Making Critical Participatory Action Research for All
Envisioning Restorative Spaces: Opportunities and Challenges in the Process Room
Qualitative Art Activity
Qualitative Art Activity
Qualitative Art Activity
About the Project
Through the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the by heart collective partnered with an alternative therapeutic school for grades 6-12 in the Boston area, to co-facilitate the year-long Student Equity Action Team elective, guiding students through a youth-led research project on a self-identified equity issue within their school.
CPAR is a framework for youth and adults to speak up about problems in their lives, research those problems together, and take action to make things fairer. It comes from the radical idea that “nothing about us, without us, is for us.” Over the course of one academic year, we collaborated with five youth researchers and a staff member.
Our project investigated how students and staff at the school experience the process room, a space for student reflection and emotional regulation, and how it might better support the school’s mission. Research methods included surveys for students and staff, student-led interviews of staff, and an art activity focus group. We presented our findings to students and staff throughout the school year, and at a celebratory convening at HGSE in May 2025, with over 10 other YPAR groups in the Boston area.
You can read our co-designed zine about the project here.
Alumni of Color Conference Workshop
Rooted in Resistance: Rehumanizing Resistance As Collective Care
About the Project
Teachers enter the education field with purpose; and like a living organism, that purpose evolves and needs tending. Yet, the current system demands constant crisis response, offering no space for that evolution. We began asking: What if persistence means proactively tending the "garden" of our learning communities by nurturing ourselves and our broader relationships before things break down? Drawing on feminist theory (bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, Audre Lorde), ecological design, and YPAR, we developed a strengths-based approach to the HGSE Alumni Association of Color theme “Persistence.” We asked, what might a collective vision of thriving look like? How do we proactively tend towards that vision?
Just as healthy gardens require regular tending, watering, and seasonal rest to prevent disease and depletion, sustainable educational environments need ongoing care practices that prevent burnout, rupture, and harm. In order to create conditions for our students and communities to flourish, we need to access their wisdom to co-design those conditions with us, so we can transform systems from the roots up.
For the HGSE Alumni of Color Conference, we invited exhausted educators and youth-serving practitioners to join us in a 60-minute workshop. Through embodied movement, collaborative art-making, and systems mapping, participants:
- Reflected on existing knowledge of “persistence”
- Reconnected with their evolving “why” and found renewed strength
- Practiced asset-based visioning
- Mapped communities as ecosystems requiring proactive care by dentifying what needs watering, tending, and seasonal rest.
- Co-designed intergenerational action plans that youth, educators, and families can activate together, from daily five-minute rituals to longer-term projects that incorporate care into the system.
- Reimagined power, justice, and persistence away from “how do I survive in a broken system?” towards “how do we proactively create conditions where everyone can thrive?”
We are “rewriting the narrative of persistence” by recognizing that our roots are connected. Like any healthy ecosystem, we don’t wait for one species to collapse before we tend to the soil. We water, we prune, we rest, and we grow together.