creation of programming. Before we had even started, I made sure to do relational one-on-one conversations to get to know them. I asked questions about who they are, how they identified, and what their passions, hopes, and dreams are. Additionally, it was important for me to gather data on how much they knew about their Filipinx heritage and its intersections with queerness. From there, we were able to build a course of programming that centered their interests and desires for learning. 

Due to the nature of YPAR studies, this dissertation study ended up becoming a truncated version of what was possible. Timing played a role in the number of sessions completed and length of the duration of the project. These constraints compromised the full potential of the YPAR project; however, elements of YPAR existed and I did not compromise the values and spirit of the project. The project was carried out in four phases: (1) Relational one-on-one conversations, (2) Zoom YPAR programming, (3) Collaborative Action Project, and (4) Final relational one-on-one conversations. There were a total of ten sessions where we engaged in topics related to rediscovering our origins, the genderfluid history of the Philippines, ancient Filipinx mythology, the Golden Gays, and opportunities to expand definitions of queerness and Filipinxness. This allowed for a number of reflections made via art journal, dialogic engagement with each other, and collaborative art projects.   

What I Learned

Lesson One: Relationship Building and Co-Creation of Queer Kapamilya

It is important when talking about the methodological findings to situate them under relationship-building (Mirra et al., 2016), one of the necessary foundations of a YPAR project. Without the youth participants in this study trusting and getting to know each other, collaboration cannot exist. Therefore, in Queer Kapamilya sessions, I emphasized the importance of relationship building as the crux of this study, built in the design through the data collection tools and actual sessions. I intentionally started the project with relational one-on-one interviews so that the kapabayan youth had the opportunity to share about themselves and learn a little more about me. 

The entire first session, which I labeled “orientation,” was about community building and co-creating the Queer Kapamilya group. I centered the first half of the session on getting to know each other and the second half building community guidelines. Within these activities, the youth were getting to know each other through “radical introductions,” which included sharing their two most important objects and distilling their most important values. They also had the opportunity to co-create community guidelines based on look, hear, and feeling of the environment. Taking their responses and discussions into consideration, I created a transcript of our dialogue, highlighting different themes mentioned throughout their artifacts on the values, their items, and the “look, feel, hear” traits of how the programming should be. If more time was an option, the youth would have been empowered to create the guidelines independent from me; however, since time was limited, I used my qualitative researcher skills to create baseline norms that they could provide feedback on.

In Session Two, I provided the most frequently used words between the three of them, presenting them as key words for “Our Community and Space,” asking the youth for their feedback. The youth were clear that the language should be authentically Filipinx; therefore, they helped translate the words into Tagalog using Google Translate and the help of  family members. This is showcased in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Our Community and Space  

From Session Three on, this graphic was projected in the Zoom platform and I placed stars near the words I believed they should lean on based on the conceptual topic. While these were the main activities during the orientation session, I made sure to build relationship-building time into the start of every session. This consisted of a circle check-in where we each answered the following questions: “How are we feeling? What is sitting with you in your spirit, in your soul, and in your mind as you enter the space? And any reflections on the usage of imagination since the last session?” This kept our initial bonding time consistent and allowed the youth to share in community before starting the actual sessions. If there was no limit to time, there would be a more intentional push for the youth to develop the check-in portion of the sessions more independently. This personal desire was strengthened by one participant’s final relational interview in which he shared that he wished for “more time to check-in” and talk more with his peers in the group. In a more consistently meeting group, as a facilitator, I would definitely make the decision to do that.

Overall, through these different co-designing and co-creation sessions, the youth did build a strong relationship culture amongst each other. They were able to relate through their identities, but also through other interests and hobbies. They eventually created their own group text and exchanged social media accounts with each other. In their final interviews, all three youth mentioned that meeting queer Filipinx youth they can relate with was very important to them and they were satisfied with how this space offered that opportunity. While I know that more could be done, I believe the relationships between the Queer Kapamilya group is what contributed to the in-depth discussions, dialogue, and growth, which ended up becoming part of the research question findings. 

Stay tuned for Part Two of Andre’s writing on his research, coming in the second half of June!

Bibliography

Caraballo, L., Lozenski, B. D., Lyiscott, J. J., & Morrell, E. (2017). YPAR and Critical 

Epistemologies: Rethinking Education Research. Review of Research in Education, 41(1), 311–336. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X16686948

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Sánchez, L. (2013). “Nobody Knows the... Amount of a Person”: 

Elementary Students Critiquing Dehumanization through Organic Critical Literacies. Research in the Teaching of English, 48(1), 98–125. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24398648

Gooding, A. R., Zaman, B. A., Harrell, S. J., Collins, S., Abelson, M. J., & Anderson-Nathe, B. 

(2023). Situated agency: How LGBTQ youth navigate and create queer(ed) space. Journal of LGBT Youth, 20(3), 524–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2022.2089430

Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2016). Doing youth participatory action research: 

Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. Routledge.