Browsing by Author "Van Beers, Rae Ann Shawna"

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    The Nice Girl Plight: Struggling to Become a Socially Just Citizen
    (2022-08) Van Beers, Rae Ann Shawna; Seidel, Jackie; Hanson, Aubrey; Spencer, Brenda
    This study addressed the overarching question of how secondary students understood social justice, and how those understandings impacted the actions they took to make a difference in the world. The qualitative research focused on an extra-curricular social justice group that was populated by middle school girls that year, highlighting the role that gender often plays in such groups. True to duoethnographic form, the research became personal as I saw my own nice-girl-self reflected in the participants’ words and actions, rather than simply being a study in which I considered the data my participants created through their peer-to-peer duoethnographic conversations. In working through this, and with respect for my participants, I saw the need to counter the notion that social justice movements were filled with nice, (often) white girls who uncritically perpetuate the systemic issues and inequities they were working to change. Using the participants’ conversations, researcher observations, and the group’s meeting minutes as sources of data, the work highlighted the contributions that middle school girls can make as citizens of their school, and even more broadly as they deepened their understandings of the implications of their actions on others around the world. The findings of the study call for researchers and educators to enhance students’ opportunities for meaningful participation in the world of educational research, to interact with them as equal partners in social justice work, and encourage them to critique their own complicity in their attempts at activism.