Research with a Transformative Activist Agenda: Creating the future through education for social...

National Society for the Study of Education, Volume 113, Issue 2, pp. 575–602Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University

Research with a Transformative Activist Agenda: Creating the Future Through Education for Social Change

EDUARDO VIANNA

LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

ANNA STETSENKO

The Graduate Center, CUNY

A transformative activist stance is a theoretically grounded model for educational research based on a radically revised theory of human development and learning. Its purpose is to advance a transformative agenda that contributes to the creation of equitable futures for students, especially those from disadvantaged populations. A collaborative project conducted in a group home for youth in foster care provides a dramatic illustration for this approach.

This chapter dialogues with and suggests ways to further advance mod-els of educational research predicated on broadly defined emancipatory goals of developing equitable futures for students, especially those from disadvantaged populations. A transformative activist stance (TAS) (see Stet-senko, 2008, 2010a, b) provides theoretical grounding that combines simi-lar commitments with a politically non-neutral interpretation of Vygotsky’s project, Freirean critical pedagogy, and Bakhtin’s dialogical approach in a model for educational research with a transformative agenda. TAS is based in a radical revision of the core principles of human development and learning, especially in its shift away from the notion of adaptation to the status quo toward the notions of social change and activism. From this perspective, development and learning are collaborative achievements

576 National Society for the Study of Education

of an activist nature that are not confined to adapting to what is “given” in the world. Instead, these processes rely upon people forming and carrying out future-oriented agendas within collaborative projects of social transformation. These agendas centrally involve taking an activist stance grounded in a vision, or “endpoint,” of how community members believe present practices can be changed and what kind of future ought to be created.

From this perspective, educational research always is, and invariably has to be, an activist endeavor too. It is based on researchers and participants working out together and committing to a common project of social transformation that contributes to creating a future viewed by researchers and participants as worthwhile and desirable. In this process, learning is utilized to provide and co-construct critical-theoretical tools necessary for researchers and participants to position themselves vis-à-vis current community practices and their histories, while at the same time developing activist commitments to how these practices can and ought to be changed. By highlighting notions of social change and activism as constitutive of the processes of being, doing, and knowing, TAS provides strong warrants for educational research as social practice infused with ideological and political dimensions requiring continuous contestation and critical dialogue among all participants. The purpose of research in education, from this position, is to intervene into the status quo by providing access to cultural tools that facilitate participants taking an activist stance toward creating their futures in a society that itself needs to be created, rather than merely reproduced or adapted to.

This chapter is divided into two sections with a brief conclusion. The first section outlines the present landscape in educational research and provides a theoretical rationale for TAS as the new grounding for research with a social justice agenda. It also spells out specific implications of TAS for educational research models. The second section provides an illustra-tion of this approach from a collaborative activist project conducted in a group home for adolescent boys. It also addresses the joys and challenges of engaging youth in a transformative activist project that creates a non-traditional learning context where students are agents of social change in charge of their own future.

TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIVIST STANCE AS THE GROUNDING FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH WITH SOCIAL JUSTICE AGENDAS1

The present landscape in education features an increasingly diversified array of approaches that take on novel analytics and research methodologies that break away from traditional positivist views of science. Many of these

Research with a Transformative Activist Agenda 577

recently developed approaches—such as critical and dialogical pedagogy, participatory, and human science frameworks—focus on conducting re-search with rather than on participants, engage participants by giving them voice and providing space for interpreting experiences, and create col-laborative spaces for partnership and communication drawing on varied bases of expertise (e.g., Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Daiute, 2010; Gutiérrez & Larson, 2007; Jaramillo, 2011; Penuel & O’Connor, 2010). In these ap-proaches, human development is understood to be a socioculturally situ-ated, relational, and dialogical process that relies upon participation in stratified communities and the tools they provide. Perhaps most signifi-cantly, these approaches emphasize the role of values, power, and politics in conducting research, especially in conjunction with the goals of increas-ing youth participation and facilitating trajectories toward more equitable futures (see Vadeboncoeur & Murray, this volume). In employing these methodologies, researchers shift away from the “objectivist” experimenta-tion model that dictates that researchers act as disinterested, impartial, and neutral observers of reality. This traditional model is presumably re-moved from practical concerns and ideological interests, somehow rising above what are viewed as subjectivist distortions of science to instead pro-duce “objective” facts and evidence for policymakers and other consumers of knowledge.

The shift away from this traditional model, which is premised on the ideals of the natural sciences and starkly outdated even by the standards of these sciences, follows several decades of analysis by many critical scholars in education and related fields who have revealed how in fact, instead of being neutral, this model masks the powerful ideology of controlling com-munities and individuals (e.g., Giroux, 2004; Harding, 1992; Howe, 2003; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2007; Morawski, 1994). Acknowledging that all hu-man activities and inquiries, including educational research, are inevitably enmeshed in webs of power relations saturated with values, ideologies, and politics, more and more researchers realize that the trajectory for participating in a democratic practice of educational research is “not away from or beyond politics, but through it” (Penuel & O’Connor, 2010, em-phasis added). This politically non-neutral orientation regards education-al research as a critical endeavor that fully abandons detached neutrality and insists that education and democratic politics do not occupy separate domains. From this position, educational research can be understood to always participate in developing “historically new forms of activity” (e.g., Gutiérrez & Larson, 2007).

These innovative perspectives and frameworks are developed with resistance from powerful players among policymakers and researchers who insist on adhering to traditional models and ideals of value neutrality, and


seek to enforce assess-and-control, evidence-based methodologies as the “gold standard” (see Lather, 2004). In order to withstand these pressures and further legitimize research with activist agendas, many challenges still need to be met. As Howe (1998) has stated, much more effort is needed to overcome “the technocratic conception” of research with its idea that social sciences and democratic politics occupy non-overlapping domains to, instead, assert that research infused with values and politics can be a profoundly powerful form of inquiry.

One of the challenges is that insofar as researchers accept that they inev-itably intervene into existing situations and that their values and goals per-meate knowledge production (cf. Penuel & O’Connor, 2010; Prilleltensky, 1997), they face accusations of ideological partiality and activism that are considered to be incompatible with traditionally understood “objective” science. Indeed, discussions around models for educational research are still ridden with anxiety that adopting goals beyond providing students with disciplinary knowledge may lead to “partisan politics” and end up not preparing them for future success in the world. A non-neutral, activist position implied in research with social agendas essentially clashes with many centuries-old, received notions about how people develop, learn, and come to know their world. The success of politically non-neutral ed-ucational models closely relies on continuous efforts to radically revise extant theories of human development and learning used to underwrite traditional objectivist science and research models.

An important strategy within such pursuits is to critically interrogate and strongly contest one of the current leading themes in theorizing human development especially prevalent in psychology, long since allied with the narrowly understood theory of evolution, and spilling into theories and research models in education. This theme pertains to the notion of adap-tation. Taken as a broad underpinning principle of human development, adaptation pictures individuals as compelled, in order to survive, to fit in with what is given in the present—what exists in the world as the socio-cultur-al and political status quo. By extrapolation, learners are understood to prepare themselves for the future that is somehow expected to arrive no matter what they do and how they contribute to social practices in their communities in the present. Many of the grounding assumptions in cur-rent models of educational research underwritten by political ideals of equality and justice do not sufficiently challenge this theme of adaptation and its often-implicit connotations. For example, the premise that devel-opment and learning are rooted in experiential presence or experiential encounter with the world (Heron & Reason, 1997), central in participa-tory approaches, does not completely avoid connotations of adapting to the status quo. These—and related notions of interpretation, dialogue,


and situativity of knowing—have been important in challenging tradi-tional “objectivist” models and accounts. Yet these notions require further critical elaboration to more resolutely break away from the idea that indi-viduals need to adapt to what is “given” in the present in order to develop and learn. The notion of participation as the basis for development and learning (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991) only partly revokes this connotation because it is premised on similar dynamics of learners being situated in community practices as they exist in the present, rather than transforming and transcending them.

The notion of adaptation is conspicuously out of sync with the realities of a rapidly changing and uncertain world, where the only “given” is its dynamic and unpredictable transformation. It is especially incongruent with research oriented to social change and active intervention into the status quo. The challenge is to develop alternative perspectives that ex-plicitly integrate activism and social change into basic descriptions of hu-man development and learning so that the resulting theory can be used to underwrite educational research with activist agendas of creating equi-table futures for youth. The grounding premise that explicitly and force-fully contests the notion of adaptation is that people develop and learn not so much as adapting, but as instead contributing to ongoing continuous transformations of community practices. Vygotsky’s collaborative project, expansively reconstructed on the basis of TAS, provides the foundation for an alternative perspective grounded in such a premise. This expansion opens up ways to more fully establish, theorize, and legitimize educational research as a critical activist practice aimed at creating more equitable futures premised on ideals of social justice and equality.

TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIVIST STANCE

TAS has been developed as an extension of Vygotsky’s project (e.g., 1997, 1998a, b) interpreted through a political-ideological, rather than value-neutral lens (see Stetsenko, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2010a, b, 2011, 2012, 2013; and for an application, see Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011). This interpretation highlights the project’s exemplary close ties with the egalitarian practices of social transformation premised on a commitment to ideals of social jus-tice and equality. Given the cultural-historical and sociopolitical circum-stances through which this theory emerged and developed, including its assimilation in Western approaches, its revolutionary meaning and implica-tions, both theoretically and methodologically, still await full explication.

Originating in the midst of dramatic revolutionary changes and on the foundation of dialectical materialist (Marxist) philosophy infused with an egalitarian socio-political ethos, Vygotsky’s project offered a radically new


perspective on human development and learning (see Gildin, this vol-ume). Rather than providing a naturalistic account based on a “view from nowhere,” the paramount goal of this project was to overcome the sepa-ration between narrowly understood research on the one hand and the ideological-critical orientation and emancipatory practice on the other. In this project, theory and methodology were developed in close, though im-plicit, alliance with ideology, ethics, and politics of social justice in order to enable a practical intervention into human development as the pathway to social change. In line with this project’s hallmark orientation to creat-ing society based on ideals of social justice and equality are its remarkable practical applications. These included developmental programs for the most disadvantaged populations, such as people who were homeless, poor, and children with disabilities including hearing and visual impairments (e.g., Meshcheryakov, 1979) and educational programs lifting all learners to the highest levels of achievement (Davydov, 1990 for an overview, see Arievitch & Stetsenko, 2000). These works showcased the central claim of Vygotsky’s project—as yet unrivaled in its radical import—that human development and learning can be understood as a collaborative and cre-ative achievement by people acting together with the help of collectively invented cultural mediators and supports. In other words, development and learning represent a continuous “work in progress,” with no imposed or predetermined limitations. This implies that all human beings have unlimited potential—and are thus profoundly equal regardless of any pu-tatively “natural” endowments or “intractable” deficits—if provided with access to requisite cultural tools within collaborative spaces of shared com-munal practices.

In furthering this agenda, and as a step toward developing a fully dialec-tical approach predicated on notions of social change and activism, TAS takes collaborative transformative practice aimed at changing the world to be constitutive of development and learning, encompassing ways of being, doing, and knowing. In expansion of Vygotsky’s tenets, the central prem-ise of TAS is that people come to know themselves and their world and ultimately come to be unique individuals in and through, rather than in ad-dition to, the process of collaboratively transforming their world in view of their goals and purposes. Furthermore, explicitly integrating Freire’s criti-cal pedagogy (e.g., 1990; see Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004; Vianna & Stet-senko, 2011) and Bakhtin’s focus on active becoming (e.g., 1990, 1993; see Stetsenko, 2007), TAS posits individually unique activist contributions to historically unfolding collaborative social practices aimed at transfor-mative changes to be the grounding for development and learning. The notion of contribution places emphasis on the interface between collec-tive and individual agency, and thus avoids reducing human development


to either an individual process or, alternatively, to the collective dynam-ics of social practices. Moreover, because all human activities, including processes of being, doing, and knowing, represent contributions to col-laborative transformative practice, the vision for the future in terms of how persons and communities believe the world ought to be (hence the notion of “endpoint”), and the commitment to realizing this vision, are posit-ed as the formative dimensions of human development. In prioritizing transformative activity with its orientation to the future and its ethically, value-laden directionality, TAS highlights activist stance vis-à-vis the world, embodied in goals and commitments to social transformation, as the key constituent of being, doing, and knowing. The realization of this activist stance through one’s answerable deeds—possible only within ongoing col-laborative practices—forms the path to personhood and knowledge. In this perspective, the ethical, future-oriented goals and endpoints appear as foundational because they are integral to acting, through which we be-come who we are and also get to know our world, all while contributing to collaborative pursuits of social transformation.

From a TAS, persons are agents not only for whom “things matter,” but also who themselves matter in history, culture, and society and, moreover, who come into being as unique individuals through their activist deeds, that is, through and to the extent that they take a stand on matters of social significance and commit to making a difference by contributing to changes in the ongoing social practices. This means that there is no way that we can extract ourselves from this activist engagement; we can never take a neutral stance of disinterested observers uninvolved in what is go-ing on. A human being who, in order to be, needs to act in the social world that is constantly changing and, moreover, that is changing through one’s own deeds, cannot be neutral or uncertain because such acting—unlike react-ing or passively dwelling—presupposes knowing what is right or wrong, and which direction one wants and needs to go.

This requires that we develop a compass about our location in the ongo-ing flow of transformative collaborative practices: where we are coming from, where we are now, and where we are going, and want to be go-ing, next. What is highlighted is the activist, forward-looking stance and, therefore, the horizon and the destination of one’s pursuits as defining no less than the foundation for our being, doing, and knowing in the present. To emphasize again, this brings the dimensions of activism, and with it, of the ethical-valuational (and political) dimensions to the very center of all hu-man endeavors, including the activities of research. Given this distinctive core of TAS, teaching and learning constitute the pathway for individuals to acquire the cultural tools that allow for participation in and contribu-tion to social practices and, thus, the pathway to becoming individually


unique. In this view, education is not about acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowing, but a project of becoming a certain kind of a person, as critical theorists have argued all along. What is added by TAS, however, is that this project needs to be understood as grounded in one’s activist pursuits premised on endpoints of social change to which persons and communities commit themselves.

This position presupposes a change in no less than the most basic as-sumptions about development and learning in terms of ontology (what we take the world to be) and epistemology (what we take our knowing of the world to be). Ontologically, the assumption is that the world is not just given to us in its status quo, as a fixed and static structure “out there” that exists independently of us and unfolds on its own grounds, no matter what we do. Instead, the world is seen as historically evolving and, moreover, as continuously changing and constantly “in the making”: composed of collaborative practices to which we all contribute in our unique ways. The realm of collaborative transformative practices, therefore, is seen as an arena in which human development and learning take place. A related as-sumption is that the future never simply awaits us, but instead is created in the present through even seemingly mundane deeds by common people in their ordinary lives—thus implying that actually no person is common and no life ordinary.

Epistemologically, the process of knowing is understood to be contingent on our activist involvement in and contributions to collaborative trans-formative practices. This is in line with the well-known Marxist maxim that in order to know the world, we have to change it. Moreover, know-ing and being are revealed in TAS as inextricably connected because both are posited to be contingent on how we act in pursuits of socially rel-evant goals. For example, knowing something is fully reliant on how we position ourselves vis-à-vis ongoing social practices and their historically evolved structures and conflicts. The reverse is also true in that we are able to position ourselves in personally unique ways, thus developing our identities, based in what we know about social practices and their his-tories, since this knowledge provides the baseline from which we learn how to contribute to them. Therefore, becoming and being human and our knowing about the world are closely intertwined as facets of one and the same activist project aimed at contributing to social practices in their constant dynamic transformations.

Similar to other critical, human science, and participatory perspectives, TAS features human development as embedded in and contingent on rela-tions with and participation in stratified social practices marked by power dynamics. However, in integrating the notions of social change and activism into the most basic groundings of development and learning, TAS breaks


more radically with the notions of a static world and of adaptation to the status quo. Taking activist being, doing, and knowing in place of adaption resolutely debunks connotations associated with the ideology of adaptation. This opens ways to better position researchers to overcome the disguised ideology of political quietism that perpetuates existing injustices. Given this emphasis, TAS provides strong warrants and legitimation for research that aims to challenge social hierarchies and hegemonic agendas by self-con-sciously intervening into the status quo, as is illustrated in the next section.

One important caveat is that the centrality of activism and endpoints in development and learning does not imply that these processes are ei-ther fixed or static. On the contrary, adopting endpoints is a process that is always shifting and changing because it is embedded in the constantly changing and dynamic flux of collaborative practices. That is, commit-ments, stands, and agendas are always in the process of coming about, requiring continuous renewal and contestation in dialogue with others, while facing up to the newly emerging challenges that arise every step of the way. Therefore, the danger is not in taking a stance and making a commitment. Instead, the danger is in taking these to be finite and un-changing, in neglecting open-ended dialogues with others who have dif-ferent visions and commitments. That is, the danger is in elevating one’s own agenda as a rigidly pre-established dogma not amenable to change, instead of exposing and critically interrogating it, all while negotiating points of agreements and conflicts with others.

A RESEARCH MODEL BASED ON TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIVIST STANCE

TAS suggests that a committed activist position based on a clear goal or endpoint serves as the starting point of any activity, including activities of educational research and knowledge production. In understanding that research and knowledge are always saturated with values and pow-er dynamics, TAS is in solidarity with many recently developed critical perspectives in education. However, many of these extant accounts are satisfied to accept that our knowing is from a perspective, calling on re-searchers to articulate and pay attention to their own impartialities. This often suggests that researchers cannot escape perspectival “blind spots” and have to learn to live with this unavoidable limitation imposed on our knowing and research.

TAS, however, suggests that it is only on the grounds of and from within an activist agenda that any knowing, including through conducting re-search, is possible in principle. All human beings, researchers not ex-cluded, by virtue of being human, always de facto act from within their agendas and visions for the future. It is impossible to avoid drawing on


our commitments that are ineluctably embodied in every act of doing and knowing. This grounding of knowledge and research in activist actions is seen in TAS not as a limitation, but as the necessary condition that provides firm anchors for conducting research. These anchors include the require-ment that the warrants for knowledge claims be based on certain criteria, such as whether knowledge provides conditions for forms of life and social organization consistent with the ideological commitments that researchers take on. Instead of being subjective, such an approach in fact allows for “strong objectivity” (Harding, 1992). In addition, TAS insists on exposing ideological-political underpinnings of research so as to make them open to contestation and objection (note the etymological similarity between “objecting” and “objectivity”), rather than leaving these hidden under the disguise of traditional value neutrality. A strong objective foundation for knowledge, therefore, is sought in clearly defining its practical relevance within the always non-neutral pursuits of intervening into the status quo.

This conclusion not only elevates the demand that researchers declare their values, goals, and commitments, but also urges that these are used as the core grounding for research design and methods. The corner-stone of this research model is formed by commitment to social trans-formation that uniquely positions researchers to see what is through the prism of how the present situations and conditions came to be, and also in light of what ought to be. In this, the historicity and situativity of knowl-edge is ascertained alongside its future orientation, thus overcoming the infamous “is-ought” dichotomy.

In this emphasis, the similarity with and the difference between this perspective and standpoint epistemology (e.g., Harding, 1992, 2004) is brought to the fore. Standpoint epistemology considers all knowledge to be contextualized, interpretative, and contingent on the positions and interests of those who produce (or consume) it. TAS fully accepts that knowledge is contingent on the position from which it is produced. At the same time, TAS makes the critical addition that knowledge is also strongly contingent on the destination toward which those producing knowledge are oriented, hence the term “endpoint epistemology,” to complement, or augment, the standpoint epistemology.2 Such endpoints have to be worked out by researchers and participants together, through explorations into the presently existing conflicts and contradictions within their com-munity practices, including their histories. Critical teaching–learning can provide the tools for such explorations; for example, by opening up the horizons of possibility and, thus, setting the stage for forming commit-ments and carrying out projects that bring these commitments into reality. Consistent with standpoint epistemology, knowledge and expertise of par-ticipants, especially those from disadvantaged populations, are elevated


as invaluable sources of insights into the present conflicts and contradic-tions, thus prioritizing participants’ voices. Yet TAS also calls upon all par-ticipating sides to critically interrogate and step beyond the presently giv-en circumstances, and their own views, in order to imagine the future and devise the kinds of projects that may bring this future into reality together. In this emphasis, TAS insists that research not only inevitably intervenes into the status quo but also is directly, explicitly, and self-critically designed to intervene into the status quo, which can only be done based on an activist commitment to changing it in particular directions.

This position expands the activist reach of educational research models. Indeed, research with progressive social agendas typically asks not just to de-fine significant, investigable questions. Instead, it also demands that we ask, “From whose perspective is the question significant? What phenomena are worth studying? Who decides?” (e.g., Penuel & O’Connor, 2010). What TAS adds to this is an explicit emphasis on the following questions: “For what goals are the questions we ask significant?” and “What kind of a future are answers to our questions likely to contribute to?” The ultimately important task behind these questions is that researchers and participants collaboratively figure out what version of democracy and community practices to work toward.

TAS provides the grounding for educational research as an active proj-ect of intervention into the status quo while creating conditions and pro-viding the tools for participants to transcend it. In particular, the tools of critical-theoretical knowledge are drawn upon for collective critique of existing practices in their historically evolving contradictions and, thus, for locating ourselves in “the here and now” viewed through the lens of history. At the same time, this critique needs to simultaneously spur partic-ipants and researchers to take an activist stand vis-à-vis these circumstances and to commit to bring a collectively imagined possible future into reality. The complex dialectic highlighted by TAS is the following: It is impos-sible to imagine a possible future unless we have located ourselves in our present moment and its history; however, the reverse is also true in that we cannot locate ourselves in the present and its history unless we imagine the future and commit to creating it. The role of theoretical knowledge is, therefore, radically recast from being inert information into an instru-ment of activism and transformative change.

In sum, TAS calls for research to be carried out not in ways that prepare students for the future that will somehow arrive irrespective of what they do in the present. Instead, the key focus is on how research contributes to creating, together with participants and through the tools that expand common agency and horizons, the very future that is to come through our own activist deeds. The principles of TAS-based educational research can be articulated as follows:


• The starting broad premise is that research situations, just as the world itself, are a historically constituted and constantly changing work-in-progress collectively realized through collaborative activi-ties and unique contributions by participants. These situations are therefore infused with conflicting issues of power and values, and thus contingent, contested, and amenable to change.

• Participants are agentive actors of their own lives and communities directly implicated in creating their own futures, capable of instigat-ing changes in the status quo while transcending its limitations and impositions.

• Researchers’ initial commitments—vis-à-vis ongoing power dynam-ics and how they can and ought to be changed—set the stage for designing all research components and steps. An explicit and open articulation of commitments is a constitutive and legitimate part of methodology; for example, dictating how the research site is cho-sen, which questions are asked, and what data are collected, inter-preted, analyzed, and disseminated.

• Researchers’ initial commitments are not fully characterized, nor completely sufficient in advance of research. Instead, they need to be explored and expanded in collaboration with participants and con-stantly updated in light of unfolding dynamics instigated in and by research. The working out of a common vision/endpoint and agenda for social change through research is its most critical component.

• The ensuing collaborative project of realizing a common agenda provides the context in which knowledge is produced and war-ranted. Strong objectivity has to do with transparency of ideologi-cal underpinnings and goals of research to which others can object. Knowledge validity is defined by its relevance within projects that empower participants as agents of change.

• Theoretical knowledge is a tool to critically analyze the present sta-tus quo and its history so as to open up possibilities for change and define its endpoint. The endpoint, in turn, sheds light on the pres-ent status quo and its history, thus connecting the past, the pres-ent, and the future dimensions of communal practices. Working through this dialectic of interconnections across time scales and between the “is” in its historicity and the “ought” is the core compo-nent of research.

• Research inevitably taps into and disrupts, already through its “mere” presence, the status quo at research sites. The interventionist


and “disruptive” nature of research is expounded and magnified, rather than only acknowledged and accepted. Clearly taking sides within these power dynamics is, therefore, not only inevitable, but also necessary and ultimately beneficial, whereas a neutral stance is not an option.

• Research is a joint endeavor between researchers and participants; participants’ expertise, especially from marginalized groups, pro-vides invaluable insights into power dynamics and conditions at re-search sites. Developing a common endpoint and agenda for social change is accomplished through critically interrogating strengths and contradictions of positions taken by all parties involved.

All of the above suggests that researchers and participants act as collab-orative change agents, or activists, rather than observers or interpreters of reality. Due to research always intervening into and disrupting the status quo, its social risks, costs, and benefits need to be examined and con-tinuously negotiated every step of the way. Research also entails turning personal engagement into a research tool, thus bringing in dimensions of personal responsibility and vulnerability and rendering research a simul-taneously personal, political, and conceptual endeavor.

COLLABORATIVE PROJECT WITH YOUTH IN A GROUP HOME AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF TAS-BASED PEDAGOGY AND RESEARCH

We turn now to a research project carried out by the first author3 together with and for the benefit of youth in foster care (ages 12-18) in a group home for boys. The first author was initially hired as a psychologist with the expectation that he would address the dire situation in the program wherein staff and residents were locked in an antagonistic power strug-gle. This project, however, evolved into a pursuit to radically transform community practice in the group home into a more democratic context and an alternative learning site where youth in care could exercise their agency and develop activist agendas of social transformation. We focus on this project because it demonstrates the core dimensions of a TAS-based educational model as an activist endeavor.

ENTERING/TAKING A STAND IN A CONTESTED SITE

Upon joining the program, the first author soon realized that the power struggles in the program manifested a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle of contradictions between control and resistance (see Polsky, 1962, 2003 on custodialism in youth residential institutions). From the staff’s perspec-tive, the boys were emotionally disturbed (e.g., excessively angry, which


they attributed to the boys’ history of abuse) and, thus, in need of disci-pline, control, and clinical treatment. For them, their job was to main-tain institutional practices and compliance by controlling the boys with frequent punitive measures. For the boys, on the other hand, institu-tional practices, especially the staff’s authoritarian style, were the source of oppression and a seemingly intractable predicament, something they felt powerless to change and could only react to in the form of resistance and rebellion. Having their lives controlled by multiple authorities—case workers, program staff, judges—with often uncoordinated views and strat-egies, and not being allowed significant participation in decisions about their lives, the boys felt oppressed and sought ways to assert their severely constrained agency by resisting institutional rules. This understandable resistance took the form of rebellious non-compliance with institutional rules without it being complemented with a clear vision for collaborative changes in the program. Without such a collective vision for transforming community practices, even in rebelling against injustices, the boys were re-producing many structural features of the oppressive systems they sought to reject. For example, they adopted a strong individualist stance and en-acted a “macho” culture with a hierarchical system among themselves in which “tougher” boys oppressed weaker peers.

Despite their antagonistic positioning, boys and staff frequently engaged in shared cultural practices (e.g., enjoying music and sports together, tell-ing jokes, participating in community events) where they seemed to take a common position as members of a racially oppressed group. However, reliance on dominant contradictory and stereotyped discourses on how to deal with a structurally racist society effectively prevented staff and boys from fully sustaining their solidarity and developing common agency. For instance, ventriloquating social discourses mired in individualism led them to portray themselves at once as victims of historically conditioned oppression and, yet, as somehow responsible for their own shortcomings due to putatively “wrong” values, such as prioritizing consumerist needs (e.g., clothes, jewelry, and partying) over hard work and education. More-over, deficit views inherent in such discourses emphasized the values of discipline and control, leading the staff to punish the victims, rather than imagining viable alternatives.

Another key aspect of the boys’ thematic universe, not at all unexpected in light of the critical literature on traditional schooling, was their view of learning as another form of control which they had to resist, especially as they felt stigmatized in their schools as children in care4. Seeing learning as a forced chore, the boys seemed to lack the motivation to study, do-ing homework mechanically; this was not surprising as their schoolwork emphasized memorization and drills. As a result, many boys stayed back


in the same grade and the program manager received almost daily com-plaints from the schools about the boys’ behavior, including frequent sus-pensions.5 Lacking almost any support in learning, it was up to each boy whether or not to take studies seriously, mostly confirming the staff’s defi-cit views about their putative “intrinsic” lack of academic motivation and ability. Thus, the boys’ positioning toward learning contributed to their conflict with the staff who, in turn, took it as further indicating the need to control and discipline the boys.

In that context, educational expectations for the boys, as reflected in institutional practices such as treatment plans, were very limited, which seemed justified to the staff. Ironically, staff and boys viewed learning in essentially similar ways, especially in dichotomizing academic and practi-cal knowledge. For them, the former (“book smarts”) was conflated with inert, abstract, or useless information, or with erudition and etiquette, akin to cultural capital whose value was predicated on joining a “cultured” professional elite. Since that path was thwarted for the boys, academic knowledge was greatly devalued, reproducing the traditional academic-vocational divide. As going to college was virtually out of reach, vocational education or entry into the low-wage job market were considered to be the most favorable outcomes. Not surprisingly, the boys resisted those op-tions, which they saw as capitulating to a life in poverty. For instance, one of the boys told the first author that he refused to spend his life asking “paper or plastic,” referring to work in grocery stores. Another boy said that he “would rather sell drugs than be poor.” Having their future aspira-tions drastically reduced intensified the boys’ sense of constrained agency, further fueling rebelliousness. To the staff, this amounted to an immature and obstinate refusal to accept reality, which they sought to overcome by submitting the boys to discipline and control.

Caught up in the midst of such conflicting agendas, it was clear that the first author could not take an impartial position. On the one hand, the staff expected that the researcher would clinically intervene in the boys’ problems. On the other hand, the boys were well aware of the staff’s expectations for the researcher and preemptively rejected working with him. Fully aware that any position taken would necessarily intervene in the status quo at that contested site, and contribute, in one way or an-other, to its power dynamics, the first author did not attempt to (and could not) remain a neutral observer. Guided by a collectivist-egalitarian ideal, he entered the program with a vision for reconfiguring its power rela-tions. Overall, this vision had to do with creating an alternative learning context where emancipatory knowledge could be reclaimed as a tool for the boys to advance their own agency and activism. Moreover, it included approaching the boys as active and, therefore, also accountable agents


whose position was not only legitimate, but also the basis to understand and transform their oppressive community practices. This entailed taking a position of solidarity with the boys and rejecting the staff’s approach, including its implication that the boys suffered from psychopathology.

However, this initial vision did not, and could not, guide all the steps in what was envisioned as a collaborative project of social change. It had to be gradually expanded through a lengthy process and on the grounds of the boys’ knowledge and expertise, themselves strengthened and expanded through the tools of critical-theoretical learning into a collective vision for what was possible and desirable to change in the program. Given complex and layered dynamics at the research site, achieving this goal was inevita-bly enmeshed in intricate webs of power relationships and, thus, inher-ently saturated with values and politics. Nonetheless, it was the conflictual nature of the practices in the program that set the stage for this research project highlighting the need—and an opportunity!—for radical chang-es. The researcher knew well that all the dynamics in this local program were ultimately contingent on the larger structures of the child welfare system, including the interrelated practices of intersecting systems of care. However, even though intervening in any substantial way in these larger social structures was fundamentally out of reach, the researcher commit-ted to what was an opening for change, however partial, imperfect, and localized, exactly because the program was a small bounded community in which all efforts mattered and each contribution could potentially make a big difference.

THE COLLABORATIVE EMERGENCE OF A COLLECTIVE VISION THROUGH THE TOOLS OF CRITICAL-THEORETICAL LEARNING

Inspired by a collectivist-egalitarian ethos, the researcher began this project by, paradoxically as it seemed to the staff, embracing the boys’ voices and views and expanding, rather than restraining, their agency. The first step consisted in learning about and witnessing the boys’ predicament, what Freire (1970/1990) called the thematic universe of the oppressed. This included understanding how they perceived their plight (e.g., through discourses on race and inequality) and their limited situations, those that appeared impossible to change. As the first author quickly learned, two themes stood out: (1) the boys’ desire to expand their agency and (2) their frustration, even hopelessness, over the possibility of changing their situation. In addition, the first author began advocating for the boys, for instance, by mediating their conflicts with the staff and pressing the man-ager to avoid discharging disruptive boys on the guarantee that he would try and work out a solution with them.


Furthermore, in his efforts to address the thematic universe of the boys, he began to create opportunities for them to expand their agency through novel collaborative activities devised with them (e.g., collective video project, films, and trips to museums, galleries, and parks in New York City).6 These activities responded to the boys’ desire to participate in the decisions involving them, no matter how small. Due to its demo-cratic character, the first author’s work with the boys increasingly, though not always, bypassed the need to resort to the type of authority typically invoked by the staff.7 The prompt success in engaging boys in these activi-ties convinced the program administration to support them. This, in turn, opened the way to negotiate a radical departure from the researcher’s initial clinically oriented job description. The project goal to develop an alternative learning context was accepted and now aligned with the new job description.

Gradually, as the boys began to “open up” to the researcher, he began to learn from them and to witness with them, however incompletely, the extent to which they were oppressed not only in the program, but also within a wide range of contexts, including their schools. Increasingly, the boys came to regard the researcher’s efforts as genuinely in line with their standpoint, though initially still fraught with conflict and always requiring negotiation of multiple interests, which bolstered their respect for him and reconfigured his authority status along democratic lines. The growing possibility of dialoguing to reach mutual agreement led the boys to see the first author as an ally, which gave them a glimpse of hope that their situation could be changed and that space could be cre-ated in the program for them to exercise their agency. On this ground, the researcher began to invite the boys to develop a collective vision to together transform their community practices and break off the vicious cycle of control and rebelliousness.

Importantly, rather than being rigidly imposed top-down onto partic-ipants, the researcher’s vision and goals, incipient as they were, had to be negotiated, discussed, and expanded in dialogue with youth, in light of their standpoint and goals and their having witnessed social oppres-sion. Thus, the researcher’s endpoint opened up, rather than closed off, the process of knowing and constructing egalitarian community practices. This included relying on the boys’ expertise and knowledge while also challenging and contesting some of their views, and simultaneously being challenged and contested by them too, in pursuit of a common agenda. In this process, all positions and claims to privilege were scrutinized, in-cluding the youths’ reliance on dominant cultural discourses and biases, as well as the researcher’s position and his vision. For instance, the boys frequently challenged the researcher’s pleas that they respect the staff and


not act aggressively, on the grounds that if they did not vehemently press on with their demands they would continue to be abused. Moreover, some of them at first openly questioned the first author’s motives, especially in his focus on knowledge, which sounded to them as elitist or, worse, a ca-pitulation to what they saw as white supremacist society.

Increasingly, the collaborative activities implemented became sites for critical inquiry whereby transforming community practices were posed as a collective problem. Even though implementing learning was not initially possible, already the first initiatives addressed issues of power and social inequality. For instance, the films the boys watched (e.g., One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) had social critique content and addressed institutional practices, which resonated with their lives. The researcher was later able to implement more explicit learning activities (e.g., a book club and tutoring for schoolwork), which then expanded into quasi-for-mal learning through a series of weeks-long workshops.8 The resulting alternative learning context created the conditions to introduce critical social theories to the boys.

Following critical-theoretical pedagogy, those workshops focused on scientific concepts taught in schools, including critical-theoretical analy-ses of social practices. Integrating and expanding Vygotskian systemic-theoretical instruction (see Davydov, 1990 Gal’perin, 1989) and Freirean critical pedagogy, the cornerstone of critical-theoretical pedagogy pre-mised on TAS is to provide conceptual tools for youth to define their present location within social practices and understand key contradic-tions while developing a collective vision (endpoint) about how to trans-form these practices and themselves. Because of this combination of sys-temic-theoretical and critical dimensions, we refer to these activities as critical-theoretical pedagogy (see Stetsenko, 2010b; Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011). For example, one of the most important workshops introduced political economy through the prism of consumption and advertising by tracing how design emerged historically as a tool for advertising and propaganda. The boys learned how logos and images function to sell products, with a special emphasis on how corporations target teenag-ers’ evolving attitudes to increase consumption. Thus, they began to per-ceive generic adolescents’ desires for brand-named clothing as integral to marketing practices of consumerist society. This revealed to the boys another facet of their own unmet desire for particular clothing (e.g., expensive types of sneakers), which shed light on their own participation in broad societal practices.

An important consequence of engaging the boys in critical-theoret-ical teaching–learning was that it significantly transformed the mean-ing of learning for them. Generalized concepts—typically portrayed as


“abstract” and formerly resisted by the boys as arbitrary and meaning-less—were demystified and turned into meaningful activity. For exam-ple, reading Freire’s (1970/1990) work was key to helping the boys mas-ter theoretical generalizations as tools to systematically relate a range of apparently disconnected observations and experiences. One example included drawing links between pedagogical practices and learning out-comes in schools. Many boys found Freire’s concept of the “banking” type of education—the assumption that knowledge can be deposited into individual heads like deposits of money at a bank—very revealing. It allowed them to transform their understanding of their educational shortcomings from solely an individual failure to the instantiation of a societal problem embedded in a broad system of historically institution-alized inequitable social relations and practices.

Aided by critical-theoretical concepts, the boys’ view of institutional practices as impossible to change began to give way to an increased desire to better analyze such practices in order to transform them. Through the tools of critical–theoretical knowledge they could now examine—and re-flect on their stance toward—the manifold contradictions in their com-munity practices while drawing systematic connections among histories and layers in social practices and exploring possibilities for collective agency. For instance, the boys began to question the value of determin-istic views that posited society as inevitably stratified and normative with some groups dominating others. Thus, they came to recognize that such views, which imply that hopes for social change are futile, in fact pro-mote the status quo and an individualistic stance, thereby impeding the goal of constructing egalitarian community practices. This new under-standing spurred the boys’ commitment to fight such stereotypes and change their community practices.

Furthermore, they began to grasp that sheer resistance might be self-defeating because it reinforced the staff’s view that they suffered from emotional disturbances and, in effect, sustained the existing status quo. This critical analysis mediated by theoretical concepts allowed the boys to recognize how they and the staff were locked in an “additive” miscon-ception of empowerment, in which gains in agency on one side implied loss of agency on the other. This instigated the boys to reimagine their community practices in ways that would expand their agency synergis-tically on the grounds of solidarity. Thus, critical-theoretical teaching–learning emerged as a central activity in the program, driven by the boys’ own desire to acquire conceptual tools for empowerment and social change. Insofar as these concepts enabled the boys to see the possibility of change and the practical value to what they used to view as useless, “abstract” knowledge, they became tools of their agency and identity by


spurring their activist positioning toward community practices, learning, and their future lives (for a detailed description of these dynamics, see Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011).

These changes had great impact on the staff as well. As the boys’ em-braced learning as a meaningful activity, and improved their performance at school, including grades and graduation rates, their transformation un-dermined the staff’s thematic universe. In fact, their deficit views of the boys and their pessimism about the possibility of change began to crack. One of the most significant shifts was that the boys began to demand changes in the structure of the program and its institutional rules, such as a different schedule for study time and more space to accommodate both individual and group work. Further, the boys’ commitment to their stud-ies made more evident the need to close some gaps, particularly the in-consistent communication between the program and their schools. Thus, the boys began pressuring the staff to pressure the program director to respond to their teachers’ requests and notifications and follow through with those (e.g., ensuring that books and materials were provided in a timely way). Yet another change in the program was to deemphasize its clinical aspects. Though the program had to follow rules imposed by state child protective services, such as a mandatory “treatment” plan for each boy requiring clinical analysis, boys and staff began to cooperate to find ways to avoid excessive and unnecessary clinical examinations and treat-ments. Thus, the changes instigated by the project were not restricted to changes in boys’ conduct or attitudes only. Instead, they were synergistic with the changes in community practice.

Gradually, the boys’ desire for a comfortable, more peaceful and demo-cratic home, where they were respected and their voices heard, began to be realized. Increasingly, staff and boys began to see each other more as allies, which strengthened their sense of community. The number of inci-dents of noncompliance with program rules started to go down and puni-tive actions by the staff sharply decreased too, leading to fewer conflicts. A new daily routine was established, and boys stopped running away from the program.9 From having cleaner facilities to having more varied activi-ties relevant to the boys, from being capable of and interested in learning to gaining the staff’s respect and investment in them, a novel and more democratic community practice took root in the program. Gradually, boys and staff together dismantled the hierarchical power structure based on authoritarian control and its corollary system of favoritism and spurious alliances. In this process, the vicious cycle was broken as the contradiction between control and resistance gave way to a new power dynamic based on solidarity and collaboration in efforts to transcend and transform the status quo.


THE JOYS AND CHALLENGES OF ACTIVIST TRANSFORMATION

Articulating and committing to this project and taking the position of soli-darity, however incompletely, with participants in pursuit of its common vi-sion entailed professional risk, making oneself vulnerable to critique, and a great deal of personal responsibility on the part of the first author. This was, in our view, key to breaking the vicious cycle of conflict in the residen-tial program. Throughout this process, and very acutely in its initial phases, when the researcher confronted resistance from both boys and staff and was under pressure to conform to expectations about his role, his personal activist commitment to this project was at once a source of susceptibility and an invaluable asset. By taking a critical stand against current community practices, he risked bearing the hubris not infrequently leveled against aca-demics for privileging their abstract knowledge over the situated knowledge of practitioners and participants. Moreover, his insistence on theoretical knowledge could have been perceived as smacking of elitism, especially as staff and boys could not initially understand how it could be turned into a tool for democratic pursuits of equality. Yet the destructive impact of the status quo on the boys’ lives was too dramatic not to take action. In addi-tion, the moral imperative to act was all the more forceful, as the researcher believed he had access to theoretical knowledge that offered a vision of how change could be possible. Clearly, the epistemological dimensions of this project were at once ineluctably ethical and political.

Among the many ethical issues involved in this project, two deserved constant consideration. First, just the decision to work within an institu-tional system where youth were vulnerable to harm was a relentless di-lemma. This was a particularly difficult problem, as the researcher neither had direct access to the boys’ families, nor the capacity to work with them in any systematic way. Second, given the power dynamics in the program where the staff had all the power and also resisted change, the project was predicated on and required the boys to become the primary engine of change. One has to wonder if it was fair to have relied on their vulner-ability and lack of options to launch this research project. Yet, as Freire has claimed, it is the oppressed who have the strength for the emancipatory struggle since the oppressor is chained up by his privileges. From that perspective, on balance, and in light of the researcher’s position in the program at the time—including being an immigrant graduate student—it seemed justifiable to provide the tools for the boys to empower themselves to transform their present circumstances and create equitable futures for them. An additional problem was that it was not possible to maintain ties with the boys once they aged out of the system, and thus ensure that changes were long lasting (see Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011).


Lastly, the inevitably limited scope of this project—pursued within the local context of a singular group home—also raised important issues con-cerning its implications for policy, institutional practices, and the personal welfare of the participants. Given the many limitations of this small-scale project, it had to be concerned with local-level transformation and did not and could not address the systemic and structural issues of inequal-ity and poverty, the root causes of the foster care problem. This does not mean that we view local transformations as the privileged level for improv-ing oppressive situations such as the one at the group home. Ultimately, wide and far-reaching systematic policy changes are urgently needed at many levels, from the child welfare system to broad economic policies. However, as TAS argues and this project illustrates, individual and local transformation are integral dimensions of social change, with all of these processes spurring and necessitating each other. While local and personal transformations are not enough to bring about lasting and profound so-cial change, they are nevertheless an indispensable level in the struggle for social justice and equality that cannot result from changes imposed in a top-down fashion from the broad structural level only.

In spite of all these limitations, and in part precisely because of them, it was an immense joy to the researchers to directly contribute to such wide-ranging transformation of what many regard as incorrigible institutional practices, and to the development of youth in foster care as activist agents of their communities and lives. As institutional practices of control and punish-ment began to recede to the background, and a rugged individualist stand-point gradually gave way to an ethics of care and mutual growth, a great deal of excitement spread through the program, especially as the boys’ achieve-ment began to materialize in academic success driven by a genuine desire to learn and to contribute to their community practices. Indeed, one of the greatest sources of joy to all involved in this project was witnessing the boys’ hope grow proportionally with their success in their collective fight for an equitable and compelling future. Moreover, there was also great joy in creat-ing conditions for staff development, as this project provided them with an alternative conception of youth development. Altogether, this was a great de-velopmental opportunity for the first author insofar as he had to learn from the boys (and staff), on a continuous basis, how to be egalitarian and act in solidarity. There is great danger for researchers, as outsiders in a community practice, to take on a superior position as the expert who will guide those in subaltern positions, a stance that ultimately further robs the oppressed from their agency. From this perspective, this project was an exercise in balancing hope and humility, committing to change by including oneself in communal action among others as agents whose openness to personal transformation is both the condition for and the outcome of collaborative transformations.


CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, we presented the theoretical rationale for a TAS-based model of engaged, politically non-neutral educational research with an activist agenda that aims to challenge and transform power dynamics at research sites while relying on notions of social change and activism as foundational to development and learning. The group home project provided a dramatic illustration to the key methodology and principles of this model. In line with other educational research models premised on social justice and equality, this project centrally engaged the youth in solidarity supporting the struggle against their predicament within existing structures of child welfare practices marked by locked cycles of oppression and rebellion.

Due to the researcher’s placing himself in a position not of authority, but solidarity with the boys (however incompletely and imperfectly), he had the privilege of viewing societal practices from their perspective, which revealed with immense clarity how those practices failed youth and their families. The research model was not limited to merely witness-ing or recording youth positions and did not treat these positions as a “given” (e.g., as free from their own contradictions and inconsistencies due to their reliance on dominant cultural discourses). Consequently, the researcher did not stay away from challenging and contesting them. Instead, all participants—including the researcher and the staff in the group home—mutually challenged each other to move beyond their current views in pursuit of a common agenda of realizing the goals to establish more democratic community practices. This serves to illustrate that the TAS-based model does not imply that researchers are positioned as primary arbiters and, instead, suggests that all participating sides are challenged and changed in the process of working out and realizing a common agenda. The researcher must commit to critical self-analysis whereby the initial stance and agenda dynamically develops as it is con-tinuously negotiated, contested, and changed in dialogue and collabo-ration with youth. Power relationships between researchers and partici-pants must be unmasked, interrogated, and transformed.

TAS research fully engages youth in research as agents who contribute to enacting the practices whose transformation is the collectively constituted object of study, and whose development as self-transformation is, thus, an indispensable facet of the envisioned social change. A critical dimension of this work consists in reclaiming theoretical knowledge as a tool with which youth can better locate themselves within current cultural-historical and socio-political processes and their histories, while taking an activist stance toward them to become agents who change their communities,


rather than adapt to them. This objective required moving beyond sheer resistance, which, ironically, served to accommodate and perpetuate the oppressive status quo.

Importantly, our TAS-based research project was a catalyst of a bi-direc-tional and synergistic transformation that was social and personal at once, with both forms serving as facets of one and the same process of changing com-munity practice and its participants. Not only did the boys change them-selves in the course of this project, they did so while and through instigat-ing important changes in their community practices. Yet the reverse was also true in that contributing to social changes at the collective level made each boy’s personal transformation possible. That is, based on the dialectics highlighted by TAS, social change and individual development appeared as directly connected to social praxis; self-change, as itself a social endeavor, was not eschewed either. Understood not as an individual “psychological” endeavor, personal transformation instead was carried out as part and par-cel of collaborative practice. This perspective, therefore, affords ways to rec-oncile emphasis on personal and collaborative dimensions of transforma-tion at the intersection of individual and collective agency, thus overcoming the outdated dichotomy of agency versus structure. The individual and the social dimensions are understood to exist in a mutually determining rela-tionship as conveyed by the notion of “collectividual” (Stetsenko, 2012).

To summarize, TAS is fundamentally about the belief that change is pos-sible and that social practices and structures are not beyond the scope of intervention and revision (including through educational research), how-ever modest, limited, and imperfect each particular instance of effecting changes might be. TAS also highlights that, ultimately, we only know the world through actively and collaboratively, in individually unique ways, en-gaging in transforming the status quo while being ourselves transformed in the process. This position connects to Freire’s (1970/1990) point that imagining and envisioning a different world than the one of oppression is necessary to the praxis of transforming reality. It also highlights that achieving critical consciousness is made possible through learning via critical-theoretical tools, which enables students to grasp the power to remake themselves as agents capable of transcending their circumstanc-es—including in challenging and changing themselves—in the continu-ous dialectical spiral of human development premised on the notion of change instead of adaptation. The critical component throughout is that this knowing is possible only from within an engagement in collaborative projects of social transformation. Therefore, ultimately, TAS can be seen not as another abstract or doctrinaire approach, but rather as one of the steps on the way to advancing and ascertaining educational research as a critical praxis of social change with an activist agenda.


Notes

1. The first section is condensed from Stetsenko (2008), Stetsenko (2010b), Stetsenko (2012) and Stetsenko (in press).

2. In differentiating TAS from standpoint epistemology, we focus more on “end-points” and how they shape commitments to social change, although transforma-tive activist stance is always about both endpoints (as an orientation to the future) and standpoints (as a historical location from which being, doing, and knowing are launched).

3. This is a reconceptualization of the first author’s original study, carried out under the supervision of the second author as his doctoral advisor at the time, now expanded and explicated in light of the theoretical development in TAS made by the second author.

4. The boys zealously avoided disclosing their youth in care status by keeping their distance from group home peers while in school and even bullying inadver-tent peers who violated this tacit rule.

5. To complicate matters, support for the boys’ schoolwork was very limited as delegated only to the youth counselors’ typically inconsistent initiatives.

6. Some boys, especially in the early stages of this project, refused to participate in these activities (e.g., the video project) without any punitive consequence.

7. The first author was not directly involved in the boys’ case management and was, thus, excluded from decisions about discharging boys from the program, as well as any decision-making about reunification or adoption plans, although he was consulted, albeit inconsistently, on these matters. Moreover, disciplining and punishing the boys was explicitly outside his purview, so that any incident was re-ported to the staff for their discretionary sanctions.

8. See Vianna (2009) for a more thorough account of how learning motives were infused into play activities to facilitate the emergence of learning as the lead-ing activity in the program.

9. At least within the next two years, while the first author was still working in the program, and for two additional years while he was still in contact with the program.


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EDUARDO VIANNA is an Associate Professor at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York City. He has won several awards, in-cluding The CUNY Graduate Center President’s Dissertation Scholarship and the 2010 Early Career Award in Cultural-Historical Research, awarded by the Cultural-Historical Special Interest Group of the American Educa-tional Research Association. His research and publications focus on the in-tersection between teaching–learning and development through critical-theoretical pedagogy, particularly in settings that serve underprivileged youth. His latest publication, co-authored with Anna Stetsenko entitled, Connecting learning and identity development through a transformative activist stance: Application in adolescent development in a child welfare program, appeared in Human Development in 2011.

ANNA STETSENKO is a Full Professor in the PhD Program in Psychol-ogy, with joint appointment in the PhD Program in Urban Education at The Graduate Center CUNY. Her research is situated at the intersection of human development, social theory, and education, including topics of subjectivity, collective agency, and personhood viewed through the lens of social change. Prior to working in the United States, she worked at univer-sities and research centers in Russia, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. She has published in English, Russian, Italian, and German. Her theory has been characterized “as exemplifying major currents in developmen-tal theorizing about agency” (Sugarman & Sokol, New Ideas in Psychology, 2012) and a recent chapter as among “the most provocative and probing essays you will ever read on the nature of human personhood” (Dan Mc-Adams, The Psychology of Personhood, 2013).

Research with a Transformative Activist Agenda: Creating the future through education for social...

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