ButI Said Something Now - Using Border Pedagogies to Sow Seeds of Activism in Youth Empowerment Programs

Oct 15, 2026

This article presents a duologue between two teacher-educator researchers analyzing two school-based youth empowerment projects: a middle school poetry initiative and a high-school mentoring program. Through border pedagogy and a borderlands framework, the study highlights how intentional participation-and-care border spaces enable minoritized youth to build critical consciousness, develop agency, and expand capacity for future social activism. The authors also foreground collaborative dialogue among youth and preservice educators to support shared learning grounded in lived experience.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages24

Reading Time1 h 0 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Youth empowerment and youth activism

Methodological pathways and program design

Border spaces and dialogical participation

Physical, pedagogical, and dialogical borderlands

Dialogic interplay and inquiry questions

Participation and empowerment

Critical literacies and inequality

Evolving border pedagogy for mentors

| | “ButI Said Something Now”: Using Border Pedagogies to Sow Seeds of Activism in Youth Empowerment Programs | | --- | --- | | | | Candace Thompson, University of North Carolina Wilmington Sheri C. Hardee, University of North Georgia Abstract In this article, two teacher educator researchers engage in a duologue to explore the pedagogical and poetic openings experienced during two individual youth empowerment school-based research projects—one a middle school poetry project, the other a highschool mentoring project. The projects engage minoritized youth with undergraduate students in colleges of education utilizing a methodology grounded in a theory of physical and metaphorical borderlands and border pedagogy for agentive participation. We assert that intentionalformation of border spaces of participation and care within the silencing spaces of school serves as a foundation from which youth may build capacity for future actions for social activism and change. Keywords: critical youth empowerment; qualitative methodology; duologue; borderland theory; postcolonial theories Force our poor sense into your logics, lend superlatives and prudence: to extend our judgment—through the terse and diesel day; to singe, smite, beguile our own bewilderments away. Teach barterers the money of your star, In the time of detachment, in the time of cold, in this time tutor our difficult sunlight. Rouse our rhyme. -Gwendolyn Brooks, 2000, from The GoodMan Research in youth studies, specifically youth activism, illustrates the benefits of youth empowerment in developing leadership capacity, voice, and engagement (Kirshner, 2007; Mitra, 2006) and helping young people articulate their hopes as a form of critical literacy, in which they are emboldened to forge better alternatives for themselves (Watts & Guessous, 2006) . The literature on youth empowerment and activism is replete with methodological pathways offering insight into the supports needed to build youth’s capacity to instigate, organize, and affect school and community change (Bishop, 2015; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Ginwright, 2003; Ginwright & James, 2002; Jennings, Parra-Medina, Messias, & McLoughlin, 2006; Zimmerman, Stewart, Morrel-Samuels, Franzen, & Reischi, 2011) . As teacher educators working from a social justice framework in two youth empowerment programs—one a middle school poetry project, the other a high-school mentoring project—that engage minoritized 1 youth with undergraduate preservice education students from two different colleges of education, we marvel at the myriad ways these young folks engage in the complex processes of becoming activists (Bishop, 2015) . Through relationships with us and our preservice education students; through writing, speaking, and performance; through question-posing; through the declaration of border spaces of free expression and uncomfortable/disruptive dialogue; through opportunities to share, affirm, and enact identities and ideas; and through the hopeful act of being heard, we bear witness to these young people as they push open new spaces. While we view these as spaces in which youth become agentive “subjects in the construction of their identities and the wider society”(Giroux, 1991, p. 135), we argue there is critical work needed before youth may view themselves as activists, and this impacts the methodological and conceptual construction of youth programming. When students have been told they are “less than” and are deprived of spaces for critical dialogue, then the creation of physical, pedagogical, and dialogical borderlands becomes an essential methodological step in supporting youth to develop critical consciousness and explore their roles as activists. Likewise, our mostly white, middle-class preservice educators need these borderlands to self-reflect, deconstruct biases, and build their identities as socially conscious educators through dialogic dives into the experiences of power and privilege with their y

FAQs

What are the two youth empowerment projects examined in the article?

The article analyzes a middle school poetry project and a high-school mentoring project carried out in school-based youth empowerment programs.

How does border pedagogy relate to youth empowerment and activism in the paper?

The authors argue that creating border spaces of participation and care, supported by border pedagogy, helps youth develop critical consciousness and agency needed for future social activism and change.

Why are dialogical relationships with preservice educators emphasized?

The article emphasizes that these borderlands are needed for mostly white, middle-class preservice educators to reflect, deconstruct biases, and build socially conscious educator identities through dialogue with youth partners.

Oct 15, 2026

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