The Broom Public Scholarship Project provides grants to Carleton professors engaged in public scholarship projects, aiming to support and foster broader dialogue surrounding this type of academic work. Two faculty members — Anita Chikkatur of Educational Studies, and Yansi Pérez of Spanish and Latin American Studies — were recently awarded grants for projects in line with this ideal.
While the two projects address distinct topics, both exemplify public scholarship through their dedicated focus on involving communities in research, and honoring diverse forms of knowledge.
I recently sat down with both Chikkatur and Pérez to learn more about their projects, their thoughts on public scholarship, and their goals moving forward.
Anita Chikkatur, Associate Professor of Educational Studies
As a researcher in the field of Education, Anita Chikkatur has often engaged with youth participatory action research (YPAR) in her classrooms and in reading her colleagues’ work, but more recently, she’s started to use PAR in her own scholarship. In a recent project, which looked into underrepresented students’ experiences in STEM classes and as STEM majors here at Carleton, she worked directly with five student researchers, themselves STEM majors, who conducted many of the interviews. Chikkatur is also currently working with a local high school teacher to create a History of Race curriculum for his class, a project about which a publication may shortly be released. The project she proposed for the Fellowship, inspired by her own experiences with PAR work and her desire to increase its visibility in both academic and broader communities, reflects this commitment to engaging with communities as active partners in research.
Could you tell me a little bit about the project for which you received the grant?
I’m developing a workshop for the 2018 winter break that focuses on participatory action research, and will be open to faculty and community members. The Broom Fellowship, in conjunction with Public Works, funded both my own training at a week-long participatory action research workshop run out of the City University of New York, and the winter workshop.
For the workshop, I want to make sure that community members are in attendance along with faculty. I want the workshop to provide strategies that community members and community organizations can use to do research in their own communities. Perhaps it will lead to a longer relationship with Carleton, but I hope at the very least it provides them with a useful tool.
How would you define participatory action research?
Participatory action research is more of a framework, not a methodology. The basic idea is to do research with people, and not research on people. The research problems themselves are developed by the community; it’s about asking a community, What are your concerns? What are particular things you’re struggling with? And then once we define that problem, we work with the community to figure out a good methodology to study that problem.
I think PAR really takes seriously the idea that everybody has expertise—it might be different kinds of expertise, but it’s expertise. The community members are the experts of their community; they’re the experts of their context. While I might have training in how to create a good survey, they have the knowledge of which questions wouldn’t quite work for their community. It’s the idea of trying to think about communities as having complementary expertise to researchers.
You touched on how PAR work is particularly useful in education. Can you talk a little bit more about how education research lends itself to this framework?
At the heart of education is the idea that education is change. In creating change, the vast impetus has to come from the people themselves, whether we’re thinking about teachers or students. For example, I think it’s really easy to blame teachers for not doing what they should be doing—or what we think they should be doing. Having the teachers themselves think about these problems gives them a sense of ownership, and allows them to see what’s happening, therefore motivating them to make change. At the end of the day it’s about getting people to think differently about what they’re doing, and I think PAR gives everybody a way to think about their own practice.
And for youth, PAR gives them a structured way in which they can be heard. I think a lot of the time when we think about schooling, we so rarely think about student perspectives and voices. PAR gives students a way to think about their own context and personal experiences within the context of their peers, the school, and their society.
What are some of the challenges of PAR work?
PAR work takes time, because you’re building relationships, and has a lot more uncertainty to it. It’s a lot easier for me to go into a school, observe it, interview people, and write that up. But working with youth, or with the teachers—that could take a long time; it could fall apart, and people might not want to do it anymore. It’s a lot riskier.
Also, it’s good to have the people that are at the center of the problem do that research, but it also means that it takes time away from everything else that they may have to do to survive and thrive in the particular context they’re in. It’s one thing for me to do it, since research is part of my job. But when we’re working with commonly marginalized populations, how do we be fair and equitable in making sure that the resources we have at the university are being shared? Because they’re doing that work just as much as I am.
Earlier you mentioned that you’ve included PAR researchers in your classes. Are there others ways that you’ve thought of incorporating PAR or public scholarship into your classes?
I think as much as possible, in some ways, it’s about highlighting the voices of marginalized communities in whatever way possible. So in my Multicultural Education class, we Skype with a faculty member who works on incorporating materials about the Dakota peoples in the curriculum in Minnesota. It’s public in the sense that we think about whose voices I’m highlighting in my classes, why we’re reading them, and also how accessible the stuff we’re reading is. How do we take these rigorous, nuanced ways in which we’re thinking about education, and how do we make that visible to policymakers, for example? How do we make that visible to teachers? How do we make that visible to the school district administrators? I think that’s important, and we definitely think and talk about that in my classes.
Do you see the workshop as a continuous project, or something that other projects might develop out of?
I’ve talked to CCCE about maybe having PAR as a more regular workshop. We could get different people to do it, and it could be one of the ways in which we train or give faculty more ways to do research in the community. I think there are a lot of faculty who do really important research out in the community, and we want to build on that, and we want to provide another framework to think about how we do research that actually matters to the community. And also, to think about how we do research with the community. It’s not just that we’re creating publicly-available research products, it’s thinking about publicly-engaged research processes, and I think that’s a different shift. So yes, depending on how the workshop goes, I think it would be great if it was something we could do more regularly, both for Carleton community members and for Northfield and Faribault community members, who are really our main targets.
Yansi Pérez, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies and Spanish
Yansi Pérez spent the 2016–17 academic year, with the support of the ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, researching the Central American community in Los Angeles—specifically, the ways in which it has made its mark in the city by creating political or other community organizations, and the ways those organizations have adapted to the changing issues affecting the community over time. Through both interviews and archival work, she learned more about each of these core organizations, exploring how they have changed and been changed by their own and the surrounding communities. These interviews also allowed her to document the personal journeys of individuals within the Central American community in Los Angeles, and it was these interviews, as well as her work with the Central American Studies Department at California State University Northridge, the Central American Resource Center and the Salvadoran American Leadership and Education Fund in Los Angeles, which inspired this new part of her project.
Could you describe the work for which you received the grant?
It’s specifically for me to develop an oral history project with an organization that already works with the Central American community. I have two organizations in mind: the Central American Resource Center and the Salvadoran American Leadership and Education Fund (SALEF), which works specifically with younger Salvadoran students, but also with Central Americans in general. I think that either of the two could work as the community partner for me.
As I was doing interviews for my earlier project, I realized that there was just a lot of interest in having a resource for people to tell their history. One of the things that kept coming out, and the reason that people kept agreeing to do the interviews, is that they felt that it was necessary for other people to hear their story, to hear that they are hard-working people, and that they’re contributing to this country, to this city, to this community. It was their way of countering a lot of the rhetoric that’s been thrown around in the U.S. lately about immigrants and about Central Americans in particular
I was really moved by that; I think it extended to a desire beyond themselves. All of this led me to think about creating a project that I felt could be a part of the community. And the more that people know about it, the more possibility there is for other people to participate, the more opportunity there is for the youth in the community to become the ones heading the project, conducting the interviews, or helping with recording or putting them up.
I interviewed people of all ages: some that are in high school, some that are in college, others that are in their 60s and 70s. The young people, I think, were really thirsty to learn more about their Central American-ness, even though they were born in the US, for the most part. The older people were really interested in making sure that their stories were recorded, that other people could know that they had to come to the United States for political reasons. Others wanted to talk about what it’s like to be an immigrant, what it’s like not to speak the dominant language, and what it’s like to travel between neighborhoods. The whole idea behind the project is to have a record of these conversations and to understand the issues that are important for the community, and that have shaped how the community has grown.
I think it can be a very concrete contribution to a community that wants to see itself represented in a more positive light. In conversation with people, I realize that they want to hear the positive contributions that the community has made, and my hope is that this project can contribute to that desire.
That’s interesting that it stemmed from your interviews from a different project. Is there something that drew you to this type of public scholarship, or did you fall into it based on the other work that you were interested in?
Up until now, my research has primarily been more literary criticism. And I think that the research leading me to this project—the cartography of material memory in Los Angeles—in some ways already aspired to have more of a connection with the living community. I always say that my work is a conversation. It’s always a dialogue, but often with people that can’t talk back—either characters in a book or authors that I’m only in conversation with through the text. In my current project, there’s a lot more human contact than I’ve had in my previous research; my project is public scholarship because I am studying memory in conversation with people.
I think that what I’m most interested in is that the project isn’t dependent on me—that it can become self-sustainable, or at least a lasting, open resource. I think that by working with a community organization, there’s a greater possibility that it will reach a broader public. I want it to be accessible to the people that I am in conversation with, that have generously agreed to be interviewed.