Cultivating hope through creative resistance: Puerto Rican undergraduates surviving the disasters of climate and colonization.

This article details what occurred during a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project involving Puerto Rican undergraduates who at first focused their analysis on how their experiences with Hurricane María could be framed as resiliency and then eventually adopted a framework of resistance to further capture their actions, stances, and practices in response to government neglect. The YPAR generative process facilitated this emergence of resistance by beginning with the presentation of a cultural artifact and then helping students to use creative and artistic means to critically reflect on their experiences and the ways that not just resiliency, but also resistance captured their analysis of the actions of the people and government actors both immediately after the hurricane and in the long recovery that followed.

The arc of transformation in youth participatory action research: creative expression to creative resistance.

In this introduction to the special issue, Youth Participatory Action Research on Puerto Rican Students' Experiences with Hurricane Maria: Shifting from Resilience to Resistance, we outline the theoretical foundations of youth participatory action research (YPAR) and explicate the guiding principles that are seminal in the corpus of YPAR literature. We propose a synthesized model based on these guiding principles called the arc of transformation in YPAR. The model is used to examine points of convergence and divergence in how these principles are employed across YPAR methods and pedagogies. We close by discussing the rising emergence of arts-based YPAR methods and how they encourage young people to engage in artistic, creative, and innovative approaches to youth-driven inquiry alongside community members, educators, scholars and researchers.

A social justice epistemology and pedagogy for Latina/o students: Transforming public education with participatory action research.

The article reports on Latina/o high school students who conducted participatory action research (PAR) on problems that circumscribe their possibilities for self-determination. The intention is to legitimize student knowledge to develop effective educational policies and practices for young Latinas/os. PAR is engaged through the Social Justice Education Project, which provides students with all social science requirements for their junior and senior years. The mandated curriculum is supplemented with advanced-level readings from Chicana/o studies, critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and, most important, PAR. The intention is for students to meet the requirements for graduation and to develop sophisticated critical analyses to address problems in their own social contexts.