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Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic, the polarized political context, and the intensified racial justice movement delineate a time of crisis in the United States. In the field of education, the significant impacts of the turbulent situations represent profound darkness of peoples lives, making the collaborative partnership between school, university, and community extremely constrained and critical. This article draws from an eight-week digital summer civic leadership program that took place during the time of COVID-19. We employed the framework of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and the concept of collective leadership to center youths knowledge and critical voices. By integrating embodied, multimodal and reflective processes into the curriculum, the digital summer YPAR program provided an innovative approach to building a collaborative school-university-community partnership and enacting youth civic engagement through multimodal, digitalized, and artistic ways.
KEYWORDS: Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), collective leadership, youth activism, art, COVID-19
"Everyone 's voice counts, and we all don't have to have the same voices. But we do want our voices to be part of the transformation in our world and in our society. I would not have thought about this if I didn't take this course."
"There was so much I had yet to understand and to know about engaging with young people. I think I was so focused on the curriculum, English, and knowledge what I need to know to be a good English teacher that I forgot who is at the center of all the work, and that is the youth."
"I learned a lot about youth actions and how youth's voices can be represented in so many ways through art. The most pivotal learning experience for me was to learn about youth refusal to participate, and that was actually a form of participation when you refuse to participate."
(Testimonies, Civic Digital YPAR Program Participants, July 2020)
The year 2020 was a painful, unpredictable, and profoundly disturbing political time for diverse populations across the world. With no COVID-19 vaccine or cure available in the midst of a global pandemic, physical distancing and sheltering at home had become the norm in an attempt to slow the transmission of the virus (Ramesh et al., 2020). In the United States (U. S.) , the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of social...