By Wendy Y. Perez, PhD, Joanna Geller, PhD, and Lisette DeSouza, PhD
Introduction
In 2021, the William T. Grant Foundation awarded the Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation at the NYU Metro Center a grant to explore how a community-based civic leadership initiative for parents/caregivers and their children—the Children’s Leadership Training Institute (CLTI) and the Parent Leadership Training Institute (PLTI)—could disrupt power inequities to influence educational systems and institutions. We hypothesized that simultaneously building the leadership capacity of both children and adults would embed civic knowledge, skills, and confidence within the family, and thus lead to more sustainable civic engagement and collective action. The PLTI and CLTI PhotoVoice sessions are one part of the larger 4-year mixed methods study.
Given that CLTI participants generally range in age from 3-12, we wanted to choose a method that would work for this large age range of children. We believed that the visual aspects of PhotoVoice would especially resonate with the younger children in the study. The research team wanted to capture civic engagement through CLTI and PLTI participants' own lenses and lived experiences. We felt that having them take photos that we would later discuss as a group would give them that power. PhotoVoice has been used in other studies with young children such as Varvantakis et al. (2019) who discussed how PhotoVoice with 6–8-year-olds allowed them to capture what was important to them. Greene et. al. (2018) also discussed how PhotoVoice allowed youth to be producers of knowledge. Lastly, Garcia et al. (2013) used PhotoVoice with intergenerational participants, including adolescents and parents, who enjoyed the time together and the communication they experienced through the process.
It is important to understand how family civics occurs in families, especially those who are often marginalized in society such as immigrant families and families of color. The literature has shown that in families of color, parents influence the politicization of children and that children can also influence the politicization of parents (Diemer, 2012; Terriquez & Kwon, 2015). At the same time, we also wanted to include the idea of everyday civics that may not necessarily be viewed as civic engagement in the traditional sense. Payne et al. (2020) uses the term “embodied civics” to describe these small, but meaningful civic activities that point towards more of the social aspects of civic engagement. During preschool observations of embodied civics, researchers noted children establishing community, problem-solving, and showing care for other people. For example, one child displayed her establishment of a community when she equally distributed lunch food during a family-style mealtime with her classmates rather than eating all of the food herself. In this same preschool, another child showed their concern for a classmate’s injury covered by a band-aid. The young boy asked questions about how the injury happened and who put the band-aid on the cut. In designing the photovoice research for the current project, we hoped to capture some of these meaningful and relevant embodied civic experiences for children and families.