Impact of a School-Based Youth Participatory Research Project: An Organizer’s Experience
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is an underutilized tool for addressing culture and climate challenges in school communities. YPAR is unique for its ability to develop practical knowledge and skills among young people, with a focus on improving a system or community that serves them. While there is no one-size fits all approach to YPAR, a review of the literature overwhelmingly illustrates how the action research process can build youth confidence and empower participants to use their voice to address school policies or inequities at school.
At Ralston Valley High School, in suburban Denver, Colorado, I explored using YPAR with a group of high school peer counseling students, to investigate issues related to student mental health. The full scope of that work can be found here:
In this blog post, I “digest” the experience of the project from conception through completion. The project evolved over two years, and I am still sorting out the many layers of the project’s impact on me, the students I worked with, the other staff and the larger community.
Colorado is one of the inner mountain states that consistently reports disproportionate challenges with adolescent mental health and well-being. The self-reported data and the behavioral data both demonstrate a real challenge in supporting youth in the state. Ralston Valley High School is no exception. The number of students reporting significant mental health challenges and requiring crisis intervention was rising steadily prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In late 2019, there was some discussion among school leadership about ways to improve upon the mental health trends. As different ideas were identified, one idea stuck out as having potential to support a cultural shift in the school community, while elevating students with innate talents that sometimes go overlooked when identifying leaders. That idea (which became one of a handful of shifts) was a Peer Counseling program. The research on the value of peer support programs is good. They can provide a safe place to work through conflicts with friends, struggles with academics, stress, loneliness, family problems and even more serious issues, such as depression, that become endemic among high school age students. These programs can have added impact for students who are leery of speaking with adults. Impacts on the peer counselors also have been noted, with strong evidence of increases in self-awareness, self-confidence and leadership skills.
Prior to the pandemic, student leaders at Ralston Valley accompanied me to other schools with similar programs to get a feel for what was possible and how we could take some of what we learned and make it our own. After navigating a few challenging semesters during the pandemic, the new peer counseling program blossomed into a unique space for interested adolescents to build their own helping skills and support their peers in the process. Once the foundation for the program was laid, we decided to implement a youth participatory research project, where each cohort of peer counselors would identify a challenge to take on within the Ralston Valley school community. This is the background to the SPF article cited above.
The cohort that began 11th grade in August 2022 began to look at a school wide needs assessment and district data on well-being and belonging at school. The initial introduction of the YPAR process and the genesis of the research question took nearly 2 months to complete. To allow the youth to drive the project and the research question, I created loose procedural parameters commonly accepted in action research and asked probing questions as the peer counselors reviewed data and discussed what they each felt about and had observed anecdotally regarding well-being and belonging challenges they saw in their community.
Based on this initial process, the emerging Peer Counseling/YPAR team identified a particular question focused on mental health stigma and how students in need of mental health support often don’t receive help prior to being in crisis. To better understand the perspectives of their fellow students, the team conducted focus groups with participants from all demographic groups and grades (9-12). The team then worked with a student in the Class of 2023 (a senior at the time) to complete coding the information that came from the focus group participants. This student had learned how to code YPAR ethnographic fieldnotes in a summer program with the University of California Santa Cruz. The experience of working with the Senior offered another level of student capacity building, where a student could share their acquired knowledge and pass it down to a younger cohort.
For me, the focus groups were enlightening, in the sense that they revealed that all the work we were doing as school counselors to push in and deliver curriculum on social-emotional learning (SEL) and mental health was not being perceived as effective by students. The lack of effective education coupled with a history of less than supportive interactions with adults in a time of need, created a cocktail of perceived adult judgment and a lack of normalization of accessing support from the resources available to students.
After making sense of the focus group results the youth research team took it upon themselves to reach out to the Biology department and explore what it would look like to more explicitly wrap information about mental health into the school’s curriculum units on the central nervous system. The team’s hypothesis was that learning more about the biological/physiological mechanics of the nervous system and this system’s impacts on mental health would better normalize students’ experiences and remove some of the stigma around mental health issues. With the Biology teaching team on-board, the students partnered with the teachers to create a modified unit on the nervous system to deliver to all 10th grade students. Prior to delivering the unit, the Biology teachers provided a pre-test to measure student knowledge and perceptions of the nervous system and the connection to mental health. After the new unit was delivered, the students completed a post-test with the same items. The pre and post data provided a revealing picture, both in terms of the lack of student knowledge of mental health as seen in the pre-test and how student perceptions shifted after delivery of the curriculum unit in Biology.
The team then engaged all teachers through a survey to compare adult perceptions of student mental health with those of the students in their classrooms. These results illustrated that students and adults were not in alignment on the level of challenges that students were experiencing and the degree to which the adult supported students in relation to those challenges. In hindsight, it seems to me that the team members were developing a deep appreciation of the importance of education practices, including counseling and teaching, being linked to practice-based evidence. We were, in essence, learning about maintaining a strong peer counseling program by continuing to see what various forms of evidence could tell us about the issues at our school that had led to the initial impetus to create the program and about how, if at all, our program was impacting those issues.
In April 2023, after six months of working through a three-cycle YPAR protocol, the youth research team requested time with the Principal to share their findings. After receiving positive feedback from the Principal, the students presented their work to the whole staff approximately a week later. A handful of teachers approached the team asking how they could help support the process, with two teachers in particular eager to support the youth research team’s efforts. These two teachers were working on outside professional development to strengthen their understanding of student well-being and improve their deployment of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) relevant to their content area teaching.
The students also presented their work to a working group with the Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA) and the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN). After getting some feedback, the youth research team returned in the fall of 2023 (now as Seniors) and resumed work on the project. One question the students became interested in was whether the strategies learned by the two teachers participating in the professional development initiative led to teacher “moves” that would positively impact their students. The team also simultaneously began operating a podcast for the school community, taking the learnings from the previous school year’s collaboration with Biology and creating 10–15-minute episodes on everything from achievement pressure to navigating the pressures of social media on high school students.
Around the time they were doing this work, the students were invited to present their findings (to date) to the Colorado Society of School Psychologists (CSSP). Presenting to over 60 School Psychologists and School Social Workers, the students articulated their process, findings and their next steps. The reception they received from these professionals was awesome. At the conclusion of the session there was a twenty-minute Q&A that was among the most engaging I have ever been a part of. There was an acknowledgement of similar challenges in schools big and small throughout Colorado and a mindset shift around how the programming that education practitioners roll out should be created in a consultative manner alongside input from students.
One of the participants at the conference coordinated all school social work in Colorado and put the information in front of the District Deputy Superintendent and the Director of Student Services. Soon enough, we learned that the Chief Academic Officer was starting his own podcast and that he had listened to the research team’s podcast to get ideas – while also inviting them to be a guest on an episode. Further, a door opened to connect with the local representative of the school board, to discuss different ways of looking at this problem. It was quite striking that one YPAR initiative was having such an impact.
In June 2024, the youth research team presented the full breadth of their project to ARNA and was recognized with the 2024 Outstanding Youth Contribution to Action Research. Also in June, there was on-going conversation in the district about how to better support student well-being and belonging at school, including looking at other options for normalizing mental health stigma and developing better tools around “mental health literacy”. The research team suggested that all students take Health to graduate from Jefferson County Public Schools. Like the experimental biology intervention, this curriculum shift would allow for a lot of scaffolding of information that connects physical and mental health and could create additional stakes for students to successfully complete high school. While it may be some time before we see a change to graduation requirements, the student research team has been invited back for this August to run a session with the staff at Ralston Valley targeting the difference in adult and youth perspectives around mental health issues. And so, the process continues.
In reflection, after two years of working alongside these students as they brought their full selves to this project, I am left with a ton of gratitude, having had a front row seat to the collaboration and dedication that these students brought to the project. When they felt empowered to explore and own this issue, they took the ball and ran with it. They were motivated to see the project reach a meaningful apex and simply needed a bit of guidance and consultation when they got stuck. They demonstrated the ability to stand beside adult leaders and experts in the field and articulate their process and findings in a profound way. They also illustrated the beauty of student voice and how empowering it can be for all parties when students take on meaningful work that not only enhances their learning but democratizes how knowledge about education practices is created and how educational communities make decisions. Beyond all the impactful policy conversations that have come from this work, it is quite profound to assess the students’ growth across two years on a leadership and advocacy index. I now deeply believe that these skills are largely learned in action, and we are quite short on those types of opportunities for students. It is my belief that all students have the ability to navigate a similar process with some broad support, building important future-ready skills while having a meaningful impact on their community. I am quite hopeful that we will find more opportunities to elevate student voice and create forums for meaningful dialogue between adult educators and students.
Blog Sponsors
