The Beginning

In the Freshmen Prep Academy (FPA) at Manual Arts High School, members of our team had the opportunity to create a social studies elective course that helped students examine themselves and their communities within the contexts of action oriented inquiry. This semester-long elective was originally entitled Community Action Research (C.A.R.). During the first year of this class, members of our team collaborated to find ways to engage freshmen in a process that helped them to deeper understand an issue in their community (whether it be campus, street, or neighborhood), the factors that contributed to it, and possible solutions or opportunities to act.  

We encountered some key challenges during the first year of offering the course. The first challenge to present itself was the perspective students had on their own identities and value of personal story. The majority of our students felt as if their personal stories did not matter or worse yet, they had no stories to tell. The second obstacle we had to overcome was the perspective on place that many of our students suffer from, particular their views on the places they come from. The last challenge presented itself after a few cycles of student initiated inquiry into local issues of personal relevance (gang violence, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, lack of access to healthy foods, etc.). Though the students became well versed conducting research on topics of interest and sharing out their learning, the action component of the research never fully materialized.

The students struggled to see any true sense of agency. It was quite evident that students did not view their own personal stories as relevant to any of the research they were conducting around issues that mattered to them. Likewise, it became even more clear that their analysis of the data collected around these issues was informed by a very negative and stereotypical view of the geographic spaces they traveled through. The sum of these two problems created a real lack of students' perceived agency, preventing them from even believing in the possibility of being involved in any type of transformational change, let alone seeking out opportunities to become involved. Thus, we had an authentic problem of practice, a real instructional dilemma. The TIIP 2 grant application process offered our team of teachers a way to begin to address these challenges.