ABSTRACT
I entered my first day at Rana High School (RHS) excited about embarking on a new journey with a group of Latino/a high school students. My doctoral advisor, a Puerto Rican male university professor in his mid-thirties whom the students eventually called “Doc,” had piloted a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) (Cammarota and Fine, 2008) collective project the previous year. I had played an important but secondary role during the pilot year, working as a graduate assistant, but this new iteration of the project would serve as the source of my dissertation research, and I would have a more prominent role and increased interactions with the students. The core of the program, an elective course, titled “Action Research and Social Change,” was well-received by the students the previous year at the magnet school, where the project originated. The projects they developed were inspiring, impressing hundreds of audience members at the numerous conferences and professional meetings where they presented their work. After the customary introductions, my advisor began to share with this new group of students some of the background of the course and several of the accomplishments of the previous cohort. While he was speaking, a student fidgeted in her chair staring at the floor and occasionally shaking her head disapprovingly.
