This reflection is drawn from a youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaboration set in K... more This reflection is drawn from a youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaboration set in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. It explores the ways youth co‐researchers employed YPAR tools to both critique and uphold their limited educational opportunity structure. It also questions the limits of transformative methodologies that embolden young people to critique the structures that govern their lives, especially for stateless peoples whose survival depends on continued access to those same structures.
This article draws from curricular analysis and ethnographic methods in school and community spac... more This article draws from curricular analysis and ethnographic methods in school and community spaces where young people live, learn, and work in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. We describe how formal citizenship education intended for Kenyan citizens is mediated by teachers working in refugee-serving schools. Our analysis shows how these messages, often scarce and decontextualized, orient refugees to project an imagined future of stability, obscuring the skills needed to navigate the uncertainty they will encounter as noncitizens enduring protracted exile. Examining refugee youth transitions after completing their schooling, we document ‘slips’ in the gaps between the civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions promoted in schools and those required within a limited opportunity structure dominated by a relief economy. Beyond school, we examine pathways that young refugees charted through apprenticeships within the informal economy, leveraging their social networks, gaining life skills, an...
There is an urgent need to develop climate leaders who can inspire and support mitigation and ada... more There is an urgent need to develop climate leaders who can inspire and support mitigation and adaptation actions. This exploratory study assessed the experiences of two student populations: (1) remote learners who participated in, and (2) student co-creators who co-designed, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Act on Climate: Steps to Individual, Community and Political Action (AoC). It examines the extent to which participation and involvement in the course facilitated the development of climate leadership practices of both populations. MOOC remote learners’ answers to discussion prompts (2099 responses from 705 learners) and student co-creators’ interview responses (n = 10, r = 83%) were qualitatively analyzed, informed by Kouzes and Posner’s (2018) five key practices of effective leaders. Findings suggest that remote learners and student co-creators engaged in these key leadership practices to varying degrees. For example, both groups “modeled the way” by taking climate change ...
... Understanding Of Personal Betrayal In A Socio-Historical Context Of Ethnic Conflict: Implicat... more ... Understanding Of Personal Betrayal In A Socio-Historical Context Of Ethnic Conflict: Implications For Teaching History Michelle J. Bellino and Robert L. Selman ... Carr, D., Flynn, TR & Makkreel, RA (eds)(2004) The Ethics of History Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. ...
Based on the true testimony of an Argentine man who lived through the Dirty War, Dentro el silenc... more Based on the true testimony of an Argentine man who lived through the Dirty War, Dentro el silencio is a fictionalized account of the life of an Argentine boy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Gaston looks back on his life as an adolescent boy in a middle-class family. He and his friends start a secret society called the Centro and become part of the resistance movement in the only way they can.
... All the Nice Restaurants MICHELLE BELLINO Caitlin took three years of high school Spanish and... more ... All the Nice Restaurants MICHELLE BELLINO Caitlin took three years of high school Spanish and can still roll her r's, but she tries not to speak it in front of me. ... Caitlin tells him the taco salad. He asks if she wants some tortilla with that. ...
Background/Context: Despite substantial evidence documenting the benefits of community involvemen... more Background/Context: Despite substantial evidence documenting the benefits of community involvement in the decisions that impact their lives, much humanitarian action in settings of displacement continues to be driven by the interests and funding streams of donors and international agencies. These dynamics particularly marginalize youth, who fall between interventions designed for children and opportunities for voice and agency that are reserved for adults. As youth-centered approaches have proliferated across diverse fields, pointing to the important insights gleaned from positioning young people as experts on their own lives, we rarely have a sense of how young people were included in the research or planning processes carried out, or the extent to which these processes reflect issues that local youth populations consider meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) aims to redress the limitations of traditional approaches, recognizing youth as co-researchers with the agency to shape the inquiry process, positioning them as both knowledge producers and agents of social justice beyond the research context. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Youth agency is central to YPAR, but interpretations and enactments of this agency are often implicitly bounded by nation-state constructs of legality and citizenship. How do we apply this approach in contexts where youth populations lack legal citizenship status and experience habitual threats to spatial movement, freedom of expression, and social belonging? In this paper we explore how youth locate openings to enact the agency that YPAR assumes of them, and the dilemmas that emerge as they aspire to address local challenges and contribute to the common good in contexts of forced displacement. Research Design: We examine these questions in the context of YPAR collaborations we carried out with displaced youth living in refugee camps and urban settlements in three country contexts: Burundi, Jordan, and Kenya. We approached YPAR collaborations with distinct research methods, positionalities, timelines, and varying levels of resources and institutional support. In each case, granting youth agency as co-researchers, we implicitly and explicitly raised questions about how young people come to understand the limits to their rights and agency, when forcibly displaced by conflict. Conclusions/Recommendations: Across the three collaborations detailed in this text, we underscore the ways that YPAR became a novel, and at times a radical, form of democratic citizenship education for a youth population traditionally positioned as passive recipients of both school curriculum and humanitarian aid. Notwithstanding significant challenges, we point to ways that this approach “slowly by slowly” created openings for young people to make claims on their rights and organize towards changes. It underscores the empowering potential of developing young people’s civic capacity and instilling their rights to understand and interact with their communities in exile.
Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0038040719863054 for The Purposes of Refugee Education: Policy ... more Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0038040719863054 for The Purposes of Refugee Education: Policy and Practice of Including Refugees in National Education Systems by Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Elizabeth Adelman, Michelle J. Bellino and Vidur Chopra in Sociology of Education
This reflection is drawn from a youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaboration set in K... more This reflection is drawn from a youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaboration set in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. It explores the ways youth co‐researchers employed YPAR tools to both critique and uphold their limited educational opportunity structure. It also questions the limits of transformative methodologies that embolden young people to critique the structures that govern their lives, especially for stateless peoples whose survival depends on continued access to those same structures.
This article draws from curricular analysis and ethnographic methods in school and community spac... more This article draws from curricular analysis and ethnographic methods in school and community spaces where young people live, learn, and work in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. We describe how formal citizenship education intended for Kenyan citizens is mediated by teachers working in refugee-serving schools. Our analysis shows how these messages, often scarce and decontextualized, orient refugees to project an imagined future of stability, obscuring the skills needed to navigate the uncertainty they will encounter as noncitizens enduring protracted exile. Examining refugee youth transitions after completing their schooling, we document ‘slips’ in the gaps between the civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions promoted in schools and those required within a limited opportunity structure dominated by a relief economy. Beyond school, we examine pathways that young refugees charted through apprenticeships within the informal economy, leveraging their social networks, gaining life skills, an...
There is an urgent need to develop climate leaders who can inspire and support mitigation and ada... more There is an urgent need to develop climate leaders who can inspire and support mitigation and adaptation actions. This exploratory study assessed the experiences of two student populations: (1) remote learners who participated in, and (2) student co-creators who co-designed, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Act on Climate: Steps to Individual, Community and Political Action (AoC). It examines the extent to which participation and involvement in the course facilitated the development of climate leadership practices of both populations. MOOC remote learners’ answers to discussion prompts (2099 responses from 705 learners) and student co-creators’ interview responses (n = 10, r = 83%) were qualitatively analyzed, informed by Kouzes and Posner’s (2018) five key practices of effective leaders. Findings suggest that remote learners and student co-creators engaged in these key leadership practices to varying degrees. For example, both groups “modeled the way” by taking climate change ...
... Understanding Of Personal Betrayal In A Socio-Historical Context Of Ethnic Conflict: Implicat... more ... Understanding Of Personal Betrayal In A Socio-Historical Context Of Ethnic Conflict: Implications For Teaching History Michelle J. Bellino and Robert L. Selman ... Carr, D., Flynn, TR & Makkreel, RA (eds)(2004) The Ethics of History Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press. ...
Based on the true testimony of an Argentine man who lived through the Dirty War, Dentro el silenc... more Based on the true testimony of an Argentine man who lived through the Dirty War, Dentro el silencio is a fictionalized account of the life of an Argentine boy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Gaston looks back on his life as an adolescent boy in a middle-class family. He and his friends start a secret society called the Centro and become part of the resistance movement in the only way they can.
... All the Nice Restaurants MICHELLE BELLINO Caitlin took three years of high school Spanish and... more ... All the Nice Restaurants MICHELLE BELLINO Caitlin took three years of high school Spanish and can still roll her r's, but she tries not to speak it in front of me. ... Caitlin tells him the taco salad. He asks if she wants some tortilla with that. ...
Background/Context: Despite substantial evidence documenting the benefits of community involvemen... more Background/Context: Despite substantial evidence documenting the benefits of community involvement in the decisions that impact their lives, much humanitarian action in settings of displacement continues to be driven by the interests and funding streams of donors and international agencies. These dynamics particularly marginalize youth, who fall between interventions designed for children and opportunities for voice and agency that are reserved for adults. As youth-centered approaches have proliferated across diverse fields, pointing to the important insights gleaned from positioning young people as experts on their own lives, we rarely have a sense of how young people were included in the research or planning processes carried out, or the extent to which these processes reflect issues that local youth populations consider meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives. Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) aims to redress the limitations of traditional approaches, recognizing youth as co-researchers with the agency to shape the inquiry process, positioning them as both knowledge producers and agents of social justice beyond the research context. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Youth agency is central to YPAR, but interpretations and enactments of this agency are often implicitly bounded by nation-state constructs of legality and citizenship. How do we apply this approach in contexts where youth populations lack legal citizenship status and experience habitual threats to spatial movement, freedom of expression, and social belonging? In this paper we explore how youth locate openings to enact the agency that YPAR assumes of them, and the dilemmas that emerge as they aspire to address local challenges and contribute to the common good in contexts of forced displacement. Research Design: We examine these questions in the context of YPAR collaborations we carried out with displaced youth living in refugee camps and urban settlements in three country contexts: Burundi, Jordan, and Kenya. We approached YPAR collaborations with distinct research methods, positionalities, timelines, and varying levels of resources and institutional support. In each case, granting youth agency as co-researchers, we implicitly and explicitly raised questions about how young people come to understand the limits to their rights and agency, when forcibly displaced by conflict. Conclusions/Recommendations: Across the three collaborations detailed in this text, we underscore the ways that YPAR became a novel, and at times a radical, form of democratic citizenship education for a youth population traditionally positioned as passive recipients of both school curriculum and humanitarian aid. Notwithstanding significant challenges, we point to ways that this approach “slowly by slowly” created openings for young people to make claims on their rights and organize towards changes. It underscores the empowering potential of developing young people’s civic capacity and instilling their rights to understand and interact with their communities in exile.
Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0038040719863054 for The Purposes of Refugee Education: Policy ... more Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0038040719863054 for The Purposes of Refugee Education: Policy and Practice of Including Refugees in National Education Systems by Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Elizabeth Adelman, Michelle J. Bellino and Vidur Chopra in Sociology of Education
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