"This is exactly what this study is all about and it is happening right in front of me!" Using Participatory action research to awaken a sense of injustice within a privileged institution

Authors

Brett G. Stoudt, CUNY John Jay CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-21-2012

Abstract

Rockport is an elite, all boys, day school in the northeast United States. It educates mostly white, wealthy, young men. Student researchers, faculty researchers and I collaborated to study bullying at Rockport using an approach to research known as participatory action research (PAR). In the process we also gained a better understanding of how privilege, especially gendered privilege, was socialized and (re)produced. The participatory research spaces that emerged in our project - grounded in the experiences of students, teachers, and administrators - facilitated critical awareness of self and context that Deutsch (2006) referred to as "awaking the sense of injustice." Over the course of a year, our research at Rockport collected data of local consequence and in doing so, built institutional momentum that has since become a school-wide and ongoing initiative to address bullying. As a result, this work was a form of counter-hegemonic action.

Comments

This article was originally published in Masculinity and social change, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4471/MCS.2012.09

This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivative License (CC BY NC ND).